Blog

A Clean Sweep

August 7, 2008

Now for a look behind the scenes on one of the biggest days in Maldivian history. The station chose this day to sweep the newsroom, which had accumulated years of debris behind the desks that were now being moved.

Bigger improvements are needed, especially the workflow in the editing rooms. The process of ingesting video into the avid is very disorganized. The memories are overloaded. Reporters try to do everything at the last minute and then the machines crash. There are frequent power outages in the newsroom that cause reporters to lose the scripts in their computers.
The 8 pm bulletin was simply not up to the standard of the rest of the coverage and the 9 pm English news was a complete train wreck. The editing system crashed again just before airtime, causing three packages to miss their slot and leaving the anchor with no video of the biggest story of the day. TVM can do better!

The newly independent journalists have to realize that they can no longer count on the VIP crew to hand them the “official” story. They must be prepared to deliver the best possible coverage on their own. In the remaining days of the program I hope we can plan some meetings to address these issues.