A Question about TV News Programs?

The papers are scripts and rundowns.

Every newscast is planned out beforehand. And every story is written down, refined, checked, reworded by the anchor to make it more natural, updated and so on and so forth.

Then before the show they get a printed copy of all the scripts. Some of them rely only on the teleprompter and have the paper scripts just in case. Some read from the prompter when they are on camera and look down to the paper when they are not. It's totally personal preference.

The rundowns they have have the order of the stories, how long they should take, who's reading, when the commercial break is, how long it is... Some anchor people also put the show in order and have to make sure that the show is on time. Some have someone behind the camera to do it for them, but they have the rundown as a visual guide for what the show is supposed to look like.

As for what they write. They write all sorts of things.

They'll jot down questions during a live interview so they don't forget and can ask them.

Or mistakes.

Or questions about stories.

Ideas for follow up.

I've had some who wrote their shopping list down during the show. And even a few that doodle silly drawings. I have an anchor now who likes to draw what should happen when something is broken, like if the weather man had no graphics, he'd draw snowflakes just because he could.

I work in a TV station. I'm the director, I push all the buttons to get the video played and the graphics up. I get a copy of the scripts too. They have commands in them for when to roll video and sound and things so that I know when to do things. My stack of scripts is like the driving directions from google.

I'm not in the media so I can only make guesses here. When they write something they're probably writing down directions from the stage director, marking down what stories they've already covered to keep track of where they are in the news, or noting ideas for how to present the news. Whether they write something or not, the reason they have papers is in case the teleprompters fail during the broadcast so they can keep reading from the hard copy. And also, just guessing here, when a news anchor is holding papers it probably gives the viewer more of a sense of that person being a journalist and credible news reporter--similar to the old days of Water Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow--rather than just somebody reading a teleprompted script.