Line producing is the first step, but it isn’t necessarily what you’ll do. The majority of the work assigned to me can be categorized into three areas: Assignment Editing, Field Producing, and Booking.

 

CCTV needed someone to decide what was important to Americans on a particular day and what also translated to Chinese. In other words, the American media might focus on a grisly murder case or abduction, which doesn’t interest an overseas audience. Reporters often asked for my services in the field to write questions, interview/shoot subjects and shoot stand-ups. Finally every morning I would call sources for day turn stories or long format. This was the most difficult task of all because there is no training for booking. When you book sources for stories you have to sell yourself, your station, your story.  This is something reporters do daily at KOMU 8, but D.C. requires you to convince staffers in the Obama administration to get on camera.  They may want to know what your station or network’s market share is and ask favors in return. This leads to another topic, transparency issues.

 

Biases are prevalent in the newsroom, from assignment editors and reporters picking stories to producers deciding what to run and where in their newscasts.  A state run media outlet has its own biases which can takeover the newsroom’s agenda. A perfect example was when, at a conference, the hosts clearly called the Chinese government liars over recent GDP reports. The story could never air in China, due to the strict gatekeepers.  I knew I was wasting my time sitting there; I needed to get a new story done before the newscast.  Another example of bias at CCTV was not allowing some Obama staffers to spend too much time on the air discussing American ideology that opposes Chinese doctrine.

 

Now for the juicy tidbits you all want to know about:  What does working for an international cable channel feel like? First, everything is paid for. Rent, food, travel…you name it they pay for it. So expenses are nil.  Second, within the parameters of CCTV’s mandate, I could do whatever story my heart desired. As long as I wanted to work on a story, I had the authority to do so.  I spent a lot of my time explaining American culture, laws and society to an eager audience of staff. The language barrier was there but it was a good challenge I liked facing daily. For me, the ability to teach a newsroom really excited me so I felt like every day was spent doing something worth doing.

 

It wasn’t all peachy. I ran into some issues such as incompetence. This came in the form of several employees being on standby for nearly eight hours a day before actually working for maybe two hours on a live show. So you had staff just checking out web sites or playing games while they waited for their work to begin.  They were forced to work ten-hour shifts because of company policy when they only needed to really work two. CCTV doesn’t fire employees unless they do something openly stupid, like do a story against government doctrine. This allows employees to do as little as possible because rank is not built around merit but by seniority. So the longer you spend with the company the more you earn and better chance for a promotion. This breeds an environment where reporters merely get by, do small-scale stories or no stories. There is no rocking the boat with controversy in such an environment.

 

I think the time was well spent. I made a lot of contacts, ran into a lot of problems I had to overcome and learned a great deal. I’d recommend it for anyone wanting to learn what it’s like to work in an international office where English is not the primary language.