Media Producer
Annenberg Media is multi-platform news center funded by USC’s communication and journalism school. It emulates the fast-paced environment of a newsroom and a training bootcamp to teach reporters, producers, and writers. It gave me the technical and leadership skills needed to put a show on — every single day.
Classic Live TV News Producing
ATVN is the campus news show. As a producer, I was in charge of managing a team of journalists to shoot, edit, and write stories about current issues, from campus scandals to international developments.
This got even more interesting when USC went online during the pandemic. Literally overnight, the team and I created an entirely new production workflow that rewired the ATVN breaker box all remotely to keep the show going.
On top of managing journalists, pitching stories, creating graphics, building a schedule, and smoothing technical glitches, producers also wrote blogs. One of mine here is about this pandemic transition.
(If you’re wondering why there’s a photo of me reporting, it’s because when the pandemic hit, few journalists could come and I stepped in to anchor a special edition. I’m terribly stressed in this one.)
News On-the-Go
The Rundown is Annenberg Media’s award-winning mobile news show. As the sole producer, I was in charge of filming and editing it together for the official Instagram. As a mobile-first program, it required tailoring everything, from the script to the performances to the technical framing, to fit its form.
This diverged from ATVN’s traditional news style to appeal to a Gen Z audience, and offered a new medium for information consumption — one that was in line with culture. I was trained in both classic forms of news and experimental emerging media and learned how things are done and how they could be done.
This has to be one of my best learning experiences. It taught me to be a proven-under-fire producer while also giving me valuable skills that have translated into my other roles. It’s probably one of my favorite jobs (and it wasn’t even a job).