Newscast not for the weak or slow

AUSTIN, Texas - It's 2:50 p.m. and News 8 Austin reporter Haley Stavinoha has just arrived in an editing bay to assemble her next can-we-get-it-by-3:15 masterpiece. Stavinoha was up at the crack of dawn to drive 45 miles south of Austin to shoot a story about a juvenile boot camp. Now she's staring intently at the screen of a Pentium computer, electronically slicing and dicing her video of young toughs in fatigues doing push-ups.

At any other station in town, two-thirds of Stavinoha's job would be done by others. But at News 8 Austin, a 24-hour local news service of Time Warner Cable, the reporter does everything. She shoots herself talking into the camera. She edits her own piece and composes the on-screen graphics. She's a one-woman band.

Stavinoha came here from the CBS affiliate in Amarillo. There she had a photographer and could focus on her writing. Here she shoots - several stories a day sometimes - then edits and only then has time to tap out a few words on her editing terminal.

A common mantra in local cable-news circles is "twice the work, half the pay," so jobs at News 8 Austin tend to attract the young and inexperienced. An exception is Bob Branson. He's seated at the anchor's desk at the south end of News 8 Austin's state-of-the-art newsroom.

At a traditional station - he's worked at several around Texas - Branson would be assembling the 5 p.m. news right now. But here, the news is always on. So when Stavinoha's story arrives at 3:20, a few minutes late, her introduction and tagline are fed into the TelePrompTer, and Branson reads them right away. A director makes a video sandwich out of his words and her pictures, and the story slides into the computerized news rotation. It will air several times that afternoon. Stavinoha and her young colleagues are loading up on experience here.

And News 8 Austin's low-key, community-minded approach gives everyone a respite from the blood-and-guts of traditional TV news. "I think they work harder than their counterparts," says News 8 Austin general manager Brian Benschoter. "But if you want to go home feeling good about what you do, this is the place."

**Related story:** Nonstop news