Slick Read Online Free

Slick
Book: Slick Read Online Free
Author: Daniel Price
Pages:
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four-hour flight from Honolulu, I figured I’d give them ample lead time, just as a courtesy.
    Naturally, they all went nuts for my premise. “Wow! Really? Cool!”
    “Way cool,” I replied. “Swing on by.”
    As I expected, they sighed and stalled: “Yeah, well, I don’t know. Keoki Atoll’s kind of far, dude. Tell you what, just send the VNR and the B-roll, and we’ll definitely use it. Just make sure to send it early enough so we can tease it.”
    Ninety-nine percent of the world couldn’t translate that request for the life of them. That makes the other one percent of us very happy.
    As you know, the news has changed dramatically over the last few decades. The media outlets have merged and merged and merged into what are (as of now) six multinational überconglomerates that control virtually everything you see and hear. This has led to an unprecedented streamlining of the news industry. It’s still going on. Just one month before, the newly consummated AOL Time Warner cut four hundred jobs at CNN. Why? The quick and easy answer would be profitability, but it’s also because of people like me. Publicists and journalists used to be flip sides of the same coin. Now we’re sharing space on a one-sided nickel. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s made both our jobs a hell of a lot easier. With the exception of AP and Maxim , I’m all the media I need for this event.
    The video news release (VNR) is the dirty little secret that all flacks and hacks share. It’s do-it-yourself coverage. Using my own crew, my own script, even my own voice, I serve as the on-the-scene (but never seen) reporter. When all is said and done, I’ve got a professional-looking two-minute news piece, the kind you see every night at eleven. From there we use a portable uplink to shoot the whole thing into space. The final step is faxing notice to all the newsrooms. Hi. I’ve got a sweet piece on a mob of angry naked chicks. Interested? Here are the satellite coordinates. Go nuts.
    For the budget-conscious news director, this is manna from heaven. It takes just minutes for Graphics to add their custom network overlays and Sound to dub a local reporter’s voice over mine. Presto. The station runs the piece as their own. There’s no legal requirement to cite the source, and that’s just the way we like it. The producers often mix it up a little to cover their tracks. That’s what the B-roll is for. It’s a no-frills collection of relevant interviews and visual clips, a media LEGO set they can put together any way they want. It’s a great system. On a slow news day, a thirty-minute show can squeeze in a good four to five minutes of VNRs, as compared to five or six minutes of real news. It’s pretty easy to tell the two apart. That fire in Century City? News. That new laser technique to remove wrinkles? VNR. If it promotes a product or company, it’s probably a VNR. If the reporter never appears in any of the on-scene footage, that’s because it’s not his story. It came from outer space.
    I was glad the cavalry finally arrived. Keoki Atoll was six hours be hind the East Coast. I wanted to get this out by 11 a.m. so the eastern affiliates could tease the story all through prime time.
    The video crew was from an L.A. production house called Metropia. Its three principals—Denny, Gray, and Vivek—were your standard ponytailed AV geeks. But they were masters of their craft. I flew them out here at great expense because I didn’t want to take a chance with an untested local outfit. If the final piece looked like crap, the stations wouldn’t run it.
    I wished I had filmed their faces as soon as they broke through the outer shell of the brouhaha and got a look at the chewy, creamy center. Even Vivek, the gay one of the bunch, was stunned by the unprecedented display of natural breasts.
    The last one into the fray was the AP’s own Miranda Cameron-Donnell. Established in 1848, the Associated Press was a nonprofit collective owned by
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