Cutting a late council story for two channels: Marcus's case

Marcus produces local news for a small regional channel, and in mid autumn his evenings fill up with council meetings that run long. He phoned the office a little after six with a problem I recognised at once: forty minutes of footage from a planning committee, a decision that would matter to viewers the next morning, and nobody free to cut it.

I took the call because I had shot similar sessions on location and knew how messy the raw material tends to be. Marcus explained that he needed two things: a tight package for the television bulletin and a shorter version for the channel's website. He had the rushes on a drive and a deadline before breakfast.

I asked him three questions before anything else. What was the single decision viewers needed to understand? Which speakers had he already cleared for broadcast? And what format did his playout system expect? His answers shaped everything that followed, and they took less than five minutes.

The footage came over by secure transfer within the hour. It was a single wide camera with a lapel microphone on the committee chair, which meant clear speech from one end of the room and muddy audio from the public gallery. That is a common situation, and it decides how much you can promise on a first pass.

Priya, our senior editor, took the files and logged them while I stayed on the phone with Marcus. We built a short list of moments: the chair opening the item, two councillors disagreeing, a resident speaking against the scheme, and the final vote. Everything else was context we could leave out.

Marcus also sent his house style notes: caption font size, how his channel writes names and titles, and the maximum length for a bulletin package. Having those in writing at the start saved us a round of corrections later, because every choice about pace and wording could be checked against them.

• Raw footage by secure transfer, with the clearance status of each speaker
• House style notes for captions, names and titles
• Target length for the bulletin cut and the online cut
• The playout format and frame rate the channel expects

The hardest part of fast editing is deciding what leaves the timeline. Forty minutes had to become a package of about two minutes, and every second kept was a second taken from something else. Priya worked from the decision backwards: the vote came first in her plan, then the two points of disagreement that explained it.

She kept the resident's statement because it was the only voice from outside the council chamber, and fair reporting means the audience hears both the people making the decision and the people living with it. The councillors' exchange was trimmed so that neither side lost its main argument, only its repetition.

Where the gallery audio was poor, she used the chair's clear microphone for the spine of the story and laid the muddier clip under a caption rather than forcing it to carry the narration. That kept the package honest about what was said while staying watchable on a phone speaker.

Television and the web ask different things of the same footage. The bulletin version needed broadcast-safe margins, a lower-third for each speaker, and captions placed so they did not collide with the channel's own graphics. The online version needed a vertical-friendly crop option and open captions, since many viewers watch with the sound off.

Priya wrote the captions from the audio, then checked every name and title against the spellings Marcus had sent. A misspelt councillor on screen costs a producer far more time than a slow edit, so this check is never skipped, even when the clock is loud.

Exports followed the format list from the first phone call. We made the television file to the playout specification and the web file as a standard compressed clip, each named clearly so that nobody on Marcus's side would grab the wrong one at five in the morning.

• Broadcast-safe margins and speaker lower-thirds for television
• Open captions and a shorter running time for the website
• Names and titles checked against the client's own spellings

The first cut reached Marcus well before midnight. He watched it that evening and came back with two notes. One was a correction we were glad to catch: a councillor's ward had been written from memory in the meeting notes and was wrong on the caption. The other was a request to open on the resident rather than the chair.

Priya made both changes in the same sitting. The ward was fixed and the opening reordered, and she checked that the new first line still led naturally into the vote. A second review took Marcus ten minutes.

We delivered both files and a plain text sheet listing the running times and the caption text, so his team could paste the wording into the website article without retyping it. The package went out in the morning programme, and the online clip was live shortly after.

Editing for news is mostly a matter of agreeing the small things early. The format, the house style, the length and the one point that must survive the cut were all settled in a single short phone call, and that is what made a late job calm rather than frantic.

I also learned how much a client's own checks matter. Marcus caught the ward error because he knew his patch, and no editor working from raw footage alone would have noticed it. We now ask every client to read names and titles aloud before sign-off, as a habit rather than a courtesy.

Finally, two versions of one story are not two jobs. Cutting the bulletin first and adapting it for the web kept the facts identical across both, and that consistency is part of fair reporting as much as any choice made in the edit.