On the other hand, when a talented anchor works hard to go deeper on a story-by-story basis and simultaneously cultivates an understanding of each story’s place in the larger scheme of the newscast, the work can become meaningful again — both to the anchor and to the viewers watching him.

Here are three performance-related recommendations we have found are particularly powerful, in particular for advanced anchors with strong fundamental skills and deep market knowledge.

• As you consider a story, keep asking: If this is true, what does it mean? The answers will help you move past the obvious and layer the story in ways most anchors fail to do. For instance, say you have a story that states that taxes are going up on the Eastern side of your market. You ask yourself, If this is true, what does it mean? Say you know that that side of the market has an especially high concentration of citizens on fixed incomes, so that a larger percentage of their income will now go to taxes. If you want to go even deeper, you ask If a a larger percentage of that group’s income is about to go taxes, what does it mean? Say the answer is that they will have to make sacrifices somewhere else... And so on. The point is, the deeper an anchor goes with this kind of thinking the richer his reading becomes — whether the additional understanding she cultivates for herself is explicitly stated or not.
  
  
• Consider the audience’s history with a story. When viewer experience of a story is ongoing, it should be reflected in your language and your attitude. A man who has been in the headlines for weeks as a suspected murderer should not be a man suspected of murder. At some point he should become the man suspected of murder. Our language needs to reflect what we know to be viewer knowledge of any given story. Otherwise, we just contribute to the cumulative impression that we are somehow out of touch.
  
  
• Consider the story’s place in the newscast. In particular, you should always be aware of what has come immediately before an what will come immediately after. That awareness will often influence your approach as you read and interpret the material. Almost weekly, we critique anchors who read potentially related stories so disparately that it is as if they were written in different languages.
  
  

The point of all this, really, is that the more advanced your fundamental skills, the more critical your understanding and thought process is to deepening and strengthening your experience of the newscast, not to mention the experience your viewers have of the newscast. To put it another way, the better you get the harder you have to think to get better.