The best kept secret in local content are called Scoops. Today we’re talking about what Scoops are, how to make them, and why you should start making them today to prepare for the future.

If you’re reading this, that actually tells me a few different things. Maybe you want to be the next Walter Cronkite. If you don’t know who that is, Google it.

Or it tells me that you are a local business owner and you want to learn how you can grow your local presence.

Maybe that isn’t just necessarily talking about your service or what you provide to people. And if somebody shared this with you, then that also tells me that somebody deeply cares about your business and they actually think that you would be a good fit for this because you are maybe more analytically minded.

What Are Scoops?

The best kept secret in local content is Scoops.

Green Screen Scoops are what we’re talking about here. Scoops are a topic where you’re covering local news and stories—maybe new businesses opening, maybe new developments in town, maybe things that are happening, or maybe parking, which is one of my favorite things to talk about.

These are Scoops. So the idea is that you are the local source for everything—every Scoop in your area.

Different Types of Scoops

Now there’s a few different types of Scoops. Today we’re talking specifically about Green Screen Scoops. So these are where you have sort of either a video or a fixed image behind you while you’re talking in the lower corner.

You can also do Out-and-About Scoops and other types of Scoops—other versions, tactics, or different mediums. Just delivering it differently.

But this lends itself very nicely to repurposing content. So that’s partially why we’re starting with green screen and then we can sort of expand from there into other things such as Out-and-About Scoops, Carousel Scoops, different things that you can do.

Becoming the Local News Source

You want to be the local news source because you want people to know what to expect. They know that you are going to give them the scoop on everything that’s happening in town.

One brand closer that tends to be really good is “I keep up on the news so you don’t have to.” So it’s giving that benefit—what they get out of tuning in, following, engaging with your content now and in the future.

We’re trying to systematize that. Scoops are a very simple, narrow way to systematize content consistently, repeatedly over time. And consistency is so useful to you in myriad ways.

Choose Stories You Enjoy

One very important thing is choosing stories that you enjoy talking about. Somebody that we work with in Calabasas, California—he used to be a professional chef, now he’s a real estate agent—and he loves talking about food.

As soon as you bring up lasagna around him, he lights up talking about food and he has so much knowledge in that space. Getting to talk about local businesses—being just outside LA, there’s so much happening in the food space and it’s amazing.

Getting him to talk about food news and trying all these different things—it’s not only fulfilling for him and you just see him light up in such a way, but then it’s also extremely useful to his community because people might not know that all these restaurants are opening.

So it’s twofold. That’s the beauty of useful—it’s being useful not only helps you but it helps other people as well, which is even more of a benefit. It’s multi-purpose. It’s both selfish and selfless at the same time, which is very unique.

Fame would be just the opposite—it’s just completely selfish. There’s nothing for anyone else, which also means it is very hard to make money being famous.

What We’ve Been Up To

What I’ve been doing—I have a secret profile which has been very fun. I am doing local news and local Out-and-Abouts for our town that we live in. We’re just outside Chicago, not actually in Chicago. We’re just a little bit outside.

So we’ve been putting this into practice because it’s very popular right now. And it’s working—Scoops are working very well. We see it with other people, we see it with some of the people we’re filming with. It’s something that we do for people, and now we’re doing it for ourselves also. And it’s fun to start to build that local presence.

Reading and Learning

Fourth of July week, Fourth of July is coming up. It’s been a really nice year. We have so many things to talk about. I’m reading 14 books—I’m looking at all of them right now. They’re all not even remotely in the same area. I like having multiple different books.

I have three that I am about 30 to 40% through. And we’re reading the same books, which is really cute. It’s fun and it’s part of our morning routine is reading. It gets your brain just sort of functioning.

The main book that I’m reading right now I absolutely love. It’s phenomenal, it’s so good. I can’t wait to finish reading it. It’s called “Hitmakers” and it is so good, especially for everything that we do and everybody that we work with. It’s been so inspiring and it has a lot of practical evidence and stories and advice.

Why Stories Matter Over Advice

What’s interesting about it is I thought it’d be an interesting read, but then I read the reviews and people are like “it doesn’t tell you what to do.” So I realize I have this sort of dichotomy in me because I want to be as useful as possible and be as helpful and give advice and guidance and all of these things.

But I don’t consume advice and guidance. I consume more of the story and the things that I can analyze in my brain and pull my own nuggets from. You take the idea and you distill it down.

I understand what people are saying because yes, there is absolutely no practical advice, which normally drives me absolutely nuts because that was what I hated about grad school—all the theories and all the principles that were way up here, never had any practical nuggets in them.

But this is so different because every reference is so directly tied to very distinct things that worked and why. It’s not saying to do them or how to recreate it today, but that’s how it’s perfect. It gives us all of the usefulness that we need to then reformulate it into what we do and how we do things.

It was fascinating to me to have read those reviews and they were like “not good”—but it was sort of shocking and a realization, more so just reaffirming how I like to consume things.

The book is “Hitmakers” by Derek Thompson. I always try to make an effort to remember an author’s name because then if I see another book, I’m like “oh okay, it’s already vetted in my head where it’s like okay, their last one was a banger, let’s see if this one’s a banger.”

You have a fluency with the author, would you say? Yeah, semi-fluency.

How to Make Scoops

How to make Scoops—and just to really drive it home, you should start today. This is why we have our own channel for Scoops and things locally. You want to be the first one doing it in your market.

It is very easy to record and edit and publish these. The hard part is in the preparation. So we’re going to give you a breakdown, step by step, maybe three total steps on what you need to do to create scoops.

Step 1: Find Your Stories

These are news stories, and they don’t have to come from the news. That’s the big thing—it doesn’t have to be. It can be your local Patch where you find stories that have been written about recently—patch.com—and you can find local stories there and be the person who shares those stories. And that’s perfectly fine, but that’s only scratching the surface.

Because there’s so much more, especially when you live in or near a town that you can find either being in the town talking to people or being involved in some of the online communities—using Facebook groups, using Nextdoor, using all of the things, Reddit if you have a thriving Reddit (which some towns do, ours does not—there is a Reddit and it has like three posts in the last seven months).

That was one of the things we joked about because our town isn’t super active with news—it’s pretty sleepy for the most part. So we were driving past an Arby’s the other day and they were putting up a new sign. I was like “wait, pull over, I need to be like ‘there’s a new sign for Arby’s.’” Because it’s just so silly, but literally that could be news.

We didn’t—we’re not saying that that is now a work or anything, but it would have been funny because literally anything can work if people care. It can work.

Choosing Stories That Matter

Going into the subjectivity of choosing news stories—it doesn’t have to be like “oh my god, they’re building this brand new condo or this new restaurant.” It could literally be something sort of as silly as “the new Arby’s sign is going up, what do you think?” Because that could actually be kind of divisive in a community. So just something like that—just food for thought. You can kind of think a little out of the box with some of these things.

We had someone—this wasn’t even a story, but the guy who did massive cutouts of his bald head and put him in windows all over town. This is years ago now, but now if that was happening we might say “have you seen this bald guy in all the windows? They’re all over.”

And he was doing a little contest—if you took photos in front of each of them, you won something. It was very smart. It was an interesting advertising thing, but that would also be then meta advertising for that person. But at the same time, that’s an opportunity to collab, to tag someone, to have them reshare your story to their audience and get you connected with more of the people in the community.

So choosing stories—choosing local news things. If your city has a local newsletter, ours does, which is super beneficial. Or even just going around town and seeing what looks new, what’s a little different. Things like that.

The Prep Work

So choosing your stories first and foremost. Then next is recording—but don’t forget the interstitial part. The prep work is the most difficult.

Because you need to curate the stories, but then what are you going to talk about? So you need to write a little script. You want these to be 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds. You don’t want to go with a full 60 or like a 90-second Scoop. People don’t care that much.

We’re looking at these as static images behind you. It could be one, it could be three stacked up, it could be whatever. And then just your script is the thing that hooks people in.

So writing a little script with one tight hook. Something I did was “Hey town, did you know that there’s actually a cute little farmers market?” or “Did you know that the farmers market just moved?” Things like that.

Something like that. So you have this little—we like to throw “hey town” right at the front because then immediately people stop because they’re like “oh wait, they’re talking to me.” Because we only want people who are in this town.

As a realtor or a small business, you might hit a few towns that are neighboring. We’re only doing ours. We are going hyper, hyper local. Our town isn’t tiny, but it’s not very big at all. It’s not even 100,000 people.

So that does sort of dictate the amount of stories you have and everything that you can curate. But curating a story, writing a little script—that would be the hardest part of this whole process, which is why we’re building a tool to make that easier to curate stories and write the scripts for you.

Introducing Our Tool

I’m very excited because it actually is a very cool little tool. I’ve been using it for a couple things and it’s very neat.

It’s called Hiveway. We’ve brought up Hiveway before for content—sort of content plans for realtors—but now it’s growing to have local and be able to make Scoops like this. So this is a work in progress. It’s not out just yet, but it will be hopefully by the end of the summer.

But that’s partially why we’re doing our local town too, because now this is extra reps. We have the people—our Top Bananas, our MAVEN Top Bananas we film with—so we get reps there. But doing Scoops and running this—running the software that we’re writing and working with AI and different tools and things to curate local stories—it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out “okay, how do we get this to work in the best way possible to make this as simple as possible?”

I think it’s been very helpful for you. Seeing how certain things are working and then one time it left out the name of something and I was like “what even is it?” and then you’re like “oh yeah,” but it was just such a little thing. But it’s helpful because then it’s like “oh okay, cool, now I know to look for this” and then you can solve the problem immediately.

So we’re really excited for Hiveway and that’s just myhiveway.com, but that will be launched later this summer.

Goals Versus Systems

So curating stories, writing a little script—20 to 30 seconds max. And then all that’s left is record and edit. And that sounds like that’s the daunting part, but these are the easiest record and edits you can possibly have.

It’s mind-boggling because I’ve edited very complex projects and these are so simple. It’s like “did I do it right?” almost, which is perfect then for any entry-level person.

And this is systems. I just wanted to say real quick because this is—you can talk about the contrast between goals and systems. Goals are “I want something.” Systems are “I’m going to get something.” So we’re giving you the system here so you get the local sort of influence that you need to then make more money.

Step 2: Recording Your Scoops

Let’s talk about recording super quick. So there are two different instances we can talk about.

Recording at Home

The first one is recording actually in your house. So this is assuming that you have a very quiet situation, you don’t have kids running around. But if that is something that is applicable to you where you can record in your home, choose a blank backdrop behind you. And this will be very important for the editing phase.

So just as blank as you can, preferably just a blank white wall. You sitting about 3 to 4 feet at the least in front of that wall because you do want to have a little bit of depth behind you.

You don’t want things that are so close to you that the tools—the software, the editing tools—don’t know if it’s you or a plant. Or if there’s a shadow behind you, it could actually theoretically pick up the shadow.

Now that brings me to another point—you want to have a good source of light. I know a lot of people say use window light. I actually disagree tremendously because if you have a cloud pass in front of you, you’re going to go from super bright to dark in like a second.

Window light can work, but I really think just having one solid lighting source—so just a light with an umbrella, or you could just do a ring light in the interim and just use that.

Recording in Your Car

But I think the easiest thing that checks all the boxes is in the car. But what I’m saying for the purposes—if you want to have a very, very beautiful video that is super clean and easy to edit—because the only problem with the car is if you have people walking behind you or if you have whatever else going on, or it can actually take your headrest with your head.

So that’s the only downside because I’ve seen that happen with people and it’s fine, but you want these to look a little bit more elevated.

So if you can in your house—plain white wall, record yourself, use the window light if you have to—or if you do not have a soundproof space, then you can record in your car, which is hopefully soundproof or very low sound.

You can also record in there because it really doesn’t matter what the background looks like obviously, because you’re going to green screen yourself out.

Avoid Breathing Sounds

Just try to not have too much gratuitous breathing because that is very distracting. Like if you are recording these, try to not go [heavy breathing sound] because that is so distracting. And maybe it’s just me, but it’s like it’s a sensory thing. I can’t stand that.

If I hear that somebody has that in their videos, I immediately—I’m like “I’m not listening to it.” And I’m not alone, I know that for sure. The agency that I used to be a contractor for for social media, they were like “get rid of every breath because nobody wants to hear it.”

So just take note—try to not be overly breathy. Breathe, but don’t be like “today I’m going to tell you about…”

Step 3: Editing Your Scoops

Now here’s where we get to the third part, which is editing. And we differ in our tools for editing.

Method 1: Using Edits (Instagram App)

I really like Final Cut for real things, but I don’t consider—it’s weird because I don’t consider the short form like “real” in the same sense. For certain things, when we were in Miami, I edited all my videos on Edits, the Instagram app.

For this too, I would just use Edits because it has a built-in green screen feature where you can throw—I guess we should rewind for a second. Grab at least one vertical or three horizontal photos that represent what you’re talking about. So maybe you go around town and just snap a few photos, maybe you snap one, but something you can throw behind you. Or you can just Google and find something.

Just so you have something. So that’s what you want—that before you record, I think, because then you can do this all at once and you can batch them.

But in Edits, then you would select your backdrop—so select the image, maybe you made it in Canva, maybe it’s a solid one—then you can do an overlay of your video. You just take it, overlay it, it’ll remove the backdrop, and you can place it there and you’re done in Edits.

Minus any cropping out things that you messed up in your little script. But your script’s short, and being real is good. You don’t necessarily need to crop anything out. Obviously we do, but if you’re doing it yourself, you can just do a one take of 20 seconds. If you don’t like it, just record it again and use the second one.

Why Not CapCut

Edits instead of CapCut. CapCut is owned by TikTok, the same company. TikTok goes down, CapCut’s down forever. If it goes down forever, you’re just screwed.

Meta Instagram—they made the CapCut alternative with Edits when TikTok went away because they’re like “oh wait, now everyone uses that, no one has anything anymore.” Edits will never go away. So if you’re using an app, that’s what I’d recommend.

Method 2: Using Descript

Or what I recommend, which is even better—after editing 10,000-plus videos (I mean now that it has to be up to 15,000 by this point in time) and testing multiple editing softwares like Final Cut is always one of my favorites—there’s always a ton more. I have found the one software that is my absolute favorite of all time.

And I didn’t think I was actually gonna like it as much as I do, but it is fantastic and not enough people talk about it. I’m being very dramatic, but it honestly is so amazing.

So it’s Descript. Descript is a text-based editor and you basically have a block of text. And for me it’s easier because I can just skim through all the text, and there’s also a video portion as well. There’s a timeline, there are tutorials, and I actually want to make a couple of my own just because it looks like a lot, but I swear it is the easiest tool you will ever use.

I actually find it easier to use than Edits because it’s literally so intuitive.

Descript Features

There are tons of different tools on it. You can remove filler words, you can shorten word gaps, and there’s a green screen feature that is the best I’ve seen on any editing software. It’s phenomenal, especially when you record with not stuff behind you. Or even too, I recorded this way and it took out everything—it was perfect.

So Descript is so easy. You can record landscape, you can do portrait, you can change the composition, everything. And if you want, there is a—I’m going to put a link in the description just so you can find it super easily because it’s like “Descript, what the hell is that?”

So that’ll be linked in the description and it is absolutely phenomenal. If you have questions, seriously reach out and I will help you. But they have really good tutorials through Descript as well.

But you can do the same thing where you can literally have your images on your desktop, drag them to the text in Descript, and then it just puts them in there. You just order them and you’re set.

How Dragging to Text Works

In Descript, it’s like the transcript essentially, and then the third part is your timeline, which you don’t need to worry about that as much. But if you take your images that are on your desktop and you have your window a little smaller so you can see them on your desktop, you take all of those and then you drag them literally to the text and just drag and drop on the text.

They’ll all show up in the video itself at the top. Then you can take—you can literally click and drag each individual image there and order it however you want for your backdrop. And then you need to change like put you as “bring to front.” There are a lot of intricacies and things, but it’s so simple.

I can knock these out in like 5 seconds.

You just drag, drop, done. And then you just order them and then they’re there the entire time. Do not make scenes, do not do anything fancy—you do not need to do that.

So anyway, linked in the description—Descript, it’s amazing.

Quick Recap and Final Tips

So as a little recap then for SCOOPS:

You have prepping your stories and figuring out stories that mean something to you, finding where you can actually get your local news, and then just being incredibly useful to your community. Always keep that at the front of your mind.

And the more useful it is, the more likely it is that it’ll be shared and sent to other people. And the more it’s shared, the more it’s commented on—it’s remarkable.

Control Your Lighting

Don’t use window light—this comes into play right here. If you look at me right now, this is—we have an actual light, but we didn’t close the curtain or anything. So right now we have extra light that shouldn’t be there. That’s what I’m saying—to control the unnatural light, the artificial light.

Script and Post

Get all your prompts ready to go. Write a great, succinct—think just a headline. When you read a headline of a newspaper, that’s basically all you want with just a little bit more of what you need to know. That’s it.

People can—if they want to know more—go read a whole article. Your job is just to let people know “hey, this exists,” “hey, this is happening.” Awareness. That’s it. Bing, bang, boom, get out of there. Leave them wanting more.

Then editing, and then post. Just have it out there and use hyper-local hashtags. I know a lot of people are saying don’t use hashtags—I still think you should for categorization, but that’s up to everybody. I’ve had three different people sending me things where it says don’t use hashtags anymore.

Gary V uses hashtags, I use hashtags. And that’s not the reason—there’s many reasons. No, I just literally saw that he does and I was like—well no, it’s for categorization. It’s how people can search for things. Anyway, still use hashtags.

Brand Closers

And the one thing we’re not talking about is brand closers—we’re out of time, but that is a whole other episode. That’s not a secret, but that’s an important part to make this work as a realtor. So if you’re just a local business, the brand closer isn’t as important, I’d say, even though it’s very valuable. But as a Realtor, it’s very important, and we will explain that next week.

So if you’re not already subscribed, hit follow, subscribe, whatever platform you’re on. Or if you found this interesting, share this with a friend. Screenshot it, post it on stories or Instagram or something and tag us so we know.

Or if you have any follow-up questions, either leave them in the comments, or better yet, actually share this to your story. I don’t monitor the comments typically as much. So take a screenshot, share it in your story, and tag one of us. Our socials are linked below in the description as well, so definitely make sure you do that if you have questions.

So happy scooping!