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!