My life in TV...

is full of hope.

I love my job. I really do. The second I walked into a TV station nearly four years ago, I felt like I was in the right place. I was pushed everyday to learn something new, and I did just that.

Now I sit here knowing I can do almost everything there is to do at "the station" - but I sometimes wonder if everything is enough. Don't get me wrong because this isn't negativity - it's hope. I participate in graduation ceremonies this upcoming Saturday, and I finish my college classes on July 2. And I've never been full of more hope in my life.

Some are scared. Some are ignoring it and pushing it to the back of their minds. And some are just waiting, hoping, like me.

"It's the economy." "Your graduating class has bad timing." These are all things I've heard. Over and over again.  But it doesn't bother me. Because I'm hopeful.

My journalism career has been a major struggle. Getting accepted into the Missouri School of Journalism was one of the hardest things I've worked for in my entire life. There's so much I can tell to that story. But through my excitement, my tears, my pride, my mistakes and each of my accomplishments, I've conquered many goals. I told everyone in my life that I would one day graduate from one of the best journalism schools in the nation. And now I will. 

So, I am not scared. I've conquered the biggest difficulty in my life before. I've climbed the hill, been to the top and moving on to the next place. Who knows where that will be? Hopefully I'll find out in a few months, weeks or days. It will be a place that will push me to learn every single day. A place that gives me more struggles, more thrills and more accomplishments. It will be a place of hope for the exciting future.

Slideshows!

I made another slideshow today for the "Paint the Town Purple" event. Volunteers tied up ribbons around Columbia for Relay for Life.

Creating the slideshow was so easy, I decided to make my own for my web site. Little by little, I can keep fixing the glitches in my site. As soon as I'm done with school next week, I will search and send out my best work and continue the search this summer.

News... and Sports...

Right now I'm debating on missing a college baseball game played at Busch Stadium - the place that made me love sports. I'm focusing my entire day on finalizing my web site. I want to prove that I know news. I know sports. I know the similarities, and I know the differences between the two. In our downsizing news market, where sports are cut first from TV stations, I plan to show that there is a need for both. People need entertainment and people need to be informed. Sports are life to some, sports are a getaway for others, and some have absolutely no interest until it's all that's talked about in town - which happens more often than one realizes. But it's not all about who won the World Series or who got a bid in the NCAA tournament. That's easy to find. I am a reporter. I find what's not easy to find - I find what you want to know and what you need to know. My interest is news; my passion is sports.

Stay tuned for a link to my web site...

Playing with Flickr

Fans wished the Missouri Tigers luck as they left for the NCAA Tournament.

So many details

go into editing a web site! I felt the Monday workday pick up as soon as I walked in. Meaning I could tell there was a lot to take care of from the past weekend, week, month... And I began.

I began updating the Black History Month stories and double checking they were even put on the web, let alone have the correct categories. Beth and I went through the iNews Hold for the reporters' scripts and then checked for them in ACM.

I met all of the new convergence reporters. It's difficult because they are new reporters every week. I never get to develop a real relationship with them, and I don't have much time to realize what type of reporter they are or what their interests are. I believe developing relationships with others in your newsroom is important to the quality of work that gets done in the end. But, I can't control this, so I met them and discussed their ideas. One of them suggested making a Flash map to me first (YEA!). I told him how we've been learning to make them, and encouraged him to ask questions and double check his facts to go with his idea.

While he was gone, I caught up on the rest of the little things like setting up stories in ACM, making images and listening to reporters' stories. I also kept checking up on KOMU.com and fixing little things, such as changing "today" to "Monday" and changing any AP or grammatical errors. The second desk/dotcom girl who came in wasn't sure how to post video or create a new stories for Photo Finish or Your Health, so I taught her how to do all of this.

When the convergence reporter returned, he told me his idea for Flash didn't really go along with the story the live reporter was doing. He didn't ask many questions about it, either, so I told him to go to the city council meeting and ask them there. After all, we are all reporters, and our job is to ask questions! If you notice something different or interesting in the world, ASK! I believe there is no such thing as a stupid question, and I feel like we should always, always ask.

Every shift has came down to my instinct reporting skills, and I really like that I can take my core journalism values and expand them into sharing stories in so many different ways from our web site to television to graphics... and hopefully soon, on a Flash graphic!!

Oh, Flash...

So last week I switched up shifts with another classmate, and I could tell it was a different news day for sure. All but one of the dayside reporters were in Jefferson City for meetings and more. It was rough finding great images from their videos because everyone had shots of the capitol and simple meeting video, but we searched and came up with a little.

Once I had the general duties out of the way, I was ready to play with Adobe Flash. I felt like the stories weren't very visual, so I thought I could really find some facts to pull something together. Nicole's story was a grain company scamming farmers in Missouri and parts of Illinois. I wanted to make a map, so I made a call to one of her sources to find out the exact locations. I spent a good 2 hours searching for the best map with highways and interstates to label the areas affected. Once I found one, I used the shapes and colors to label the areas. It was frustrating to label it correctly and I forgot a lot of details from when we learned how to use it. By about this time, my shift was ending and the next person was coming in. I told him what I was doing and he wanted to work on it as well. I don't think it ever got posted (sadly) because I don't know if we've gotten that far.

BUT this week I will pitch good visual Flash stories with the nightside reporters and work on them while they're out on their shifts. Let's hope for a good news day on Monday!

Adding More

I was really excited about my shift this week because I pushed really hard to find extras to add to stories. Since the big, big story was the Missouri-Kansas Border Showdown basketball game, I wanted to make a slideshow with images from past games. However, we didn't have file video (DVDs) from games beyond the one in 2008. Beth Hoag helped me look for video and other images, but we couldn't find much.

Since I'm the only one from our class in that shift, I decided I should move on to doing the basic work. I made plenty of images from the reporters' stories and created new stories for them in ACM. I'm beginning to get the hang of everything again (I used to work on the web site about a year ago), and I'm getting through the basic needs of every shift quickly. Hopefully in the next few weeks, I can spend more time on making slideshows and other extras.

But for this shift - I had about an hour or so to spare, and I really wanted to find something extra to add to the dayside reporters' stories. I asked Kent Collins, our "Tiger Chair," what he thought the best story was during the day. He told me he felt like Julia Harmon's story about job searches at libraries was interesting. I went to Julia and asked her if there was any additional information that she couldn't fit into her story for the newscast - something that the viewers needed to know, or might want to know. After thinking, she said her interview with the library director was informative, and I asked her to edit more of that interview for the web. I taught her how to make her own sequence, and I posted it as a KOMU.com web extra video link to her story. I then wrote it as the "New on the Web" in the 6pm newscast.

Overall, I was pleased that I did something extra other than editing images and creating stories for reporters. I still wish I could have made a slideshow or something for the MU-KU game, but there's next shift for me to attempt to top the shift before.

The Communicator

Yesterday I showed up to my shift around 2 pm and attended the producer meeting. I was able to learn about the dayside reporters' stories, and sadly I felt like none of them were too visual.

So I went into the reporters edit bays and looked at their videos. I really feel like our Monday dayside reporters are great videographers, so I usually find a few good shots. I took their media cards from their cameras and went through their videos.

I found about 3-5 good shots from each video, and I really concentrated on finding close shots and far away shots - so the reader can see different perspectives. When editing the pictures in Photoshop and adding them into ACM, I really decide what should be the front photo. I feel like a shot that is too close (like splashing water) doesn't really give an idea of what the story is about. So in a story like Max's Water Patrol story, I chose an image that showed a patrolman at work. The story is about job cuts, but it's still intriguing to see someone working.

Around 5:30, I had to give a class a tour of KOMU, so I had to leave the "dot com" area. I wrote a note for Nick and Cate (the people coming in after me) and gave it to the other person working the desk and dot com area. After the tour was over around 6:30, I met back up with Nick and Cate, and they were working on editing the videos from the newscasts. For the next half hour or so, I helped them edit and communicate back and forth with the dayside reporters. This was the first time we created stories in ACM for them, so it was important to let them now. I showed them all of my images, and during her shift, Cate made a lovely slideshow for the newest Sarah's Story.

There's Learning in Teaching...

Since Saturday, I've been teaching the new sports class students how to produce the sportscasts. It's really made me step back and realize all I've learned since August. So, so many little details go into producing (kind of like the web), and it's very easy to mess one up. So I've picked up patience, even more multitasking skills, and definitely the ability to work under pressure. I can only hope that every step I take in teaching the new students - good or bad - rubs off on them. Because if I make a mistake, I want them to learn from it. And I want them to see how much good communication is SO IMPERATIVE in the newsroom - especially with producing, news OR sports. I used to think I didn't want to be a producer. But that pressure one minute before we're supposed to go on and that satisfaction when the show ends successfully brings such a great feeling of accomplishment. I will be teaching for two more weeks... and I hope the students I'm teaching learn as much as I have about the world of TV when the semester ends.

First Day Back...

Last semester I hosted Opening Drive, an online high school football show, and that was my only internet experience for awhile.

So it's been about a year since I've worked a full web shift - especially news. Today I came in for a five hour shift, and it all came back to me pretty easily. I found out what the reporters were doing, and got right to updating stories from the weekend. I was lucky to be working with Beth Hoag because she's experienced with the web, and she's a convergence reporter, so she was all about adding more content to KOMU.com. We posted closings to the site, and after checking the email a few times I opened a press release about a drug bust. It's been awhile since I've written the news rather than sports, so I really liked the change of pace.

I kept in touch with the reporters and pulled images from their videos to add to their stories (HD images, of course). Then the news began! I always feel like it's a whole day waiting up to those evening shows, and I love seeing what the different reporters finish with at the end of their shifts. After editing video and helping the reporters edit their stories for the web, I called it a day. I just finished recording all of my winter break work, and look forward to a very interactive semester!