These notes on New Stories come from listening to a lecture by Les Rose, NBC’s top cameraman. If you watch 60 minutes, the CBS Evening News or Sunday Morning, you’ve seen his work.

• News is really STORYTELLING. If you have a minute of scary stuff, you need a minute of romance.
• Your job is to inform people and to make them FEEL something.
• Romance the viewer. Take them by the hand and MAKE THEM FEEL.
• Don’t give them all the big stuff off the top—reward the viewer along the way with little gold coins of big information and feeling.
• You only have a few seconds to get the viewer’s attention.
• Advice from Walter Cronkite—“As soon as you put your feet on the desk, you’re in for a big fall backwards.” Also, “Don’t buy your own company’s stock.”
• THINK OUT OF THE BOX. If everyone in your community goes right, go left. If everyone goes left, go right.
• The story is not claustrophobic—never shoot all in one location. If doing a story about someone’s work, go HOME with them. They will feel attachment to the story.
• News should not be staged. It should be real. A sit-down interview is the ultimate staged event.
• Music tells the viewer how to feel. News shouldn’t do that. The viewer needs to decide how to feel without music. In news, you cannot use music unless it is part of the story in some way.
• When learning how to compose a story, watch with the volume down. Pay attention to lighting, composition, shot selection.
• Story comes from ACTION and REACTION.
• Think of the viewer in the EZ Chair. Ahhh! Should be at the end of the story.
• Silence is not a waste of time. It is the best of time. Silence IS the story. While shooting in a hospital, for instance, let the silence speak for a few seconds to let people know the feel of the hospital.
• Everybody has a story.
• Shakespearian stories make you laugh before they make you cry.
• Steve Hartman of NBC rarely does a voice track longer than 12 seconds because he doesn’t have a great voice. He uses natural sound to tell the story.
• Never do an interview—it is a talk or a chat. Interviews are what you have to do to get a job. They make people nervous.
• Become good at small talk. Small talk gets the subject of your interview to talk to you, so they are not talking to a stranger when you begin the tough questions. Small talk lets you become a person with a camera instead of a camera person.
• Get really subtle moments on camera. Show on camera the father and daughter who are unhappy with each other; don’t tell us about it.
• For a 2 minute piece of network news, there will be 5 ½ to 9 hours of tape.
• A good news story focuses on 2 to 3 characters . Nothing more. Don’t crowd your stories with characters.