How to Localize a Story as TV News Reporter

Video Transcript

"BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk about localizing national and international stories. Oftentimes, there's a great interesting and very important event going on somewhere in the world, for example, the war in Iraq. Well, most TV stations and local markets don't have the budget to send someone like me to Iraq. How will I get there? You have the plane ticket to consider, the passport. There's a lot of cost that are incurred by going to other places beyond your market to get stories themselves. So what you need to do is what called localizing a story. So what you do is you would say, "Well, I can't go to Iraq." But what I can do is I could find a local family that maybe grew up there and immigrated to the United States. Just talk to them about life over there in Iraq, what they think the--if they have family over there still, how they're reacting. If a soldier is stopping through your yard, obviously, you're going to be broken. It's going to be a very difficult situation for you, and it affects people right here in your community. Let's say you're not from Iraq, you don't know anybody from Iraq, however, I bet you know someone in your neighborhood who may have gone there as a soldier, as a contractor or something like that or may work in the oil business or went to high school with someone who was in the military and spent some time over there. Find someone in your neighborhood, in your news market that has some connection to those events that are so far away and bring that into the story. And that's localizing the story and it makes it more meaningful to the people of your community."