Sportscasts

Best Practice :: Advanced

Strategically plan your coverage to mirror news department priorities. What does your news department stand for? If the priority is hard-hitting news coverage, then focus your coverage on sports news.

One of the most significant recent trends in news is fewer long features, yet they remain a staple of local sportscasts.

Reflect your station's news mantra in your daily decision-making. Focus on a higher story count and using single paragraph stories as bridges between voice over stories. Provide daily, regular feedback to the show producer to suggest sports stories you might push higher in the newscast.

Develop 'point of view' consistency. Another significant change in local sports over the past 10 years is the amount of perspective viewers expect from established sportscasters. Today, it’s not enough to just tell them the score and give them the highlights. Most viewers also want to know how you feel on any given sports topic.

Point of view consistency simply means you have a point of view and are willing to provide your knowledge, perspective and experience on any given sports controversy. Extreme caution is advised for newcomers in any market offering their perspectives or before they’ve established their credibility. But, seemingly every market has the one sage who seems to speak for the viewer on major sports debates.

If you will begin to develop a point of view, it won't be long before viewers will turn to you to set the agenda.

Create a midday graphic rundown. Last-minute demands of the graphics department will get you on the Production Most Wanted list in no time. But nine out of 10 days, you know before noon what stories will impact viewers.

Take the time to develop full-screen graphics to tell stories more visually. Sports fans have been conditioned for 100 years to read the box scores. Newspaper and Internet-style graphics are almost non-existent in local sports news.

You can bring real depth to your sportscast by providing more detail in graphics on the stories sports fans care about.

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