Photo by Hugo Conquet
Interviewing Montgomery County Regional SGA President Sophie Ngyuen for a broadcast package about the superintendent's recommended FY2026 budget.
Broadcast Journalism
While I have made videos since my freshman year, this year, I have stepped it up in broadcast journalism truly making the leap from just videos to full broadcast packages.
The first video I made was simply a 5-minute interview video with our student member of the Board of Education -- no b-roll, one angle and no editing done by me. But I believe videos have a powerful storytelling tool that neither word nor photo can do justice to alone. This is why the videos I have made have become some of my proudest works.
My first broadcast-style video focused on a Board of Education candidates forum in the leadup to the 2024 election. Instead of writing a traditional article, especially with the amount of interviews I wanted to get, I decided to go with a video and edited it that night to publish the next day. Although I didn't know everything, I still incorporated the basic elements of broadcast with A-roll and B-roll to tell the story.
While we already had someone else on staff covering volleyball through traditional article coverage, we lacked multimedia coverage. Therefore, when our normal reporter couldn't make the regional semi-final game, I attended, taking photos and videos for the game. Following the game, after posting pictures, I edited together this video that told the story of the game and got interviews with key players and the head coach.
This video was a more feature-style broadcast video I produced. While it focused on a news event (a teacher winning an award), the b-roll I captured revolved a lot around Mr. Rodman's teaching style and presence in the classroom, and the extended interview we conducted was cut and trimmed to fit into this format. The audio quality on the video during the interview is somewhat muffled, a challenge we faced as we used our older set of microphones. I spearheaded purchasing new wired lavalier mics that we have started using this year.
This video was included as an example of my gradual refining of technique and skill in broadcast. Especially compared to my first video, this one featured crisp audio in interviews, better lighting, and better b-roll. I was able to interview two of the three newly sworn-in Board members, as well as one outgoing Board member, and used footage pulled from MCPSTV for other Board members. In addition, this was my first opportunity to speak to and interview MCPS superintendent Dr. Thomas Taylor.
In this video, the topic at hand, the largest-ever proposed MCPS budget, lent itself well to a video as the unveiling event had lots of people there and an important presentation about the budget itself. I again interviewed Dr. Taylor and also talked to students and Board President Julie Yang for the video and used MCPSTV footage to supplement the b-roll of the presentation.