“Why should I re-write the story? No point in re-inventing the wheel.”
                                             -Sara, a producer where I work.

     You’d think being a news producer would be a hard job. To some extent, you’re right. There’s a lot of mass to wade through before show-time, and that mass can get tedious quickly. Even when it is show-time, you get to trudge through the same stuff you’ve been trudging through since 1 am that morning. Not only that, but you get to listen to the director scream at you, the talent complain at you, and other lower technical life-forms, like myself, nag at you until a minute seems like an hour, and an hour, a week.

     Still, the pay is pretty good, and if you don’t get too detailed, a well-worded phrase like “I’m a producer” can get you laid pretty quickly in Hollywood, and at the speed of light everywhere else, except for maybe NYC, where they’re far too savvy to fall for gimmicks like that, even if they are true. You don’t really have to answer to a lot of people, except for the news director, who would be a more annoying version of yourself, and the general manager, who is less annoying, but more fearsome.

     But everyone has to answer to somebody. Everybody’s job is tedious to some degree. Everybody has to listen to screaming and complaining, and a lot of people have to do that before they even leave the house.

     Can you cut-n’-paste? That’s the easiest way to write a show. Take everything that was used after you went home yesterday and build a program out of that. You may find yourself rehashing stuff you had used the day before, because everyone else has the same idea. Mr. Thesaurus can help you out of your jam, and quickly, if you have a version on your computer that will allow you to swap this word for that. Updates can be quickly tagged onto the ends of stories. Just to make it really original, you can throw a “This is a follow-up,” into the beginning of the story somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, you will still actually have to write your own stories. But the cut-n’-paste method of TV journalism has been known to cut a workload by three-fourths in less than fifteen minutes.

     “Packages” are news stories that are already put together by someone else. Can you say “easy?” Some packages are unique to your region and feature local crime stories and local politics. A lowly reporter gets to put these together, and any good producer will run them at least once per show, or – if you have a two-hour morning show like we do – once every hour. There are also national packages which feature national crime stories, politics, entertainment, and lifestyles. Some good examples are: “Soap Scoop,” a two-minute time filler regarding story developments in everyone’s favorite soaps; “Good Housekeeping Reports,” which devotes itself to product tests and tastings. Ebert has a movie review package that gets sent out, and every CNN reporter in the world sends a package out.

     The good thing about packages is that they fill time with little or no effort on your part. The other good thing is; you can dispose of them easily. Say you have an anchor that is a little sludgy around the gums that morning. He just can’t seem to get his mouth around all the big words you’ve used. Say he’s reading really slowly; and before you know it, you’re two minutes “heavy.” Simply “kill” the package. More work goes into dumping the two-minute story than went into including it.

     On really lucky days, something genuinely newsworthy and important in world history will occur. Since Saddam’s already been caught, you could pray for Osama’s capture, or, if you’re on his side, a really good calamity. When that happens, your network takes over programming. You don’t have to do a thing. “Good Housekeeping Reports” aren’t even necessary when network takes over - its cake time for you.

     You might want to have all your cut-n’-paste pages ready though. Just in case network decides they’re wasting their time.

     Live shots are good time-killers, but they also throw in the unpredictability of another living, breathing, decision-making person – the reporter. Reporters have been known to swear, live on-the-air, when they think no one is listening, and you’ll get to field all the phone calls from irate grandmothers and perturbed ministers. I suggest working at T-Mobile for a couple of months, as training. Reporters can also: walk away from their shot before you take it, get stuck in traffic, break their mics, break their cameras, and lose their train of thought - sometimes all in the same day. I’ve seen it happen.

     Get a good reporter, though, and let him run his yap for however long he wants, and you have a time-killer deluxe. No script, no work (on your part), no problem (you hope). Most of the time it works like a charm. Throw in a couple of “live updates” during the course of the show, and that instantly negates six minutes of script juggling that you have to worry about.

     So ... get your right-clicking finger ready, and set your stop-watch.
     You’re ready to produce a show.
     Wait ... did I forget to mention anything about investigative ability, a good sense of journalistic      balance, and a naturally inquisitive mind?
     I did?
     Good.
     You don’t need any of that.