Before You Book Live Coverage Training: A Checklist to Work Through
A plain checklist for reporters and operators weighing up live coverage workshops: what to look at in your own work, the sessions and the kit before you commit.
Start with the live work you already do
Before you look at any workshop, look at your own recent live work. Write down the last three times you went live, or rehearsed going live, and note what happened in the first minute. Did you know your opening line, or were you reaching for it? Did the gallery or the presenter cue you cleanly? Training is most useful when it answers a problem you can name, and a vague sense of wanting to be better rarely points to a particular session.
I ask people to do this on paper because it forces honesty. Keep it short: one line for what worked, one for what wobbled, one for what you would change if you were given the slot again tomorrow. If the wobbles cluster around planning, then the planning part of a live coverage workshop matters most to you. If they cluster around the moment something goes wrong, look for sessions that spend real time on adapting.
- List your last three live reports and what went wrong in each
- Note whether problems came before, during or after going live
- Pick the one habit you would most like to change
Check what the workshop actually covers
Live Coverage Strategies at mediafixnu is built around three things: planning, cueing and adapting. Planning is everything before the red light, from knowing your location and your running order to deciding what you will say if the shot is not what you expected. Cueing is the hand-off between the studio, the gallery and you. Adapting is what you do when the story moves under your feet. Ask any provider you consider whether each of these is taught or only mentioned.
The scope runs from a routine live link to a breaking event, and those are different skills. A scheduled two-way from outside a council building rewards careful preparation. A fast-moving incident rewards the ability to stay calm with half the facts. Check that the sessions you are weighing deal with both, and ask how much of the time is spent doing rather than listening.
- Planning, cueing and adapting should each have real session time
- Ask whether routine live links and breaking events are both covered
- Find out how much of each session is practical
Think about your role: reporter, operator or both
Live coverage is a joint effort between the person in front of the lens and the person behind it, and a good checklist asks which seat you sit in. A reporter needs to hold a thread while receiving instructions in an earpiece. An operator needs to anticipate where the reporter will move, keep the frame honest and be ready to change shot without being asked. Each seat has habits that the other would do well to understand.
If you work as a pair, consider training together, or at least ask whether you can sit in on each other's exercises. If you work alone, which many people in regional television now do, the workshop should cover how to manage both jobs at once without letting either slip. Be clear with yourself about which of these describes your week, because it changes what you should ask for.
- Reporters: holding a thread while taking instructions in your ear
- Operators: anticipating movement and reframing without a prompt
- Solo workers: managing both jobs at the same time
Questions to put to the tutor
Before you commit, speak to the person who will teach. Ask what their own background in live news is and what they actually do in the room. In our case the live coverage sessions are led by Priya Nair, who has produced and directed live news programmes, so the questions you ask her will be about the view from the gallery as much as from the field. A tutor who has been on the other end of your earpiece teaches cueing in a way that a textbook cannot.
Ask, too, what a typical group looks like and how many people share each exercise. Small groups matter in live work because the only way to learn is to do the run-through yourself, more than once. If you will watch eight other people go live before your turn, you will learn less than you hoped. Ask how feedback is given, and whether you get your own run reviewed rather than general remarks to the room.
- What live news experience does the tutor have
- How many people share each run-through
- Will your own attempt be reviewed individually
Be realistic about kit, location and timing
Practical matters decide whether a workshop is useful. Find out whether you will work with the equipment you use at work or with something unfamiliar, and whether you need to bring your own. Learning on unfamiliar kit has its place, but a chunk of live skill is muscle memory with your own gear, so be honest about which you want. Check also where sessions take place, since a classroom is a gentler setting than a windy street, and live work is rarely done in gentle conditions.
Think about timing as well. In these autumn weeks the light goes early and weather turns, which makes outdoor practice more demanding and arguably more honest. If you are working shifts, ask how dates are fixed and what happens if a breaking story pulls you away on the day. Tom Ashworth coordinates our timetables and can talk through what is realistic for your own schedule before you decide anything.
- Will you use your own kit or the provider's
- Classroom, studio or location: which setting do you need
- Check dates against your shifts and ask about changes
Decide what you want to be able to do afterwards
The last item on the list is the simplest and the most often skipped. Write one sentence describing what you want to be able to do at the end that you cannot do now. Perhaps it is to open a live link without notes, or to recover from a dropped feed without visibly flinching, or to brief your operator in thirty seconds. A goal that specific lets you judge a workshop against it, and later lets you judge whether it worked.
If a provider cannot tell you how their sessions would help with your sentence, keep looking. If they can, you have the beginnings of a sensible decision. None of this needs to be elaborate. A page of honest notes, a conversation with the tutor and a clear idea of your own role will tell you most of what you need to know.
A checklist cannot make the decision for you, but it stops you choosing on a hunch. Look at your recent live work, check that planning, cueing and adapting are all taught, think about your role, speak to the tutor, be practical about kit and dates, and write down what you want to change. If the answers line up with what Live Coverage Strategies offers, get in touch and we will talk it through.