Rundown mode for long-form newscasts
Q: Do you know of any stations using WireReady who read their newscasts from the screen in the news booth instead of printing it out? We have been stacking our embedded audio to play the sound, but use a paper script to read from. I was hoping to pick the brain of somebody who uses it for anchoring, to see how they move from story to story, drop items on the fly, etc...
A: 99% of our customers do their news paperless, completely on the screen & printing paper solely for backup in the case of a computer failure.
Short form (up to 4 minute) newscasts are generally pasted together in one notepad - a newscast is created and saved/archived to the filelog- someone in the booth pulls it up, and airs it.
However for long form news - that's impossible as you usually have several dozen stories and "pieces" that you fly from one to another - and in some cases people in the newsroom are filing in last minute inclusions or changes while you've already begun. It's impossible to "paste" the hour's worth of breaking news into one script prior to going on the air..
For this reason we added the Rundown. WireReady can help you do the following for long-form newscasts:
1) Create actual custom folders for each show/hour (you can also use subfolders- i.e a custom folder called SHOWS, and when you click on it you'd see 5am, 6am, 7am, 8am etc...
2) You create all the re-usable pages (I like to call them frames, but htey are simply individual stories saved in the filelog), and you usually name them 03 Weather, 05 ABC, etc (where the first two characters are the time within the newscast they go)...
3) You click the RUNDOWN button (you'll notice the button displays depressed and and stays that way until you unclick it)...
For all intents, this changes us from RADIO short form to "TV-esque long form." Instead of first in at the top, you'll see how you can permanently "stack" the files in the order they need to go in (the + and - keys drag them up or down).
4) Once you've got your templated pages that clue you into when to go to breaks, weather, traffic, cut-aways etc, now you can have people "file" stories for that newscast into this folder and drag them to where they go. Now you have a rundown...
5) You'll notice the filelog gives you a total time of all copy and sound in the program (at the bottom of the filelog which is handy).
6) You'll also notice if a producer in the newsroom goes to this folder while you're on the air and they are in RUNDOWN mode (button displaye depressed), he/she can drag/change the order of the rundown and anytime you hit REFRESH in the filelog, you'll instantly see new things appear. Your current cursor stays on the story it was on too.
7) WIOD actually dual anchors this way. They have two screens in the booth (two people - both in the same rundown) with each user alternating which stories he/she is opening and closing.
A couple other pointers:
DUAL SCREEN MODE
You may want to switch our screen mode to what's called DUAL SCREEN mode in the booth and on some computers. You're most likely accustomed to 1 wire browser, 1 notepad, 1 filelog etc. If you change to dual screen mode and change to vertical split instead of horizontal, you can have TWO FILELOGS open at the same time (pretty much two of everything - one on the left side, and one at the right side at all times - even two notepads).
Why?
Imagine having the Filelog open on the left, with all the raw stories for the day, and imagine having your 6am "rundown" filelog on the right...
Not only can you now see possible stories for inclusion in your run down, you can do a virtual "drag and drop" from one side of the screen to the other. Unfortunately you can't drag and drop with the mouse. What you do is highlight the story you want to "drag" and click CTRL-C. Then click to the exact position you want the story to go in the run down and click CTRL-V (this is copy and pasting stories from one folder to another).
Likewise, let's say you want to pull stories you ran in the 5am rundown to the 6am rundown. Put the 5a on the left and the 6a on the right, and "drag" what you want to re-use over.
ADDITIONAL CUSTOM FOLDERS
Now think about all those 03 weather, 05 ABC "permanent" story elements in your typical long form anchored newscast...
You could create a folder called MORNING TEMPLATE - that has all of these stories "blank" ready for re-use each/day each hour.
Now you can basically go into the 6am tomorrow, delete everything (or DUP/move it to your archived news folder), open the template folder on the left and the 6am on the right and highlight and copy/paste the "fresh" templated pieces to create your next rundown. Note - the rundown order should hold too if you've arranged the rundown of the template folder.
Also when you highlight stories from one filelog to throw them into your other filelog/rundown, keep in mind you can highlight MUTLIPLE items at once. For example, hold the CTRL key on the keyboard and click once on all stories you wish to copy at the same time (each time you click you select or unselect it). Just don't let go of the CTRL key until you're done clicking and ready to hit paste in the other window.
a) Because these separate stories are available to others on the network, they can be making changes UP TO THE SECOND before you open them on your desktop.
b) For example, network grabs. Someone can open the ABC story and embed the latest sound for it, or a story that's in the rundown that's still waiting for sound can have someone add the sound in at anytime.
AIRING THE RUNDOWN
The "hardest way" to do this is to doubleclick on a story (or hit ENTER), read it, then hit ESCAPE, DOWN, and hit ENTER on the next one. In essence, you have to hit a couple keys to go from story to story. Once you are in a story, scrolling it as you read is easy.
A "better" way to do this is to use our NEXT/PREVIOUS buttons in the filelog. When you hit ESCAPE to come out of a story you just read, you can hit F11 or F12 to jump and open the next or previous story. Thus, one key is easier than having to hit DOWN and hit ENTER...
The "best" way to do this is to use a programmable keypad or MACRO program in windows. We can provide a custom mini keypad for example that gives you all sorts of quick large buttons to play your audio and advance to the next story.
For example: When you are looking at a story you just finished- instead of doing everything above you can just hit a big button on a mini keypad that says NEXT STORY and whamo you're in the next story (same if you hit PREVIOUS).
Because it's a macro, it can even submit the YES if you happened to have changed something in the story while reading it and the system wants you to save your changes before exiting.
The keypad costs $249. We give it to you ready for use, but it is EXTREMELY simple and easy to add more custom buttons for all your needs. You could, for exmaple, have a button that says FINANCIAL that throws you to the WIRE BROWSER, and does a search for FINANCIAL with one button hit. The uses are only limited to your imagination.
The keypad isn't proprietary - one model we like is XKEYS from XKEYS.COM. If your engineer is happy to make his own labels, and program it himself, you can buy a PS2 or USB model direct from the company for $149 plus shipping (the markup we add covers our design/labelling time). However, ANY programmable in-line keyboard device works with WireReady and your station may already have one from another computer system you can use in the booth with our program.
To go from one story to the next, the macro is:
ESC (to close)
ALT-Y (in case it asks to save any changes you made while reading)
CTRL-R (if you want to refresh the display to pick up any changes made by others in the newsroom)
DOWN (to go to the next story)
ENTER (to open the next story)
Rundowning in WireReady is an extremely versatile and powerful way to "Stack" 5, 10, or 50 or more separate stories to create a single yet very flexible and "visual" schedule of all the items you want to read individually and play during a newscast. Because it's multi-user, any number of people (or producers) in the newsroom can be changing your stack and adding/subtracting and updating the elements throughout the newscast.
Once you start using this, you may discover other useful tips/tricks.
Many newsrooms re-use the same items from hour to hour, but often reporters have written 3 or 4 different takes on a particular newsmaker. One way to ensure you rotate through all your different takes is to modify the name slightly after each hour. Some stations, for example, rename the file in the filelog by adding a + to it before they drag/copy it to the next hour. As the day goes on, if you notice 2, 3 or 4 pluses appearing next to a slug, it's probably time to go back to your main filelog and pull one of
the other takes to freshen up the next hour. WireReady also should be updating the Times Used and Last Time used fields whenever you CTRL-C the stories from one filelog to another. And if you have these columns visible, then you see without renaming files exactly how often and when the last story was put in a newscast.
One other tip
If you run on a LAN and are nervous about your file server/LAN, the booth computer can be put in what's called LOCAL TEMP PATH mode. There's an INI line that tells the program to "pre-read" the audio files down from the server everytime you open the next story. It adds barely a second delay when you open the next story, but because the audio is on your local hard-drive, you'll notice immediately how much faster the audio starts when you hit your PLAY button. It will never glitch, even if your LAN or server is ever having a slow day. Most major market newsrooms keep thier booth computer running in this mode 24/7. The pre-load also warns you if any of the audio cuts don't exist which spares you embarrassment trying to play something that is no longer on your server.
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