Television News Reporter Tools

Video Transcript

"Some of the tools you use as a television news reporter are your brain, first of all. You have to be knowledgeable about a great many things and be interested in a great many things. So you're constantly thinking. You're constantly learning. But some of the other tools you might use, as a television news reporter, are things like microphones or cameras or various types of cables and equipment, like editing software. For example, when you see a news story on television, you see all this seamless fluid-like video that goes by, all the different stories and things. Well, someone has to edit all that video and oftentimes, it is the reporter who's doing the story. So if you see this cool landscape and then you see the car go by and then there's a cutaway to, like, a profile of a person and so forth. You have to edit that and so you have to be knowledgeable and use editing software much like they do for, you know, movies. And if you've ever watched the behind the scenes on a DVD, a lot of the same type of things go on at a TV station. You also use computers, like most jobs these days. A lot of your work is done on your computer. Researching or looking things up or typing stories and that sort of thing. Microphones. There are a variety of different kinds of microphones that you will be called on to use as a TV news reporter. Things like a lavalier microphone, like I'm wearing, clipped onto my jacket, or there's the hand mike. A hand mike is something, you know, its exactly how it sounds, it's the microphone that a reporter holds in his hand. And of course, there are other types of microphones, like you've seen the boom mikes where someone's holding it and its dangling over top of whoever is speaking. And there's shotgun mikes which are designed to, you know, point at a specific area and get audio just from that area. You also use a lot of different types of camera equipment. You need to be able to use a tripod properly to make sure your video is steady. You'll want to use camera, to make sure all your different kinds of shots are pretty cool to look at. And then you put all of that together at the end of the day."