NEWS NEWS

At 9pm Friday, Desha Rambhajan looked like a news presenter and not a wannabe fashionista.
It was the combination of things - the hair (much better), the toned down makeup, the shape and colour of the jacket.
Very professional.
But.
Desha you are still pronouncing the words that should have the 'u' sound as 'o', e.g. you are saying 'elec-shon' instead of 'elec-shun'. Please pay attention to this.

Now onto news. Charlene Ramdhanie gave us a story on the judgement in favour of the maxi taxi drivers. It was long and at times spiced with legal jargon like "coercive authority". Then Joanne Briggs took the other side of that story from the maxi taxi drivers' perspective. She spoke with both the Route 2 president, Victor George and some drivers, then at the very end of the story she threw in a sentence referring to the commuters. Clearly they were an afterthought, but how will the ruling affect them?
And Joanne, that pose with your left hand in your pants pocket while doing your stand up just didn't work for us. You looked a tad bit too casual, like you were telling people to go have a good time for the weekend rather than that maxi taxi operators may be collecting millions of dollars.

Then for the story on the flooding and the low reservoir levels, your colleague Sherwin Long told us "...the rainy season is only three weeks old...". Sherwin, wouldn't it have been better to say "We are just three weeks into the rainy season..."?

CNC 3's 9.30pm newscast began four minutes late, because some government programme was running. That is not acceptable.
Sampson's story on inflation began with this lead in: "The Central Bank says the country's inflation rate has risen from what it was last month...".
That is what you call a laugh out loud moment. Well if it rose, then clearly it wasn't where it was last month.

And speaking of Sampson, he also reported on the low levels in the reservoirs. The camera work was excellent. We saw the close ups of the meter in the reservoir. That shot stood out because no one else used it.
But Sampson at one point you used a soundbite from someone who said "If no rain falls within two weeks...". But the rain was falling while that tour to the North Oropouche water treatment plant was taking place, and rain fell so much in Port of Spain that the streets flooded, so why did you use that soundbite? Why didn't you just chop it out?

And during Leeron Brummel's story on the army presence in Diego Martin, the bar at the bottom of the screen read that protesters were claiming "police harrassment".
PS Leeron, why did you need three stand-ups in that story? You started with one, then halfway through we saw you again in the same spot, then at the very end, you closed the story on camera just saying your name in the same spot. Why? Well it seemed as if you wrote those three pieces at the end of the interviews when you were on your way back to the office and decided to record those pieces by the way.
Then when you got back to the office you or someone else said yeah they all look good, use them.
No. The stand-ups should not be used like that. Find a reason for them, some significance, a link that is missing in the script, you don't have enough video to cover part of the script, but not just to see yourself.