Live in 3, 2, 1 …
News broadcast takes the Adventists’ international meeting to the world
This is no ordinary newsroom. Yes, seasoned veterans operate high-tech cameras and production equipment. Men and women whiz by as they prepare for the live 6 p.m. broadcast. Editors and reporters turn around stories in hours as a full production staff gets graphics and packages ready. And make-up artists touch up anchors and panelists.
This impressive newsroom was a temporary setup for Adventist NewsLine, a half-hour live news show reporting daily from the 10-day Session of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Atlanta. A staff of producers, anchors, reporters, news directors, photographers and behind-the-scenes staff with decades of commercial broadcast experience moved into the Georgia Dome, bringing with them a shared sense of purpose.
“This is an every five-year reunion for all of us,” says David Brillhart, Adventist NewsLine producer. “We get to train young people who want to be in this business for 18-hour days, and we enjoy it. It’s different working with a great group of believers. There are tensions but we care for each other.”
David Brillhart and his team
From June 23 to July 3, Willa Sandmeyer, the broadcast’s news director, ran the show from the press level of the Georgia Dome as business meetings, elections, musical performances and division reports took place on the other side of the wall in the main auditorium from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sandmeyer approached the job no differently than any of the commercial news broadcasts she has directed during her 30-year career.
Sandmeyer began preparing for NewsLine almost a year before the event. She brainstormed possible stories and interviews that might occur at the session so the entire staff could hit the ground running in Atlanta. She used the denomination’s wide network of international missionaries and video footage from around the world, and researched inspirational stories that could be developed on site.
“To make something like this successful, it takes careful planning ahead of time,” Sandmeyer says. “You can’t walk in wondering what you are going to do. You have to know what you are going to cover on a daily basis.”
Each morning began with a devotional followed by a news meeting, and then reporters collected stories on the session floor in time for their noon deadlines to fill the 30-minute newscast, which featured two- to three-minute news stories, sidebar stories, panel discussions, world division reports and musical performances. Sandmeyer’s hard and fast deadlines ensured the broadcast ran smoothly each night.
Willa Sandmeyer edits scripts before showtime.
“We didn’t want delegates just sitting in a chair and internal shots of the Dome,” Sandmeyer explains. “We wanted to connect to the World Church members with the actions taken outside the Dome, committee events, the fun run, and share with them a rich variety of stories.”
Rajmund Dabrowski, communications director for the General Conference World Headquarters, spearheaded the production by the Adventist News Network (ANN), the denomination’s official year-round news service, which also provided articles, photos and a daily podcast covering the conference on its website.
“We wanted to do this with a journalistic foundation without it being propaganda,” he says. “We wanted to provide a realistic picture of the event. Naturally, as a church we are interested in projecting a positive image about ourselves, but if you read our stories there is plenty of controversy; [we] reported on varied opinions that the delegates had.”
The high-quality broadcast operated like a commercial broadcast from all angles, but it wasn’t just professionals like Brillhart and Sandmeyer putting it together. Aspiring journalists manned the cameras and collected stories out on the floor.
“We wanted to involve young people in this because they are Seventh-day Adventists so they care about the church, but at the same time they get training,” he says. “They get a chance in a 10-day period that they would not experience — the tension, the intensity.”
Full coverage of the General Conference Session, including webcasts of NewsLine, articles, photo galleries, podcasts and more are at news.adventist.org.
— Jennifer Garrett
Related story: Adventist on Adrenaline, a Q&A with GC Session planner Sheri Clemmer
