I was stunned to see some serious craftpersonship issues in one of the Olympic feature stories yesterday–a puff piece with Mary Carillo and Maria Sharapova (who apparently grew up playing tennis in Sochi).

While much of the b-roll was gorgeous shallow focus eye candy…when they were actively doing things like walking and making Russian pizza dough treats, there were egregious jump cuts. One in particular had a CU of their hands in the dough, with a jump cut to an almost identical hands-in-the-dough shot. There were also at least a couple of "two shot at the table" to "two shot walking down the street" style jumps with no transition between them.

This is the best NBC can do, with all the lead time they had for their backstory features?