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How Much Can I Make? - Discover Your Dream Job.
TV News Editor
How Much Can I Make? with Mirav Ozeri
The Job of TV News Editor
Mirav talks to Johnny, a veteran network TV news editor about the pressure-cooker world of broadcast news editing, from tight deadlines and ethical decisions to the industry's shift toward user-generated content and the looming impact of AI.
https://www.nyfa.edu/digital-editing-school/
https://nytedu.com/courses/pre-college/fundamentals-editing/
https://www.poynter.org/product-category/reporting-editing/
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Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation
today. It's interesting. Tiktok, all these other formats are all very short and they play to the young audience, who's getting a lot of their information through that those platforms hi, welcome back to how much can I make.
Speaker 2:I'm a ravozeri, a journalist who loves to know what people do for a living and how much they can earn. If you ever wondered what goes behind the scene of your TV news broadcast, ask no more. Today's guest is John, who is a network TV news editor, and we're going to find out all about it. So, johnny, thank you so much for giving us your time.
Speaker 1:Okay, no problem, Marav.
Speaker 2:I have lots of questions, so first let's start by telling me how did you get started in TV?
Speaker 1:I got started when I was a junior in college. I wanted to work at a television station. I was going to Syracuse University at the Newhouse School and I was studying production and journalism. And I wanted to work at a television station. I didn't have any contacts. My dad was a construction worker. I didn't know anyone in the business, so I had to find a way to get in and I applied for summer relief they call it as a technical person as their people went on vacation they hire somebody to do you know videotape.
Speaker 1:Back then, two guys who hired me they were one was the chief engineer or the co-chief engineer and the other one was like sort of a supervisor. They looked at my resume. They seemed to like me. They called me back. I was just excited, I was thrilled. Wow, like I could work here. This is a TV station as a kid I was watching they had children programs that I've watched when I was a kid and of course they were CBS affiliate and was that upstate New York?
Speaker 2:or was it in New York City? It was in Hartford, Connecticut.
Speaker 1:Okay. So they called me back. First of all they put me in front of a television switcher, video switcher. I said could you do this, do a dissolve? Yeah, I switcher video switcher and said could you do this, do a dissolve? Yeah, I could do it, because we had equipment at the university and I I knew some of it and they liked that I knew enough about it. They said we'll hire you.
Speaker 1:So I was hired for the summer because I had to go back to school and I learned a lot, learned how to program these cart machine, which was the way they played commercials. I was just fascinated, like wow, I'm doing all this stuff. Then I remember they wanted me to help with playback of the news and they would do like a five o'clock newscast and a six o'clock. The six o'clock was the most important newscast. It was just before the evening news and I was being trained on. I remember one day there were two engineers there and one of them was training me and she was having some dispute with the management and there was another older guy there and he was sitting there smoking a cigarette and he had to feed up on the machine.
Speaker 2:I'm like wow so they trained you as editor or is it no?
Speaker 1:no, I wasn't an editor yet. This is just an engineer.
Speaker 1:I had to put in the tapes for the A block of the show, they call it. And I put in the tapes that had the stories, right, you know. So the anchor would then say blah, blah, blah and reporting, and then they played a tape. The story was self-contained, so I queued it up. I thought this was exciting.
Speaker 1:I heard the director directing and he played a tape and the woman who was near me was supposed to supervise me but she was not paying attention and there was no audio. But I saw the meters. They were moving back and forth. I said this is not right. And the director goes where's the audio? Where's the audio? I said the meters are moving. I have the audio pots up. So then they interrupt that, go back to the anchor again, play the second tape. No audio again. And this is the top of the newscast. All hell breaks loose and I think it was a third tape. There was no audio on that. Well, apparently one of the engineers turned an audio pot that was underneath the table. Nobody knew that existed, except maybe he did. He turned it down for something. He forgot to turn it back on, I didn't know anything.
Speaker 1:And at the time the executive producer he comes in and he's yelling at the top of his lungs. He goes I have egg all over my face. I have egg all over my face.
Speaker 1:I'm sitting there petrified. I'm like 19 years old, looking at this guy yelling at the group. But the other two didn't pay attention. The other guy was still smoking a cigarette. You know, the woman that was next to me was filing her nails and I'm like I'm sitting there looking at him paying, like I think he's important. They didn't think he was important and did they fire?
Speaker 1:you. No, they didn't fire me. My supervisor said don't worry about it, it's just the news, people, they're this way. Wasn't your fault. For fault For me. I was going oh my God, my whole career is like that's it down the toilet. It's over. So after that I learned to have thicker skin and deal with these kinds of situations Today, you edit the news correct.
Speaker 2:How did you get from there to edit news?
Speaker 1:When I graduated, they gave me a job as broadcast engineers, so I worked on shows and news playback and things like that, and then eventually they needed people to edit in the news department.
Speaker 2:And that's how you got into it.
Speaker 1:I got into editing because I thought, oh, this is cool. And then I'm like, oh, I can manipulate images and this is how it's done. You know, I had a pretty good background in television but I had a lot of theory, you know, and I watched, of course, a lot of classic films, even silent films, so I knew about the power of editing.
Speaker 1:And at some point, you were also a cameraman. Eventually I became a cameraman. The place I worked had some incredible camera editors, producers. Some were like all in one, very rare back then. A lot of the guys who shot only shot. They didn't edit. You know I like what they did. I knew when there was a good cameraman or a bad cameraman and as an editor you really know who's good. You know people have steady shots, nicely framed, and they cover you. They do wide a close-up, maybe another close-up. They give you reversals. So you know the good ones and I work with the best in the country.
Speaker 2:So you work in hard news. Is it difficult?
Speaker 1:Well, everything is a deadline and especially where I work now, it has to get out by either 1130 or 330. And you have a couple of hours. Essentially, the producer is writing the script, pulling the videos, but a lot of times you're pulling video yourself because we just don't have enough people.
Speaker 2:How do you decide what footage to put to?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, obviously, if we're covering a fire, it's whatever footage either we get from a local station or now from Storyful, which is another group that gets footage from people who shoot things on their phone that happen to be there. Wow.
Speaker 1:And that's entirely different. Once in a while we used to have cameramen. They would go out Right If they happen to be at a while. We used to have cameramen, they would go out If they happened to be at a fire, they would get these great shots. A lot of times there's no one there to take the shots. We just did a story recently and the Philadelphia airplane crashed the medical plane that fortunately crashed in the Philadelphia area and there was a ring camera that was able to get it actually coming down and exploding.
Speaker 1:Where would you get that in the past Impossible?
Speaker 2:Nobody would have that. So you take footage from ring camera iPhone.
Speaker 1:Whatever comes your way, it depends. There's a lot of sources now, so how do?
Speaker 2:you balance when there is like a gory story and you get gory footage.
Speaker 1:I mean because we still are broadcast television or we're still kind of right-gated. Plus, you know we're sending our material to affiliate stations and you got to be careful. What you show, Other people will show the whole thing. We can't we blur things out, especially gory, and there's really no need to show that. If you blur it out and you see rubble and you see blood, that's all you need to understand that it's not a pretty scene.
Speaker 2:How many stories a day do you have to edit? It depends.
Speaker 1:It could be two. One we do a lot of medical stories. Now we do consumer stories.
Speaker 2:Who supervises what footage will go on?
Speaker 1:Well, usually it's the producer, the producer and the reporter. Sometimes it depends on who you're working with.
Speaker 2:Does the reporter sit in the?
Speaker 1:room with you? No, not as much Sometimes. If they're there, sometimes they're out in the field and when they're out in the field they rely on you and the producer to help them put the story together. They'll pick out the sound bites. You know they interview people and then they like a sound bite. We insert that. Sometimes we have to cut it down even more because our stories can't be more than like two minutes. Usually a minute 30.
Speaker 2:Stories can't be more than like two minutes. Usually a minute 30.
Speaker 1:That always drove me crazy about news, network news, because even if it was an important story you'll cut it down to two minutes? Yeah, because they have a certain format and they have to adapt to that format because they have commercials to go into Again. That's why the medium, again, these platforms like Instagram what is the most popular one right now, or one of the most popular is TikTok, right and everything is these small short clips the young ones get their news from TikTok.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, my daughter gets her stuff from TikTok, I go. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 2:What was the most challenging story you had to work on?
Speaker 1:Oh, probably 9-11. Yeah, there's no doubt 9-11 was the most difficult, but it was, I think, our best moment as news people, because it happened in the city, it happened in front of most of us, right? I knew people who were down there. I wasn't there initially, I went down later and it was horrific. I mean, I was at the top of the cbs building with my camera and shooting the buildings coming down.
Speaker 2:Right, I remember. Do you ever run into ethical dilemmas, like there is a story that has footage that is too graphic, too sensitive? That's really important.
Speaker 1:That's where a senior producer or news producer determine they normally have. Well, they usually take a look at it before it goes on the air, as we would say, and if they see something that they don't like or you know, there's network standards. So there's certain things you can't do right and you can't show, you can't recreate certain things for news, not for entertainment, right and all that so it's a union job correct. Yeah, if you edit for a network, yeah usually in a union, what?
Speaker 2:What is the going rate for the union If somebody breaks in at the beginning? What is the going rate?
Speaker 1:Well, it depends on the level of skill you have. I think we have something goes from like one year to five. Most of the people we hire already have four or five years experience.
Speaker 2:So they're at the top level.
Speaker 1:Well, let's put it this way, you could easily make six figures. You can make more with overtime, but in a lot of places they don't have as much overtime as we did in the past. You know you can work freelanced. If you're freelanced then you can work for a variety of different people. So you know your income could.
Speaker 2:But the network doesn't have a set price for an editor.
Speaker 1:No, but usually it's, let's say, over $90,000 or $100,000.
Speaker 2:That's not bad.
Speaker 1:And then overtime is time and a half correct? Yes, yes, but that used to be the case many years ago. Where we get more overtime, they've cut back on that quite a bit Really.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Matter of fact, some of us get four days instead of five.
Speaker 2:Wow, and they pay you by the hour, or they pay you by the week, they pay you by the hour, yeah, wow.
Speaker 1:Now the people who would make the most obviously are the photographers who went on assignment. Cameramen make more Because they're out on assignment. So they got to fly to the location, have to set up and normally you get paid for travel expense travel and your travel expense. Then when you're there as soon as you hit the ground. If you're working, you start to get paid.
Speaker 2:What advice would you give somebody who wants to break into TV news editing?
Speaker 1:First of all, you have to love what you're doing, and then you have to be persistent. You have to really want it. You have to make some sacrifice to get to that position, because a lot of people you're competing with a lot of people. There's a lot of talented people too, and many times it's just you're at the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1:And the best advice is to network with people once you get your first job and to get to know different people at different levels. Be curious, go around, ask what's going on, because whatever company you're working for, you just know that particular department or that area Right, I think you have to motivate yourself to go outside of that, find out what someone else is doing. You may not want to do that, you may not be interested in another aspect, but that's the company, and the company does different things and the better that you understand the company, the better you find yourself with the right job and the right fit for you. But you have to be very persistent and you can't give up and you're going to get a lot of no's and a lot of people won't believe in you until they see your work Right.
Speaker 2:What is your typical day like?
Speaker 1:Well, I go in and if I'm editing what they call the package for, the 11.30 is our deadline, that's for the noon newscast. Or if I edit the 3.30, it's for their 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock newscast. You go in, you find out what the story is, find out who you're working with usually a producer. You would get a script eventually. But before you get the script, they send you footage that you should pull and have in your bin In the Avid it's called a bin. You place your footage in that bin and then you screen it and you look at it. I mean, you kind of know what the story is by the title of the story and eventually the producer has a rough draft and they send it to you. Then it gets approved and then that's when you start working on it and you get the sound and the audio that you're going to use From the reporter.
Speaker 1:From the reporter from the producer and they can pull it from different sources.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And then you begin to edit. You lay down a skeleton, you lay the audio track, the sound bites and the final track, and then you know how long it is, the length at least. Then you start covering it with video. Right, that's appropriate. And sometimes you have graphics, sometimes there's a spelling mistake, you have to redo it, things like that.
Speaker 2:Do you ever watch, or your family watch, the pieces that you cut? No, nobody watches anything I do.
Speaker 1:No, I'm kidding. I mean yes, they have in the past. Certainly, when I worked at a television station, they watched it. A lot of people watched it, because that's the only way they watched anything.
Speaker 1:You didn't have phones. You didn't have iPhones. You didn't have, you know, video on it. You didn't have a video. You didn't have anything like that. You had television Turned it on. It came at a certain hour. You either saw it or you didn't have anything like that. You had television turned it on, it came at a certain hour. You either saw it or you didn't. You missed it or you didn't, you know. Later people had DVRs and can record it.
Speaker 2:Right. Your job is every day. Nine hours, eight hours a day.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right now it is.
Speaker 1:Yes, before, it used to be longer, because we just would have more to do.
Speaker 2:Right, so if there is a huge disaster, and do they call you, and then can you. You have to work many hours, many shifts.
Speaker 1:No, it depends. I do the what they call the generics and where we would do live shots of an important event.
Speaker 2:Live shot is when the reporter stands. A live shot where there's a reporter.
Speaker 1:He's, let's say, in Atlanta or someplace, like, for instance, jimmy Carter. When he was released from hospice and they thought he only had limited time to live, they called me in early because they thought he may pass away at any time. I was there at 4.30 in the morning for a 5 o'clock live feed, you know the reporter, but nothing happened. They didn't have anything to report yet and he lived much longer than they thought he was going to live.
Speaker 2:So they were pretty off base on that one, so you just sat there and they paid you Well it's just similar to the Pope.
Speaker 1:now Everybody's waiting, but who knows right?
Speaker 2:Did you prepare an obituary already for the Pope?
Speaker 1:I'm sure they have one. I didn't do it personally, but they may have one. I'm sure they have one. They have one, because you know when he does die it's going to be so quick.
Speaker 2:Right, no time to edit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they don't have really time to edit, but a lot of these stories you know we cover we used to cover a lot more Hurricanes, tornadoes and stuff like that. Yeah, we do if it's pretty major Okay.
Speaker 2:It has to be quite. Is that because everybody has iPhones and there's so many streaming services? It's all kinds of different things.
Speaker 1:They've pared down our organization, our news division. We just don't have as many people and flying people out, putting them in hotels and paying them all the extra, all the extra pay that goes with it. They've been cutting back on that because they find other ways to do it. For instance, in our case, we have local affiliates that can give us footage or they can. We could use maybe their cameraman for a certain time, but that becomes problematic because they have their own news to cover, so it doesn't always quite work out.
Speaker 2:Where do you see AI and automation coming into news editing?
Speaker 1:Oh well, I've seen examples of it, but nothing concrete where they could take all this footage and put it together that quickly. I mean, I'm sure they can at some point and will.
Speaker 2:Oh, but not yet.
Speaker 1:But not yet. But yeah, I can see that. I can see someone just calling up AI and say you know, first of all they could write the story. It can eventually pull the footage and it can edit it into a sequence. So it's coming. How it's going to evolve? It's always hard to say. I think everybody thinks okay, that's it, but not really. There'll be other things to do.
Speaker 1:And AI still makes mistakes, somebody will have to supervise, but it will cut a lot of jobs. Yes, I think it will certainly, but I think the people that will guide it are still going to be like an editor, but overseeing certain things, and it may be manually, themselves going in and fixing something or saying I don't like this and I'm going to change it into something else Hard to tell.
Speaker 2:But you think network news is here to stay.
Speaker 1:Hard to say. I mean, it still has an audience, albeit an older audience, although you have to think that whatever they do for the evening news or for whatever program they're doing gets clipped sent on the internet. So I do think that technology obviously is going to play a role in how the news is disseminated. I do think that technology obviously is going to play a role in how the news is disseminated, but you still have to have some people deciding what they want to show. The important part is that there's always going to be a need for intelligent people, people who enjoy the creative side telling stories.
Speaker 1:There's always going to be a need for those people, and a computer cannot get into the human aspect of it as well.
Speaker 2:Well, we hope so. Well. They claim AI will be able to develop sort of consciousness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's still all human programming. Yeah, you know, and I always tell people if it gets out of control, you pull the plug, and therefore it can't work without power, can it? But guess what won't replace AI, a plumber who comes into this home to fix your toilet? Ai will not be able to fix it. Not yet, maybe not for a while. Maybe it has a robot. You have a robot vacuum cleaner, sure, but that gets stuck.
Speaker 2:Right. That's why a lot of Gen Z want to be plumbers and electricians.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the trades are a necessary thing. Now, will AI help you with those things? Sure, it helps me. When I need to know something. I look it up, I go oh, okay that's how you do that. And you don't have to ask anyone anymore. You don't have to ask anyone how to pronounce a word anymore.
Speaker 2:You don't have to ask them a definition of a word.
Speaker 1:You can give AI your tax return. I just saw a picture of the Pope in his hospital bed and it was AI-generated. Really, yes.
Speaker 2:Wow, why would they do it?
Speaker 1:Because they don't Because somebody just put it out there oh, here's the Pope. He's in this hospital. Nobody's taken a video of him or a picture of him. But again, people, we have to be very careful. You know we even had a unit at CBS to try to detect fake stuff. A lot of it's kind of easy to detect and a lot of it maybe not so easy. You know, and you can put people's voice, you know, if it gets it goes viral somewhere. It could be totally false, but it's out there.
Speaker 2:All right, Johnny. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you Very interesting.
Speaker 2:I hope you will still have your job, regardless of AI or automation.
Speaker 1:Well, you used to have this job, now I have.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks, no problem. Okay, that's a wrap for today. If you have a comment or question or would like us to cover a certain job, please let us know. Visit our website at howmuchcanimakeinfo. We would love to hear from you and, on your way out, don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone who is curious about their next job. See you next time.
