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Sometimes, the most straightforward solutions are overlooked when making workloads easier for your staff. If you have producers struggling to get newscasts on the air in time, even on slow news days, or MMJs who take a long time to turn in the web versions of their stories, you need to start scheduling a specific bi-monthly meeting with staff and a “superuser” for your operating system to address issues.
Most newsroom managers think their staff members with these issues are poor time managers. While that is sometimes true, another root cause is often in play. No matter the operating system you use to create scripts and newscasts, only select staff members, so-called superusers, can make changes to templates and macros. With such limited ability to fix issues, extra steps are being taken to format stories or newscasts that are unnecessary for most staff.
I see it all the time when coaching journalists. We review time management planning, and I quickly learn that the journalist wastes a lot of time with unnecessary technical issues. Some common examples: The rundown has the previous anchors’ names in script templates. The operating system came out with new macros that speed up the addition of VO sources or graphics, but no one on staff is aware of this. The rundown has entirely changed, but the template has none of the new elements listed. And perhaps even more frustratingly, the staff cannot add elements to the shared assignment file because most are not superusers and cannot do so.
Let’s