No lead story? Go with your gut

July 16th, 2011 by Jason Mayoff  Tags: advice, gut, lead, lineup, news, newscast, newscaster, radio
Filed under: Radio

This didn’t start out to be advice for young newscasters, but that’s what it turned out to be. In fact, I wish someone had told me this twenty years ago. Actually, maybe someone did and I just ignored them.

When I was starting out in the radio news business, all those many years ago, my biggest challenge was deciding what to lead with, what to make my top story.

It’s a challenge even today, more than twenty years into my career, although experience has made things quite a bit easier.

It’s a problem that most people don’t even realize exists. The news is the news and the top story is just the top story. You don’t decide what the top story is, it just is. Thankfully, that is sometimes the case, but not always. Not even most of the time.

Most of the time a newscaster is faced with a slew of stories, all seemingly with the same value on the importance scale (the importance scale is something I’ll explore in a future article.)

The news is the news and the top story is just the top story. You don’t decide what the top story is, it just is.

When that’s the case, it almost seems like you can throw your stories in the air and read them in the order in which they land.

Don’t laugh, sometimes I can and do, figuratively do that. Figuratively, of course, because no one prints out a newscast anymore, it’s all arranged and read off a screen.

When you’re doing eight or ten newscasts a day, and with new stories coming in to your lineup throughout the shift, you can lead with a different story every hour.

You can, but you probably won’t.

Why? Because your gut takes over.

I find that while reading a newscast, I get a gut feeling sometimes that the story I led with was not the right one. That the story second or third down the line would have been a more natural lead.

One thing I’ve found throughout my career is that you’ve got to trust your gut, because really, that’s all you’ve got.

And you know what? That’s okay, because you’ve got one, or two or six more newscasts and you can adjust you lineup as you go. One thing I’ve found throughout my career is that you’ve got to trust your gut, because really, that’s all you’ve got.

Your gut is where everything you’ve learned in j-school and everything you’ve learned on the job come together and gel into a decision making ball of filtering goodness.

As you move through your career, there will be more on the job learning from your peers and bosses that will help that gut ball grow into a force to be reckoned with. This is why it’s so important at every stage of your career to listen to and learn from those around you, people with more experience than you or those who haven’t been at it as long.

Every new idea, piece of information, way of doing things goes into that gut ball and, whether you’re conscious of it or not, contributes to every decision you make henceforth. The longer an idea, piece of information or way of doing things spends in your gut, the more it becomes an automatic reaction, as opposed to an actual conscious decision.

And, throughout your career as you get new material for your gut ball, you may discard older bits of it that either aren’t relevant anymore or that have been replaced with new ideas, pieces of information and ways of doing things. Or, that new material may reinforce what you’ve already got in there.

To this day, I ask my colleagues, more experienced and less experienced, for their opinions on where to place stories in my lineup. I think it’s a healthy way of doing things in a newsroom. It’s not a democracy, of course, my gut and I still get the final say, but more often than not I’ll learn something from the conversation – something that will make my gut that much more of an effective ball of filtering goodness.

I’d love to hear from experienced radio newscasters and those just starting out. From those who’ve been doing this for a while, is this all BS, or does it make sense to you? From you young whippersnappers, does this seem like reasonable advice? Has anyone else ever told you something similar? Will you take this advice to heart?

Image: Renjith Krishnan