Establishing News Contacts 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. What we're going to talk about in this clip is contacts, not the ones you put in your eye, but the ones you develop through relationship with people in your community. You, as a reporter, will spend a great deal of time talking to local figures, things like the mayor or a construction company or anyone who may have a relevant something to add to the story you're doing, and those contacts are valuable down the road as well. For example, let's say I'm doing a story about local road construction. Well, who would you call? Probably the public service department. Here in Lansing for example, they do all the maintenance on the roads themselves. They do potholes and they shovel and so on. Well, in my case, I would want to know who is responsible for doing that. I would want to know how would they go about doing that. I would call the public service department and try to develop a relationship with the people who run it, the people who work on the roads and so on. Because six months from now, when there's no longer snow on the ground and they're no longer plowing roads, I may not need a plowing the road story but I bet you, I'll need a pothole story or I may need a story about how they're working on a bridge and I want to reevaluate that relationship, call those people back and meet them again. So it's important to develop some kind of relationship with a lot of people that you may need on a regular basis, people like police, people like fire department officials, people from your local government. All of these people, you will have to see on a consistent basis throughout your career so that you will have this relationship with them so then it's easier to get the story when you need it later on."