News Video Editor reacts to working during COVID-19 pandemic

Since going into “stay-in-place” in late March 2020, I have been itching to document my experiences as a working news editor during the pandemic. Compared to some of my colleagues in the film and commercial industry, I experienced a sharp increase not only in the amount of videos produced, but also in the quality expected from each deliverable. Originally, I had hoped to do a weekly vlog, possibly for the VERIFY YouTube channel, but it proved to be too much work on top of all the flagship videos we were delivering.

But, I still had the all the behind the scenes footage me and my wife shot in our temporary news studio we built in our garage.

Enter the Creators Offline “Create at Home” Film Festival.

I told founder Genki Hagata, via a Discord chat server we both hang out in, that I was disappointed I would be unable to submit to his festival because of the lack of time to put something together. He encouraged me by saying, “You still have two days to submit.”

Then, I realized I had all the B Roll I needed to make a short, one-off documentary about my experience working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortunately for me, the journalist I work with came down with food poisoning two days before the festival submission deadline, so I had a whole day to record my talking head A Roll for the film and start cutting everything together.

Check out the gear I used to make this doc.

The film ended up turning out very personal, as I started talking about the accusations of conspiracy pointed towards “the media.” Especially as someone who hasn’t been working in news for very long, I found this line of thinking both shallow and harmful. It’s a similar thought process as an “armchair quarterback”, but it alienates the viewing audience from the journalists trying very hard to get them the facts and the truth. Obviously, there are bad actors in the news media space. I won’t deny that. But it’s important to remember that “journalists” are not a monolith. We’re not a hive mind following the orders of some malevolent overlord at corporate.

I've been a video editor for about 10 years, making short films, marketing videos and trailers.  

But it wasn’t until the last two years that I started working in news. I’ve been working with Verify, a fact checking show broadcast to over fifty local news stations and we’re all over social media.

Even though we’re backed by TEGNA, a media company that reaches about 39% of all TV households in the US, we’re a pretty small team.  For the first year and a half, it was just me and a journalist producing all our content.

That journalist is Jason Puckett.  He hosts the Verify videos, writes articles for the stations to share, and generally keeps the show going through sheer force of will.

In the first few months of 2020, we promoted an intern and hired 3 new people to research and write for the brand. At the time, we were preparing for the 2020 political season.  We didn’t know that we were about to enter one of the most hectic and important times in recent history.

Jason and I were actually out of town to conduct training for one of TEGNA’s stations in Knoxville, TN, WBIR.  While we were there, the severity of the pandemic became apparent, and we instantly had to switch from training mode to work mode as misleading memes and false rumors began popping up online.  

Our viewer-request inbox went from a handful of messages per week to dozens of messages every day.  While there was certainly some overlap in people’s questions, it was still a lot of information to cover.

While we were still out of town, we started making two videos a day to make sure we corrected as much disinformation as we could.  Considering Jason and I were both working from laptops, it’s a miracle the videos turned out as good and as quickly as they did.

The day before we were to leave Knoxville, our company announced that they were starting to roll out a stay at home policy for as many employees as they could handle. Instead of flying home, Jason and I drove a rental car over the Appalachian mountains back to our homes in North Carolina.

Once we got back home, Jason and I began our quarantine workflow which quickly became our new normal.  

Every morning I reset my garage to be our at home studio.  For YouTubers, this idea is all too familiar, but for a lot of broadcast news workers, it has been a challenge.  Luckily for us, I have all my documentary lights and camera gear, so it was relatively easy for us to make the change.

Around midday, we’ve figured out what our video will be about, and Jason writes a script.  Once the script is approved, we shoot the video.

I usually have 3 to 4 hours to edit the video together.  Even though Jason sources all the documents and links that the story references, I still have to find stock footage and animate any still images or documents.  

It sounds easy enough, but there have been days where I’m fighting the clock to get the video done either due to a late start or because a story is particularly long.  Either way, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

Once I’m done, I run the video by Jason and our senior researcher just to make sure everything in the video is accurate before we deliver to the stations and the web.

The pace of the work and demand on our time to deliver as quickly as possible has been stressful to say the least.

But maybe the most disheartening part has been people online blaming “the media” for things they don’t like.  While I can only speak for myself, there’s not some grand conspiracy to make anyone’s life worse through our videos.  For our part, we are only concerned about answering viewer questions about current events and debunking viral fake news.

I’m not an idealist when it comes to journalism.  In fact, I never planned to work in news at all.   But I’ll tell you that the more I learn, whether it’s editing or science and tech news, the more I realize how little I know.

That’s a weird lesson to take away from all this.  But I believe everything happens for a reason, so I’m determined to remember that nothing is ever as simple as internet comment sections want them to be.

We’re all human. Even journalists. My coworkers and I can’t be everywhere and know everything all at once, especially during a situation where the science is new and the numbers are constantly changing. Know that we are trying out best, and most of us don’t set out in the morning to do harm.