Our News Scripts Are Getting Intense

 

Since about November I've been running a daily news broadcast at my school. It's something I've wanted to do for almost ten years, but the first time I tried there just wasn't the interest among students to do it. Also we didn't really have the infrastructure for it, and it just died before it could get off the ground. 

Immediately after the Covid shutdown, however, the school was half in-person and half virtual, and administration was willing to invest a bit in live-streaming technology. We couldn't have assemblies with the full student body, so we would stage them in the theatre and my film classes would do three-camera broadcasts of them to the rest of the school. We also did most concerts and performances this way, because we weren't allowed to have a live audience. One long-term thing that came out of this was that we now had enough equipment (between the school and my personal gear) to do a competent looking news broadcast. 

So this year I pitched the idea that we could do the morning announcements as a student news broadcast instead of over the PA speakers, and everyone was on board, including the kids this time. I put together a small news set on one side of my classroom, using curtains at first, then pieces of old theatre sets (sometimes teaching film, photography, and stage crew has its perks, since I didn't have to ask anyone if I could use their stuff). Here's what it looks like now:

We only have one camera that we can dedicate to this full time, but they let me buy a teleprompter and we already had a live streaming switcher from the Covid stuff. It's not really a proper studio—the control table almost touches the news desk and there's nothing like controlled sound—but it works. We've been having a great time, and it's truly one of the highlights of most days. We've even got an interview show in the works that we're shooting for the first time next week. 

The kids do most of the work here. They're the talent, they run the broadcast, they design some of the graphics, and they do a lot of the planning. I do the work of collecting and organizing the content of the announcements and writing the scripts, and I design the rest of the graphics. We also send out a daily email that has a link to each day's broadcast and a newsletter version of that day's announcement. 

Today as I was watching the kids do the broadcast, it struck me just how complex some of our scripts have gotten, and just how challenging some of this material I was asking them to handle was. We have an intro segment followed by the pledge, then we feature a special celebration going on that day and use it as a framing device that we reference (sincerely or humorously as appropriate) throughout the rest of the broadcast. For example, today's was National Napping Day, which is a real thing. 

After that, we transition to a This Day in History segment, where we present two or three historical events from credible sources, and end by relating one of them to our own times, usually with a joke, but always with sincerity. Then we move on to current announcements, which vary a lot based on what's happening, but we vary their presentation each day so they don't become too repetitive, and we try to make them flow well while also ordering them so the most urgent ones seem the most important. 

We have scrolling text that supports our spoken words. We feature birthdays and student artwork. One of our recurring announcements is formatted as a new haiku every day. Sometimes we run student-made ads. Most days we have over a dozen separate graphical elements (today there were 17). And we end it all with a consistent but not always identical sign off that ties back in the framing device from the beginning (today, the kids fell asleep immediately after signing off).

In other words, it's a lot. These kids range from 7th to 11th graders, and they are doing a fantastic job with what has become a really nuanced and challenging daily production. I sometimes forget how young they are and just how much I'm asking of them, but they always rise to it. Sure, they make mistakes, but they are committed, and on the whole are engaging on screen. They get far more right than they do wrong, and when they do get it wrong, they usually catch it and correct themselves. 

I guess what I'm saying is I'm just really proud of them, and happy that this thing I've wanted to do for about a decade has gotten off to such a strong start.