What's a village anyways?

Today I had hoped to learn all about what it takes to become a village so that I too, can one day elect myself mayor and assimilate my own utopia. Unfortuantely, our source decided that today wasn't the day to do that. I must say, this small hinderance has not dampened my intreague. The basic questions of how and why you would spend your time and resources to attain such a goal is beyond me and I am eager to hear some 1st person accounts.

My experience at KOMU was interesting enough. I had a great time snapping shots of old people doing excercises but I felt like there was no place for me at the newsroom. No one was quite sure what to do with me and I felt like I had little to offer. I spent most of the day just putting together a slidshow but I was in the way of the broadcast student I had gone out in the field with. She obviously had priority over the audio material I needed so she could make the deadline for the 5oclock broadcast. I'm looking forward to going back but I hope to learn a new skill or 2 this time around.

SEX IN ELLIS LIBRARY!!!!!

Ok, so we didn't get that story for this week's project. Still, I need to start practicing my tabloid-style headlining now for when EVERY newspaper is owned by Rupert Murdoch....

Alas, we are working on a Current TV story on caffeine addiction this week that will include Beth and Ashley becoming incredibly grumpy as they give up every caffeinated product in their daily routine (chocolate, soda, tea, coffee, and even most migraine medicines...). It will be interesting to see how working on a non-traditional project over the next week with two strung-out junkies going cold turkey will pan out. Wish me luck.

Love always.

The Wake-Up Call

I really did purposely wait until today to post, because we attempted to continue production on our documentary this weekend. Which turned out to be a monster wake up call about our direction. As in, we have a subject, and now we need a direction to go in and actually do some reporting.

It's been a mission getting all three of us in the same room the past week. We're all crazy busy, and I have the GRE looming in 13 days so my head is crowded with word roots and math reviews. Even finding a time were we could all go and shoot was a challenge. Group dynamics are another thing. We all have ideas and it's hard to articulate when all three of us are pouncing on each other to add and finish sentences.... I think I'm a the main offender in this sometimes. And Wale is now out of town until Tuesday (and took a camera to Texas with him).

So, Alyah and I had a quick get together to get a mission and a focus for the next two weeks. We think the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in town is a really interesting little culture that we'd like to explore- so we're hoping to start constructing our story around these people who are members and the appeal of this small, smoky little lunch counter.

But like I say, we've had our wake up call and are now aware of our work in progress. It's definitely a major work in progress.

Too much video

I've never gone through so much video as I did this week. For our bilingual education story, we collected close to four hours of video, between all our interviews. I guess the way to solve the too-much video problem would be to work on my interviewing technique. I need to be in control of the interview and not let sources ramble too much. It's just a fine line to walk-- you don't want to be logging hours of video, but you do want your sources to be comfortable with you so they'll give you what you want. I find that it's much easier to do a concise interview when you really have a clearly defined focus for your story. If you don't your questions stray broadly, and you're left with a lot of extra video that you'll never use. Anyway, lesson learned.

The election website is still chugging along. It seems that about every day or so something new is agreed on, so, like I've said before, it's coming along slowly but surely. I've been keeping up with all the discussions on base camp, but a lot of the server talk and stuff is really over my head. I just don't have knowledge about stuff like that, but I'm trying to learn and keep up. I've been working on designs for the banner and the content box. I've been checking out other online election/political websites and I have a few designs, so hopefully we'll have a design agreed upon early in the week so that we can see the full site and make changes from there.

SmartDecision'08 update

We can use the free version of SplashCast, but a conference call has revealed we will have to pay for any personalization of the player, which could amount to thousands of dollars. Our budget is zero. I’m wondering if we could get some of the advertising students from the j-school to sell online advertising for us. Problem is, I don’t know any advertising students.

My goal for the site: get a completely working site up by the end of next week so we can see exactly what it will look like and we can decide what we want to change.

Wow. So not a good week (and now I'm blogging late!).

After having to repitch, our story's focus shifted as the week progressed. We all spent a lot of time on it, and I think we all thought that we had done what we could to salvage the story, especially when all of our edits seemed positive. I was actually pleased with how the story turned out when I wasn't too sure about it to begin with, but it wasn't ultimately how someone else envisioned it. I just feel really discouraged at the moment because I thought we'd made a decent effort and I thought I had a sense of what we were aiming for in this class in general, and I was totally wrong.

Both of the last two project weeks my stories have shifted slightly from the pitch to the finished project, and no matter how much reporting you do beforehand, I think that's a natural tendency in journalism. I know that I do everything I can to adapt/adjust accordingly, but it's not working out so well for me. I totally see where our teachers are coming from, wanting better, well-thought-out story pitches, but I also feel like we're sometimes expected to do ALL of the reporting beforehand. If the finished product varies from the pitch because we found out something new once we got there, it's not seen as a positive adjustment, but rather a demerit.

I'm also getting a bit frustrated by the lack of place we seem to have in the newsrooms. I'm still trying to finish my shift work from last week, but no matter how persistent I am, I'm not getting edits back on my script so I can voice/cut. I hate letting things build up, but when you have to wait on edits, you don't have much of a choice.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

This has been without a doubt the longest week of my college career. The past 5 days just kind of well...ran together, and certainly only getting 7 hours of sleep in the past two nights didnt help. Anyways...While this story did just seem to drag on and on and on I can actually admit that I felt like a true journalist in doing it. I was running around contacting sources and then once I contacted those sources they would give me the names and contact information of other sources and so on and so forth, and thus by some small miracle of god, the story came together.

Now I turn my attention (read: Fears) to my shift at the Missourian on Monday and I can only hope that it goes as well as my two shifts at KOMU did

Keys to success

There's been some progress here for the Adelante radio show my capstone team and I are working on.

I'm especially looking forward to interviewing Cuban pianist Omar Sosa when he comes to Columbia to perform at Stephen's college. His music is a mix of santeria and other Cuban traditions and is supposed to be very spiritual.

I wonder how and if the skills I learn from the show will help with my future career. I see that podcasts still aren't very mainstream, so will an online radio show catch anyone's attention?

We are looking to put the show online through the Adelante web site, so hopefully it will gain some sort of popularity.

Fishing

So, what do you do when you're fishing for big fish, but your pond is shallow?

This is basically the dilemma my group and I faced this week when doing the reporting part of our Missourian Plus story on high school referees. We had all the right equipment and motivation to catch the "big fish" (the heart and soul of the story), but in order to have that, you need depth...and that's something our sources pretty much refused to give us. Kiiiind of frustrating.

The officials we followed self-censored a lot of the reality of their stories, and because of that, we weren't able to capture the essence of their motivation to officiate. I think if we had more time with the sources and our story, this could have been worked out. But, with only about 5 days to work on the story, this couldn't really happen. I felt our visual elements (both video and photos) are strong, but we obviously needed the personal stories of a couple officials to accompany them. I'm learing a lot from working with "difficult" sources, and am glad to have had this experience now while I'm in a more structured learning environment, as opposed to encountering it for the first time in "the real world."

People are crazy, but ya gotta love 'em.

Week in Review

I have not yet worked my Missourian shift this week (my assignment is an event on Saturday), so I'm going to share what I learned last week since I didn't get a chance to last Friday.

Working on our ghost stories project was actually a great learning experience. When we went to the event at the heritage festival, Liz and I took one morantz, two canons, one Nikon and two wireless mics. Carrying all that equiptment to and from the event truly made me feel like a convergence reporter, and thus, a backpack journalist. We spent almost three hours capturing audio, taking photos and trying to get as many interviews as possible with audience members all at the same time. We collected so much information and multimedia on that one night, that aside from detailed interviews with the storytellers, we were basically done with our reporters.

This experience will help me tomorrow as I report on the Fall Fesitval in Columbia for Adelante. I've been asked to collect audio and shoot video of some Latin American performances. After last week, this shouldn't be a problem.

Auto Auction

This week was frustrating for me because we worked really hard had a lot of early mornings getting to the auction before it started and we still were late hitting our deadline. The other thing that was frustrating was the fact that we had to come back and finish video today which was hard to do because I basically didn't want to do it. I mean after five o'clock thursday I wanted to be done and then to finish the audio and late and stay late and have to come back the next morning early and have to keep working on the same project was trying. But on the high note, it was a really really interesting story. I loved meeting Jack Overton he hasd a real southern redneck hoosier carsalesman thing about him. I really enjoyed meeting him. I hope that one day when I'm old and crazy I can sell cars at an auction. He could yell too, that was impressive. He would slap the hood and holler like an angry bull or something. The other characters at the auction made the story really fun too. The way that Jack talked about the Mexican car dealers made me chuckle. He claims that he has learned alot of spanish but her can't pronounce any of the words. It's not a bad thing but now is a little excerpt from my blog. I am hoping to use this blog to focus my topic into a manageable way of documenting my world. I would like to use my experience as a performer in viewing my surroundings out and about in the nightlife of Columbia. There are so many factors that come into play that I feel like a stream of thought blog is the only way to go. Since often the hardest part of the writing process is the first word, I am going to start out by giving my thoughts on the questions left on my wiki the other day. That added a little bit of length and that should do it. Now I am going to see the Kingdom it looks awesome. Yay for republican propaganda movies!!

KOMU info

I am spreading the word.
From now on at KOMU, you will have to wait until an adult editor at the station looks at your work before you can post it. A student editor will not cut it at this point.
Another thing - I think people forget that when at KOMU, you can almost always reach Jen Reeves by phone or text message. She is always willing to help, even when she's not at the station.
More information on all of this will follow next week in class.
Until then... my Missourian shift went okay, and repitching is painful. My group finally has a story. I just can't wait for next week to end!

weekly reflectioin

This weeks is KOMU shift I have done a soundslide for the assignment, but because of all of the action pictures, it's not not easy to have pictures that I plan to get.
Out of all of the pictures I took, not much of them are useable. Luckly Jen letme also work on a video version for the shift. Now, because I was doing both things at once, I don't think the video came out as good as I wanted to be. Although, pitch in KOMU, because of its day turn around project, is easier than ones we have doen for group project. We are still working on developing the protential of the story idea. Let's hope things will go well this coming week.

Draining Sanity...

Wow, it has been an emotional week. From leaving Chicago where my aunt may die in a few months to talking to loved ones of those who have passed away due to chemical exposure during Vietnam, holding back tears is hard. But it keeps me trying to live for today. I almost have to with the list of things I have to do. I might have to quit my LoyalTV.com job, because I think it's keeping me from focusing enough on my journalism classes. "But this is your sequence!" my mom exclaims. Juggling 20 different things, my stress level is high. But it's like convergence class is my #1 job out of three, except I only get paid at the other two. I am going crazy deciding how to prioritize everything. But when a project is finished, like writing our script about agent orange, the small accomplishments feel good. So don't ask me how life is going, because I'm usually only preoccupied with that particular moment. Plus, you don't want to hear the long story anyways. Have a great weekend everybody!!

Don't talk to strangers

All of the survival necessities my parents taught me when I was younger - don't talk to strangers; if someone looks upset, don't try to find out what is going on; if someone is wearing a medical mask and looks ill, don't get close enough to have a conversation - well, I don't follow those so religiously anymore.

I'm not putting myself in any dangerous situations. I just tend to approach people when maybe before I would have given them a wide berth. Not anyone who looks like they would hold me hostage for weekend fun, but anything that looks a little bit out of the ordinary.

I just can't help it. Anything that looks a little bit strange makes me think, "How can I make a story out of this." Anything strange.

Including my dreams.

Yeah, even the limited sleep I can get while taking this class, is consumed by this class.

All the strange things that happen in my dreams - which is almost all of it - some annoying voice starts brainstorming interview questions and fresh angles.

That time some family had made their home in the middle of a busy intersection's median, dream me started interviewing them and finding out the mother rarely had more than phone contact with her husband because he never stopped working.

Dream me sits in on underground, subcultural meetings that I have no personal interest in except for finding out what the "real" story is before I pitch it.

I'm hoping this is just a temporary thing. You know, like those dreams you're supposed to have when you're just starting to become fluent in a language because you're using it all the time.

I'd like a little bit of passed out, completely non-thinking sleep.

From the Moving Wall to Agent Orange

This week was interesting.  For my group project, I worked with Sarah Damien and Ryan Spencer on a story we thought was about the Moving Wall in Moberly.  Initially, I wanted to have this story done by last Sunday for KBIA.  KBIA rarely airs any local programming on the weekends, and so far none of the groups have had the opportunity to really work on deadline.  Sure, getting stories complemented in less than a week can be a tight deadline, but producing a feature in a couple of days is added pressure.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do this Sunday deadline because one of our group members (Sarah) was out of town, and her reporting would not have been included if we finished this story before she returned.  So instead we were told to work on a longer formed feature on the Moving Wall, which included everyone’s reporting.  This however was not actually our assignment.  We found out Monday that the Moving Wall piece was actually a “launching point” for another story.  We had to find someone at the Moving Wall ceremony, and pursue an interesting story based on whatever they told us.  In the end, we narrowed down topic to Agent Orange, a toxic chemical used during the Vietnam War to kill forests that were making it easier for the enemy to hide.  The American troops who were on the ground or even spraying Agent Orange into the jungles would be soaked in the substance.  Long-term health problems eventually arose for these soldiers, and the Department of Veteran Affairs started issuing disability commission to soliders carrying anyone one of 11 known Agent Orange related illnesses. 

All-in-all, we came up with a really interesting story topic.  We met a woman at the Moving Wall event who lost her husband, Wayne Cooper, last Spring from Agent Orange.  She agreed to share her story with us, and was kind enough to send photos of her deceased husband.  We tailored the story around her husband, but included information on how Agent Orange compensation is distributed, and why the chemical is so harmful to people.  For that additional information, we went to The Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans' Hospital in Columbia.  We talked to two people there who work with Agent Orange related illnesses.  On top of that story, we also put together a soundslides from the Moving Wall event. 

This experience was without doubt the most frustration project I’ve had all semester.  However, from what I hear from other people, the frustrations I experienced are similar to what other people go through in professional newsrooms, especially when they deal with editors who are constantly changing their mind.    

Wayne Cooper, a Vietnam veteran from Moberly, lost his battle to Agent Orange in April.

The other victims...

How to keep an idiot busy for hours

Now don't get me wrong. I think that I am learning tons in 4804. I like reporting and I like constructing packages and copy. I just feel lost. But not too lost. I know what I'm doing to some extent. Thus far, my two shifts at KOMU have been relatively productive. My first visit I covered a oil line rupture that occured in one of Missouri's vastly complex, teeming with life, counties. It was a trip. My second story covering a Veteran's Memorial Ceremony for the POW's of Mid-MO (a real tear jerker I know). I put together a decent slideshow for that one. I mean that was all I had to do and it still took me around 9 hours. It seems like without any type of instruction or direction, my efforts to be successful in convergence are lacking. However on the contrary, I do like figuring things out for myself. And I guess it's working to some extent.

Official Censorship

This week we were assigned a story idea that would uncover who MSHSAA officials are. These are officials that officiate Missouri Athletic Sporting events. We thought we had a great source in a crew we had found- We would be able to interview the crew and have full access to these guys during a Friday night football game- We were set and ready to go- When we finally started following them around however, the crew acted very strange, almost robotic in the way they acted- answers were generic and we werent able to get a feel for who these people were as an essence to the story- Our group put in a lot of hard work and effort into trying to get these men to open up and tell us about times in their lives when they have officiated and things have been bad, or good and what keeps them going through the bad times in particular but we didn't get much of an answer from them. We tried everything we could journalistically and were left with not uch substance behind what we thought was a great idea for a story- I wish I could find out more ways to try and crack the code of people, find out how I can get them to open up more.
In the case of these guys it just was not happening and we were left with more work ahead of us to get the story ready for print. Our photos were great, as was our video and we hope to get all three up when we can find an official who is willing to give us the secret to how officials keep on doing what they do despite minimal glory and maximum scrutiny.

Officially Excited

Ok, so I'm officially pumped up about my team's story. And I'm relieved that it will be our current tv piece. It feels like it is going to be a chance to do something completely different. I am NOT looking foward to giving up caffeine...but I'll take it for the team (it's the least I can do-Velker was ready to do a sting).

My first shifts at KBIA were surprisingly rewarding. I had two five hour shifts...the short amount of time to work during each shift was difficult. But I liked the fact that they (KBIA students and staff) go home. That they have a life outside of KBIA. It made me want to show up the next day and finish my story. As compared to killing yourself somewhere else and dreading going back.

I feel like in this class, we migrate from two extremes. One week we are in our groups and have editors breathing down our necks trying to help us, the next week we are in newsrooms with little direction and feeling out of place. Having editors around can be the best thing possible, but to go from having them available all the time to having no one available to help is a tough pill to swallow.

I wish there was a way to make convergence students blend in better into newsrooms. Right now I feel like we stick out like a sore thumb and don’t know what to do when we arrive to do our shifts. I feel confident and capable of tackling anything a newsroom can throw at me, but I feel like they regard us as inferior. Hopefully the day will come when we are regarded as equals in the newsroom, but I feel it may be a while before that day comes.

Shifting Shifts

I don’t know how anyone else was feeling about doing shifts in a different newsroom this week…but I was not thrilled with the idea. This process is exactly like Lynda described it in class. You go to a newsroom once and spend the day figuring out how their process works. Then you go back and try again, thinking you may have a clue what’s going on. Rinse and repeat. This week I transitioned from KBIA to KOMU. I can’t say KBIA was exactly smooth, because for most of the first shift I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing or that anybody there cared to help. However, at least I had an idea how a radio newsroom would work. I have absolutely no knowledge of television news. What’s worse, I had never set foot in the KOMU newsroom. I know you’re supposed to do that in 2100, but the bus driver wrecked the bus on the way to my car and I had to sit on the side of the road for an hour while they did accident reports. Well now I’m at KOMU…and it’s not the scariest place in the world. I’ve survived the first 2 hours at least. Although they have been spent just waiting for a phone call. We’ll see how it goes when I actually have to do something.

KBIA and Group Projects

I had my KBIA shifts this week and I found it to be kind of confusing. I don't feel like they give the convergence students any direction on stories and that's frustrating. I am excited that they are letting me do a story on a female that trains male boxers to fight. She also used to fight when she was younger. I pitched it as a group story idea but they picked evangalism in schools instead. I was kind of bummed, because my last few stories have been Missourian plus pieces. I guess I kind of wanted something new to do. I am excited to work with the people in my group though. The pinball story is still in the works. Charlie and I went to visit the Pinball Doctor in Hallsville Wednesday night. Let me tell you, what an awesome interview with an amazing game room! It definately will add positively to our story! We got more pictures as well.

All that I know is that I am tired, very tired and Wednesday's critiques really frustrated me, but I won't get into that!

Movin' on up

So, we've made some good progress in the last week. Wale and Erin went and talked with some veterans and got some ideas about the direction we could take our story. I think after the first 4 or 5 times we meet with sources, we will be able to narrow our focus. Right now, it's hard to say exactly where we are going with our film because we still don't know exactly what's out there. Also, we sat down and watched some documentaries together to help us foster some creative ideas for shooting methods and general structure. We made a list of things we liked abou the documentaries we watched and discussed how we could apply those techniques to our film. What we must keep in mind though is that those docs were made by professionals with LOTS of training. We are planning to go talk with more sources Saturday afternoon. We set up a blog for our project where we can communicate with each other and debrief after interviewing sources. I'm hoping our story will start to take shape within the next week or week and a half. I'm going to cross my fingers.

I'm doing my KBIA shifts this week and feel like the outsider up there. Janet is gone this week so we're all sort of on our own as far as stories go. It's much more laid back than my time at the Missourian, so I like that aspect of it. But it's also a little tougher to get motivated to work.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I really enjoyed the videochat we had with the New York Times guy on Monday. Getting that first-hand perspective on the industry, and how what we are doing can directly impact and improve the method people receive their news, is reassuring. Convergence can be frustrating at times, but it's very rewarding other times and will definately lead to jobs!

Missourian

I was working at the Missourian this week and when I went in Liz Brixey asked to have a covergence student go with the reporters. I was supposed to get an interview with the creator of the "Joy of Discovery" sculpture in the Life Science center creator. Unfortunately he was grounded and never made it to the opening. Now I am working on creating a graphic with Liz about a new type of bric. I have not tried to contact the professor yet, but I have his number and Liz told me today that his secretary knows I will be calling, so I will call tomorrow after class and see how this graphic will work. I think t should be pretty fun, but the process sounds complicated, so I guess I will find out how much I like graphic design soon!

New Podcast; Research Continues; Click this title and join our group!

Copy and paste the link below into your browser to hear the latest version of the ESPNU @ MIZZOU podcast:

feed://web.missouri.edu/~jdrtw6/Podcasts/podcast%20week%202.xml

Monday morning, a light version of our group presented our plan of attack for the research portion of our project. We recieved a good amount of feedback from Lynda, Karen and the class and continue to be pleased with the path we're going down. We'll be putting together our survey for the focus group we're putting together, facillitating our ad campaign, and continuing our research next week. Not to mention, a podcast every Thursday!

The best news of the week came Monday afternoon, when it was announced that the Nebraska-Mizzou game on October 6 would be shown nationally on ESPN. This may or may not alter our approach as ESPN liasons - but primarily I'm just excited to have a night game on campus (815 PM) and the historical precedence of this... 2003, Nebraska came to town and played MU on national TV.... and this is what happened:

still doing it one day at a time

There was a moment at KOMU on Tuesday afternoon, when I (along with several broadcast reporters I'm sure) stared at the ceiling and thought - there is no more news anywhere in Columbia. It was 1 pm, and after a morning of a reporter and I chasing a story (my idea) that ended up falling flat, we were sitting at a big fat goose egg for the 5 and 6 pm shows. Not only that, but I was still trying to think of a decent story idea for group pitch the next morning...
I don't think we've run out of stories to tell, though. I think our biggest problem is a) we're students, we live in a student world, and we simply don't see a lot of the stories we could cover, b) we don't have enough time to develop a beat or even become integrated enough into the community to really see the stories that are worth covering.
I'm really picky, too. I can't stand covering event-based stories (lucky me, neither can my professors), I don't want to do a story that none of my friends or even my parents would read (I think that's a pretty good standard, honestly), and more than anything else, I don't want to do a story that I personally wouldn't read...and that's actually a lower standard considering the volume of news I read every day.
I want to report a story that I remember reading the next week, the next month. I'm not here to write the story that gets skimmed over. Is that too ambitious?

Concentration

After listening to the guest speaker in today's reporting class, I'm starting to realize that I need to think a lot more about what to make for my concentration within this sequence. Right now I'm leaning towards something in the information graphics/online/photography/editing area, but who knows. I want to take one class from about six of the different concentration options and I'm not quite sure how I can combine those interests into a lucid "concentration." What do you call something that combines photography, graphics, and editing with online journalism? Wouldn't that be..."convergence?" (Oh dear. My apologies for a horrible joke). Hopefully this will all come together somehow, I'm just not sure that a jumble of random, "I-thought-it-would-be-cool" classes will translate into a knowledge base that I can build a career off of, which is what I'm really worried about.

Capstone

Today was a productive day in capstone. I presented the news of the week and our group presented our research and project ideas for ESPN U. It's great getting feedback from the class. I didn't have time to finish all of the links for the news of the week, so feel free to check out these sites as well for some interesting convergence content:
A newspaper website just for teens http://20below.mainetoday.com/

Professional political campaigns on facebook http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_obama_websep23,0,4824579.story

Get Engaged to the 2008 Election: http://bridesdecide.com/

What neighborhoods will look like in 2037 http://www.startribune.com/10165

Fliming, etc.

WE STARTED PRODUCTION!!!!

We went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars post off of Business Loop. It's dark there, very little light (I had my f-stops all the way open, at 3.5, can anyone tell I think like a photographer now?). The most memorable thing I've done as a reporter so far has been talking to Sgt. Thomas Smith, who was deployed to Afghanistan on Friday at 5 a.m. After the formal interview, I sat and talked to him about his experiences there. And WOW. Considering I've been freaking out about taking the GRE, taking to a guy who's daily reality is that he could blow up, well, puts things in perspective.

That said, we used super cool new cameras (that are ours, all ours!) and learned a lot about our style. Mostly that we need to nail down a style and shooting video technique. This is not a TV package, and we can't shoot like it is. We're planning on having a style session this week, in addition to other things. And going back to the Veterans post Friday night. This is going to be a crazy two weeks.

We've had 219 responses to our online survey. Sweet.

Documentary time!

We finally started shooting! Here’s our Documentary story idea: We want to look at war veteran concerns since WWII and see what there concerns were then and what they are now and see how they differ. Luckily, there is a war post here in good ol’ Columbia.
So on Thursday we went and struck gold, getting an interview with a man leaving for Afghanistan the very next day. He had also been in Vietnam. We stayed there for a couple of hours and talked to some great people with a lot to say about war. That part was expected. How we would go about gathering the information is a little harder.
Some of our best stuff didn’t come from an interview, but from watching and talking to two veterans interact. They had jokes, stories, and lots of insight. Here’s the problem: we only brought one camera. In a small smoky bar, it is hard to capture a conversation with two people without two camera’s. Going back and forth between them looks very sloppy and unprofessional.
Before we go the next time, I would love for my group and I to sit down and watch some documentary work together, and talk about a better way to approach this movie.

As far as the class goes, we've been advertise our work and I went to the freshman explorations of journalism class and we are getting their survey results as we speak. Now that we've finally gotten started, lets see how far we can take this baby!

extra post just because I'm thinking about it

so, I'm still scared of video like nothing else, but I'm starting to definitely want to experiment more after watching some current.tv pieces; and watching this piece from MediaStorm. I love the juxtaposition of photos with audio and video. I think it's about a 10 minute piece, which is ridiculously long for a broadcast story; but it's done so well I didn't even notice. Check it out.

Out to sea

So, NYTimes.com ended Times Select earlier this week. I admit to have only subscribed to it during the week-long free trial.

Even though NYT had a good amount of subscribers, they felt the pay-for-content model failed and took the tags off content that once read $49.95.

NYT is certainly a pioneer in online content, so it seemed kind of radical to me that they would open all of their content to the non-paying public.

Thomas Friedman was on Tim Russert's CNBC program this week, discussing NYT's move towards freeing its content, but didn't really give any projections for the future. He likened the online system to a ship that left its harbor and still doesn't have land in sight.

Advertisement is perhaps the best and most obvious solution at this point. Are page visits become as important as subscription figures? Perhaps all we can do is keep our eyes on the horizon.

Paranoid People?

Last night my group and I went out to video tape a high school football game (in The Middle of Nowhere, MO) for our story about high school referees/officials. And I've never worked with a source who has been so paranoid about what we're recording. Don't get me wrong, the head official (and also our main contact) seems like a really nice guy and is definitely passionnate about being a football official...BUT he kind of needed to chill a bit in terms of worrying about what sound we were getting and what we were shooting. We talked, joked and overall had a good relationship with all of the officials, but the whole thing was just quite interesting. In the end, we walked away with lots of photos, nice video, and more understanding about working with antsy people. Ah...life lessons...

Personally, I had fun on the shoot. Being back at a high school game actually really made me miss high school sports, and the purity and passion behind them. Alright, I better stop now before I start reminiscing too much about volleyball and what lots of high school grads would dub, "the glory days." Good thing I'm excited about life where I'm at and everything ahead...

Red Headed Step Child

Convergence students are KOMU's red headed step children (excuse the phrase if you actually are a red head or step child...or both). After discussing this with someone, I'm convinced that I am not the only one who thinks this. I'm afraid there has been a disconnect on either what I thought we were supposed to do OR what KOMU thinks we're supposed to do. As I understood, I thought we were there as convergence reporters. But from the time I have spent doing my shifts there, and being there while others are doing their shifts- it seems we are serving as "extra legs" for reporters. Maybe these are a few isolated cases and I'm completely wrong - but it doesn't seem we are serving as much as a reporter (especially compared to testimonies of what people have done in KBIA and Missourian).

"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

Nietzsche said it. Chris Bunch said it. Now, I said it, too.

I don't know if I really should have. I didn't think too hard about whether or not it fit my situation before I wrote it a few centimeters above in the title box. But I did, and there it is.

I suppose in a way it's true. This week, I repitched for the second consecutive week or group. I repitched sports. And I survived.

With journalism, I think sometimes that's all you should ask for. After all, if you're not dead but did something hard that you thought might kill you, chances are you improved yourself in the process. I just want to survive. Oh yeah, and maybe see my name in print.

Cheers.

Expectation, product, and result

Well guess this was the lesson of the week, different people will have different opinions and expectations in just one assignment. And really time is a huge factor that determinate the quality of story. For example, we started out with a very exciting project about pinball in Columbia this week; we really went out with a nice start of doing pre-interview even before the Friday pitch meeting. But then afterward, things just didn’t go as smooth as it plans to be. Our contacts were harder to reach, our extra components didn’t go as well as we plans, though I have to say Charlie did a good job on drawing a good info graphic to demonstrate a pinball trick that was awesome. And well we didn’t get a good grade that we wanted because of the time. But hopefully our a story gets better once we do follow up on it. Our team was nice, but we just need to a bit more time.

Aside from that I was looking back to some of the clips that I shoot and the past, and found others to look at my video again, and comment on them. I was always nice to hear how people like and dislike your projects. And I also found a good way to loose weight, and shoot video at the same time, as Lynda gave me a rule of thumb “If you don’t get sweat on the first 15 minutes of shooting, you are NOT moving enough.”, I will keep that in mind that’s why I like this school and class, because people get right to the point with valuable suggestions.

Let the job search begin

As far as capstone goes, we outlined all our research - including a very detailed calendar of events for the next month - and are getting ready to jump into it all. Fran and Jessica are working on posting Adelante's content online, as the first issue of the semester debuts on Monday. We also have some multimedia (whoop whoop) - a video from Steve Remich - that will go up asap. This may just be Adelante's first bit of multimedia.

As far as life goes, I have officially thrown myself into the crazy world of finding a job. I met with two recruiters this week - from Reuters and the Orlando Sentinel - so that forced me to throw my butt in gear and get my resume, clips and portfolio together. I'm still finishing up my website right now, so hopefully none of the recruiters will look at it before I'm done.

I'm glad I met with Reuters even though I am not sure if my skills and interests would fit there. I gained some practice in interviewing and learned a little more about the industry though. I am VERY glad I met with Dana Eagles from the Orlando Sentinel. I know they are doing some great interactive work and it seems that they have opportunities for someone like me. Bonus points for being part of Tribune Interactive, which also owns my dream job at the Chicago Tribune.

Phou gave me some good advice: meet with everyone you can. And I'm definitely following that advice.

How many weeks until Thanksgiving?

Seriously? Its time to blog again? Didn’t I just get done doing this? Another week has flown by. I can’t believe how nuts this semester is. I feel sorry for anyone trying to take more than 12 hours with this reporting class. I thought I could manage 15 hours … oh how wrong I was.

Thursday morning, I went to the auto auction with Danielle and Andrew for our group story. Talk about a wake up call. I don’t think an auction can get any more fast paced. This auction was only open to dealers, they start outside, auctioning some cars on the lot. After about 15 minutes of walking around to individual cars auctioning them off, the dealers walk into a garage with two lanes. Cars start rolling down the two lanes. As the cars stop in front of the auction stand the auctioneer starts calling for bids.

This is an abbreviated account of what happens. Car rolls in, auctioneer starts yelling into the mic, spotters yell out when they see someone that has bid, auctioneer continues yelling, spotters keep yelling, SOLD, someone bangs on the car that just got bought and off it drives. Double that situation and you can start to imagine the chaos of an auto auction. My ears were still ringing a half hour afterwards. It was an eye opener, but because the dealers were all either camera shy or busy with buying / selling cars, we got no interviews. It probably didnt help we couldnt stay for longer than 2 hours because we all had an exam to get to. Our group will go back on Monday to interview the owner of the auction. I’m looking forward to see how this project shapes up, it should be interesting no matter what.

2nd KOMU Shift

Hemp Milk

Raisins

Bread

Microwavable Dinners

Diet Pepsi

Ginger Ale

Toilet Paper

Oh, hello.  Sorry about that...I’m putting together my grocery-shopping list.  I have to go to an e-research seminar in a few minutes, so I thought I’d spend some time right now talking about my KOMU experience this week. 

I worked at the station yesterday putting together an interactive map for a story on proposed alley names in Columbia.  Randy Reeves suggested making a map with images of these Columbia alleyways.  So, I figured along with these images, I would include some historical background on the proposed names.  I called several people familiar with Columbia/Boone County history, and gathered additional information on why these names are significant.  As it turns out, there has been some controversy over one of these names called “Sharp End Way.”  Sharp End was once a predominately African American community in Columbia.  Some argue Sharp End refers to the knife fighting, which occurred in this community.  Others however contend Sharp End refers "to get dressed up, look sharp, and go out.”  In any case, I was able to dig up some interesting historical facts about our community.  I ended up incorporating these facts with the images on a map of the downtown area.  Considering this was my first time using Flash since this summer (and I had little success with it then), I am satisfied with how the map turned out.  The map I used was provided to me by the City of Columbia.  I spent about 5 hours cropping images, cleaning up the map, outlining my rollover placeholders, etc.  I definitely feel I was able to add useful information to this story that the broadcast version did not have time to cover.

I do have to give Liz Langton a heebee-jeebees worth of credit.  There was NO convergence editor at KOMU last night, and even though Liz was there to get this map on the web, she provided me some helpful advice on how to improve this map.  Round of claps (can we say drinks?) for her. 

All in all, my two shifts at KOMU this semester have been a great experience. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me.  I have to clean up my apartment.  My parents are driving 6 hours to visit me for a couple of hours on Saturday, and I need my place to look presentable.      

Weekly capstone report

SmartDecision2008 has a candidate page! My goal last week was to make one, and it’s up, with generic text. Now I need to figure out which candidates we actually have information for, and put up actual pages with real information. Even though the initial launch isn’t planned until October, I am trying to get as much of the site navigation nailed down as possible, even if it is dummy text on Web pages.

Lindsey and I met to discuss the presentation of our research plan due next week. Our presentation is in good shape.

The Mountain is High the Valley is Low

As the semester progresses I seem to constantly find myself on hills and in valleys. yes there are definitely times when I absolutely love this class...take for example my to shifts at komu...both were quite interesting and I actually feel that I learned a lot. Then there are the times when I seem to be stuck in a rather dark and gloomy valley...almost like the dulldrums from the book The Phantom Tollbooth. Those times usually come when I am working on my feature stories. I find it increasingly difficult to come up with new and original story ideas that will invigorate my audience and then when something maybe finally sounds good it either a)gets shot down or b) gets shot down by lousy sources who refuse to give anything worth using and expect for me to just make a grade A story appear...as if I carry them around in my pocket and that is sadly not the case. Anyways I continue to surge forward...baby steps my friends...baby steps.

A learning experience--

Well this week was interesting- I had pitched a story about a running group in Columbia- When I got to the place on the Katy trail, it was 5am- there was no light, I wasnt able to adjust the shutter speed, and the maurantz decided it was going to work half the time. Needless to say the story was a disaster- I am now trying to salvage it by contacting the leader Mike- but he hasn't returned any of my e-mails or calls- This has been a most difficult assignment to do because of the elements of having no light and now sources not getting back to me- It can get very frustrating as you all know- I guess now is the time to sit and wait to see if I get contacted back- maybe in a week or a year I will get a call or an e-mail.. sometimes this job is NOT fun..

Rough Week

While I was excited about this week because of our cool topic of pinball, it didn't turn out quite as I had hoped. Due to too lack of sleep and stress I ended up sick the majority of this week. Didn't move from bed for two days... missing two days of classes in Russian is definately not good when you have an exam at the end of the week. So I tried to write the group story even though my mind was pretty groggy from meds and make sense of what was going on. Didn't work out in my favor, because this next week will consist of reworking that story, finishing up artistic skating and my two KBIA shifts, which I am kind of nervous about. I have never been fond of doing things for the radio, but I guess we will see how that goes. I really don't like when things don't turn out right and disappoint people, so I need to try harder although I don't know how much more time I can give without going completely insane or ending up sick again. Don't get me wrong I enjoy what I am doing and the people/opporunities I have had through reporting. Plus it's such a challenge to come up with new and interesting story ideas. My group was fun to work with this week. I am sure we will be seeing more of eachother this week to spruce up our story! The joys of convergence reporting!

Cross two more weeks off my calendar...

There goes another two weeks of my life….

My second two projects are finished, and I am going to go ahead and grant myself a “Most Improved” award for the last two weeks.

My team story last week was on the underground hip-hop scene in Columbia (yeah, I know, who knew?). And it went really well, better than my first project for sure. I wrote a longer print piece to go with our video story, and for my first print work so who knows when, I think I did a pretty solid job. I defiantly learned not to underestimate the time it takes to transcribe video. I was trying to get quotes to add to my story, which I figured would only take me an hour or so, and then I could move on to finishing up my final draft of the article. Wrong. It took nearly four hours of fast fowarding, rewinding, stopping, pausing, and finally pressing play before I finished watching all of our footage. Advice to others- don’t put this off until the last day. Lesson learnt.

My (team project) hopes for the future: have a strong team effort as usual, stop being afraid of talking to people, get some practice time in on Avid and Audition (but not have the team grade depend on me doing it alone)

So, if you know anything about my first shift at KOMU, you are probably concerned with how it went this week. I just need to say a big shout out/thank you to Matt Zimmerman and Jeremy Maskel who helped me out stupendously! When I first got there, I shadowed Jeremy on his Quinton story, which he was preparing for the 5pm show. I have never in my life seen someone turn a story around so fast. We got back from the interview, capture the video, cut some clips, and wrote his script in like 15 minutes! If I were doing that it would take me all day! Then it was back on the road to go do his live shot, talk about pressure! I wrote the write up to accompany the video on KOMU.com- check it out at http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/1fa0e593-c0a8-2f11-003f-a0865f7faa13

After Jeremy left, I chilled in the Web room and tried to learn the ropes of all that goes into KOMU.com. A man came in with some ‘pictures’ of an ‘accident’ on 63 and we were told to write a story and put them on the website. Being the only person there without other responsibilities, that meant it was my job. First off, let me warn you that the toothless man had taken two of the exact same scene- a truck pulled over by the median. I called MO Highway Patrol (yeah I know, I’m brushing my shoulders off right now for my unusual lapse of shyness) and they said there had been a ‘near’ collision between a car and truck, and so they pulled over. No crash. No damage. Nothing. However, Al was nice enough to bring in picture on a camera he didn’t even know how to work, and KOMU appreciates that kind of thing so I posted the story. Special thanks to Matt for the brilliant headline… http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/20549f00-c0a8-2f11-00b5-2042c7a11dc1


My (shift) hopes for the future: not be afraid of KBIA next week (although that is inevitable)

I’m not sure how great this whole week-by-week thing is working for me. Actually, I know it’s not considering I have abandoned all efforts in every other area of my life, especially other classes. This balancing act doesn’t look promising…

and Go!

After meeting with Mike and Lynda, we sat down as a team and decided what we thought was our best and most feasible documentary story idea. We chose to go with a documentary about local war veterans. We brainstormed the many different directions we can take this idea, and I think we came up with some very interesting possibilites. My favorite idea is identifying the similarities/differences between and older veteran with a younger soldier back from Afghanistan or Iraq. There was an interesting story in the Tribune last month about a young man who was actually choosing to re-enlist. The story talked about the financial benefits of doing so and also mentioned a common issue for soldiers known as "survivor's guilt." The soldiers who come back alive and unharmed feel tremendous amounts of remorse for their fellow soldiers who aren't so fortunate. I think this would also be an interesting aspect to examine. Right now, we are working on finding our key sources. This will help us to narrow our focus.
Also, we finished up our survey [about students' interest in taking a documentary course] and Wale spoke to the freshmen in Brian Brooks' class abou taking it. Hopefully, we will have our first batch of survey results sometime soon.

Karen Mitchell should have used Sean Powers's email to solicit BSB

Some days I just don't feel like I have enough to blog about.

I think there should be a J-School-wide, week-long ban against using the internet for story ideas. If it's on the internet, there's already information about it. If it's on the internet, thousands of other journalist in this small city have perused it already, analyzing it from every possible story angle. Honestly, it's a waste of time. I've spend so many hours on "Mike McKean's Search Tools for the Internet", and only one out of maybe 10 leads will turn out to be something that could turn into anything. Switch to what I did last night - walk around at the Twilight Festival talking to any one I could - and finding story ideas takes around half the time it would on the Internet. Sure, it may mean

ESPN U is on its way! Justin recorded an interview with an Illinois State yesterday and I helped him by recording intro/tags/etc and with editing. It was a great idea and we are planning on posting these podcasts weekly on our facebook group "ESPN U". Please join our group to find out everything about Mizzou sports! :) I think our next steps are implementing local research and developing a specific marketing technique. GO TIGERS!

I can't think of anything witty to say, and I'm too tired to try but I've basically lived at Rock Bridge High School for the past 3 weeks. Between group stories and newsroom shifts I should probably just build a cot in the gymnasium. Nurse Tammy provided some good laughs and Avid provided a near heart attack Wednesday night, but we made deadline and were satisfied with the final product. I remember being in fundamentals this summer and laughing at the reporting kids who said they lived in the convergence lab. What a great joke, right? No, they were serious as it turns out.

Gathering nat sound is a dangerous job

You're in Kirksville. You're not really sure why you're in Kirksville, since you were in the KBIA newsroom a little over two hours ago, but you're holding a Marantz and standing on the rugby pitch in the middle of the women's team practice, and you definitely have a story to do. So when a girl twice your size comes barreling towards you, do you continue to hold the mic and hope for the best, or do you run like hell?

I hoped for the best.

And sustained what's quite possibly my first journalism-related injury: a bruise a good six inches in diameter.

Anyway, I ended up in Kirksville this week hearing Truman's side of the story in preparation for the women's rugby showdown this weekend. I'm still a little amazed I actually drove all the way to Kirksville, went to all these practices, and am trying to turn around a full feature story myself this week. It's been incredibly challenging, but I'm really glad I undertook this project, despite the amount of work it's been. I have sound bytes about licking dirt off your teammate's eye, stories about dislocated knees, and clips of the toughest girls you'll ever meet singing these ridiculous songs. It's a tradition, they tell me.

So, it's been an interesting week, and I definitely bit off a lot for a shift week that I really wanted to be low key. But, as a result, I've gotten to work more with the KBIA staff, and I'm doing a story that's definitely interesting. Don't be afraid to pitch a crazy project, even if you're just assigned to do a shift. You might end up putting in the hours (and wondering how long you'll take to heal), but you'll be getting the experience, too.

Wow. This election guide business takes a LOT of discussions. We met up this week and discussed all sorts of things: if we have a spot on a server, what databases we want, whether or not we should use Drupal...There are many, many more decisions and issues that arise than you would think. With everything there is to discuss and so many people that need to be in on the discussions, it's no wonder there were communication problems last time around. Things seem to be going fairly smoothly this time, but we'll see! Things seem to be coming along slowly but surely.

It's the little things...

Gathering information? check. Interviews? check. approved script and voicing? check. a server to work on? not so fast. After working on everything we possibly could (in a relatively decent time) but came to a screeching halt when we couldn't get our files from KIBA to the jschool. can we say frustration? not only did we experience delays, but our loyal professors shared in our bafflement as well. it wasn't until an off-the-cuff comment about the stupidity of PCs caught the ears of easily the most brilliant man I have encountered in a while.
All it took was simply disconnecting the server and starting over and we were up and running. 30 minutes later we were ready to submit the final project. Oy, if only I had known it was that simple.

Listen to the ESPNU@MIZZOU podcast!

Copy and paste this to check it out:

feed://web.missouri.edu/~jdrtw6/Podcasts/podcast%20week%201.xml

This week, we produced and posted our first foray into the world of podcasting. Click the link above to hear it! I run down the week that was in Mizzou sports, take a look at three surprises in the young Tiger football season, and talk to Illinois State beatwriter Randy Reinhardt about the Redbirds, who invade Columbia Saturday afternoon. The Redbirds are I-AA, but Northern Iowa, who is in the Gateway Conference along with ISU, beat Iowa State in their own building a couple of weeks ago. Plus, in a universe where Appalachian State can go into the Big House at Michigan and win... well, here's to hoping the Tigers aren't looking ahead to Nebraska in 2 weeks.
None of us had worked with audio editing in a while, so I think we were a little rusty. Also, throwing the podcast on the web, though not difficult per se, was a little more effort than I thought it would be. Still, I think our first try was pretty good. We hammered out what needed to be done on the research side of things, and talked some more about ideas for the ad campaign. Working with five people in the group allows us to bring an array of strengths to the project, but it also causes time conflicts since we each have busy schedules.

Join our facebook group, too!

http://missouri.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7234910714

WOW

This week has been a week of long hard work, that until the end, turned out to be nothing. I started spinning my wheels trying to make a map, then taking photos of the 5 tips, but finally I spent a while and made a pretty nice graphic. I liked having a task, never having used illustrator, and figuring out how to make a graphic. I am glad that I got this graphic, much thanks to Prof. Mitchell because she helped me through all of the difficulties of illustrator.

Streaming for the Masses

OK, so it's not exactly for the masses yet, but it is free! This is truly amazing and from what I can see, traffic is through the roof on these sorts of sites... that's not to say that there are crappy sites out there that off free streaming, but by far my favorite so far (I've tested 4 sites) is Justin.tv - Justin is a site that offers free live streaming video to anyone with a video camera or other input source.

I managed to win their Friday afternoon contest and got a beta code last week. I've since been lifecasting whenever I get the chance (which largely depends on when I can find wifi to use). Justin took out a $50,000 loan 6 months or so ago and started this service, now he's mostly fueled by VC and sponsorships. Basically his dream for the site is a group of people who carry webcams everywhere they go and constantly stream their lives live online. Justine Ezarik (the iPhone bill girl) has been on Justin.tv and streaming for nearly 6 months now, and it's hard to find a time day or night in which she doesn't have at least 70 or 89 people watching her.

One day a few days ago I had her channel on, and there were 500 people watching her sleep at around 9am, she woke up around 10am and her traffic jumped to 700 people... yes that's 700 people simultaneously watching iJustine (who last week professed her love for Steve Jobs by getting an Apple logo tatoo, live on cam of course). I've embedded a live player of my own channel below this post.

My idea for this channel is to help get myself a job, I'm going to be doing weekly (maybe more often?) shows where I interview people from across the web regarding media and technology, I also plan to do reviews of web sites, give opinions on news-coverage, lots of fun things like that. If you'd like to participate, be sure to let me know and you can be a guest caster!


Go to live chat!

Story...Or Not?

It struck me this week how odd it is that sometimes the things we think are story ideas aren’t even stories to the people experiencing them. My group set out this week to report a story I had proposed. I came up with the idea when I was flipping through the channels and ran across a school nurse, singing a song about backpack safety. At this point I think we all know convergence reporters can exploit a cheesy story idea better than those from any other sequence. We thought it might be difficult to find a child paralyzed by improper backpack packing (redundancy, anyone?), so we settled for a more attainable approach. We decided to do a video feature on Nurse Tammy, using her ideas on backpack safety to lead into a text story. Tammy responded that the backpack episode had been produced nearly a year ago and she didn’t even remember what she had said. We knew her song better than she did—which says a lot for her catchy songwriting skills and not a lot about the relevance of some of her topics. In the end the story ended up being Tammy and her creative style of reaching children, which she didn’t think was much of a story either. Is it just that people don’t think anyone else wants to read about what they’re doing?

If nothing else, at least I have radio down.

So right now I'm in the lab, of course, editing yet another group story for KBIA. After two shifts at KBIA and two group projects, in which I've done a lot of the editing, I'm feeling pretty darn comfortable with Audition/CoolEdit. I'm still terrified of video, but the audio editing techniques I'm learning I think will definitely come in handy when I have to face evil AVID once again.
Thoughts from this week:
- No, I don't think I'll take up smoking, but thanks much for the suggestion, *unnamed professor.*
- I'm definitely trying to cut down on my control freak syndrome in groups... don't know if it's working...
- I really wish the j-school offered a course specifically directed toward creating your own website for resume and career purposes.

Adjusting

This week my group is working on a story about... stories. Ghost stories to be exact. We had an idea to record one of the storytellers doing their thing, which was going to be our plus for a Missourian plus story. That didn't work out, and so that's where the adjusting came in.
The audio wasn't that great, and the photos were good but fairly repetitive (Lindsay did a great job, but there's only so much to do with people sitting on chairs while a guy is talking into a mic). It took a little last-minute brainstorming, but I think we're going to have a good package.

It's always frustrating to get into a story and realize, oops, we can't do that. The difference between convergence and, say, working at the Missourian, is that convergence requires a project and extra elements every week. At the Missourian, if a story doesn't quite pan out, you can move on to the next thing. I guess that means in the Convergence track, you're going to push a lot harder to get some water out of that stone!

Week 4 capstone project blog

Last week felt like the least productive of the four that I have been working on this project so far. I developed a new index page based on comments made at last week’s meeting, and am fairly pleased with the result. Next on the list: a candidate page, and hammering out that research plan due in week six. Lindsey is working on the graphics for the Web site, with the help of an eager Missourian graphics editor, so I am excited to see what comes of it. Alex Lowe, formerly of this fine convergence sequence, is finally understanding exactly what Jen Reeves wants for her “candidate calculator” and the team we are building for the Adobe AIR competition now has a common vision. Sweet.

Blog timeliness, seniority, and YOU

I was always so good at doing this on time in my spry youth, but apparently senility has taken hold here during the capstone course. We've got more budding ideas as the ESPNU project progresses - this week will mark our inaugural ESPNU@MIZZOU podcast: a look at this week in Mizzou sports. Nate and I will put this together later in the week, and put it online. I'll link to it when I post ON TIME next Friday! We need to get cranking on this research component, and I'm confident we will be firing on all cylinders for that portion of the project. We have the info we need from ESPN - Bristol has shipped me the requisite big binder of documents and we're ready to go. We've also generated a now growing Facebook group for ESPNU@MIZZOU - search for it and join!
I spent a great deal of time on other projects last week - namely my Adobe contest entry, lit paper, and Friday Night Fever. This week will be more devoted to ESPNU.

Adelante

I am getting excited about our radio show. Last week we met with Katherine and decided to create a 15 minute pilot episode. We have some story ideas we are pumped about and will spend the next few weeks pursuing them and starting our research to determine the format for our show.

We are going to focus on qualitative rather than quantitative research because we think it will be more productive and useful that way. We'll interview bilingual radio show producers to find out what works in other areas, and after our pilot episode is finished we'll meet with a focus group of listeners to discuss the show.

I like how narrowly focused our project is becoming. This will make it easier for us to focus our attention and create a solid product that hopefully will be very lasting. Our host will be here for the next two years, so we've got that going for us. Now we just have to convince KOPN that our show is excelente!

Slowly but Surely

My team and I's projects are just starting to budge themselves off the ground. We are narrowed down and focus now to two documentary story ideas. Still, honestly if anyone reading this has another amazing idea that they saw or read about and said, "I want someone to do a documentary on this," then let me know: aaanr5@mizzou.edu!!

So it looks like we may be able to get a documentary course started by next semester!!! Yay!!! It will have to start off as an independent study course, but if we get some interest, this class could, could, could be the next BIG thing! Yay!!

Things to look out for this week: we plan on finalizing an idea and getting all of our initial reporting done and maybe even that first interview. We are looking at about a two month time frame to shoot and maybe another month for editing in making this mini-movie. I won't tell you what our top choices are yet because it's not final, but, okay, I'll tell you: Right now it's between looking at people who have been screwed over in the health care system (yes that's everybody), but because of the nurses who are underappreciated and comparing issues of war veterans over time and seeing if there are any support groups formed to help those at war right now. Obviously, either story will be more indepth, but we're just praying now that we pick the better and more feasible idea for our group.

Also this week we plan to go to Dean Brooks J1010 class: the future of journalism, lol, and advertise and market our documentary and possible class! We are coming along, Yes slowly, but also Surely!

I went home for a wedding this weekend and the entire weekend has just been a blur with all the driving and everything, so bear with this post! So this week Beth and I met up and discussed the Smart Decision logo and our research proposal. I had some ideas for the logo, but so did Keith Claxton, the graphics master. We both have some good ideas and he has great skills, so we're going to collaborate on it and he's going to help me make what I see in my mind actually look decent in Illustrator. That should be done fairly soon (after I collect all the correct newsroom logos). We've pinpointed our research questions, so now we just have to design a proposal to answer them. Things are coming along, slowly but surely!

what did I do this week? I don't know. It all blurs.

this week, in solid facts:
- finished, finally, KBIA segment of "Under the Microscope: MU medical students sent to rural shortage areas"...yeah, that story, the one I've been working on for twice the allotted time now...the group project from LAST week. Oh well, it aired, finally.
- shot a candlelight vigil along with at least six other photographers from every media outlet in town.
- pitched a group story, got my pitch, then ran off to get a head start on reporting it.
- oh and did things for my other classes.

KBIA shifts have gone well. I'm scared for the KOMU experience; hopefully something will work out. I really wish I knew Flash better.

One...day...at...a...time...

PAIN in the newsrooms

Well, at least I'm not the only one having huge issues with KOMU shifts. I just got back from mine--at 11:45 at night--after having been there since 1pm today. I went in with a great idea which I had discussed with Jen Reeves beforehand. However, she was in meetings and didn't come in to the newsroom at all today so I was unable to go over particulars or logistics with her. Nobody else in the newsroom was familiar with how to execute that story so it was dismissed and I was assigned to do an info graphic for the online version of the 10 o'clock lead story instead. I figured it would be easy to use flash to make buttons and make the graphic interactive but somehow neither the instructions from 4802 nor the flash.com help file could help me make it work. Never one to give up that easily, I turned to Photoshop because I'm more familiar with that and knew I could use it to add links as well. When i finished that, however, I couldn't find a way to export it that would include the links and could be loaded onto the website. Finally, after spending literally about 8 hours trying to make it work, I settled for loading two plain images and captions as a sidebar on the story page. I felt horrible for not having done something more useful or interesting and for wasting so much time on an outcome that I could have done in 30 seconds. Does anyone have tips for the other newsrooms (I start the Missourian next week) that can help me avoid this kind of fiasco? For those of you moving on to KOMU, I would say you should definitely go in with a very specific idea and know how you are going to get it done without needing to "go over it" with anyone once you're there because you can't ALWAYS count on them being available.

I consider myself pretty flexible, but I can only stretch myself so far.

Let me be clear that I'm not criticizing any individual, just the system that we're operating under.

Maybe this is a function of convergence journalism itself, but it seems like it's pretty much standard to have expectations and deadlines obliterated by a chaotic way of handling business. I'm talking specifically about the shift work. My KOMU shift was last week, and instead of being there on just Tuesday, I was there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And that's fine. That's what the shift week is for and I was expecting a little overlap with group story ideas due on Wednesday. I'm perfectly willing to put more work into my shift than I expected to. In fact, that's great. That's the experience that I came to this school for.

It didn't get stressful until I had to go to the station yesterday, the same day as my team story deadline, to go over my shift story with KOMU's convergence editor. (I'll stress again, this is not frustration vented about any particular individual - she was very helpful and I have no hard feelings against her.) This was over a week after my initial shift. I'm okay with being flexible and I understand that, especially with convergence journalism, I need to be. But it seems like something like this could be avoided if things were done just a little bit more efficiently.

I also know that I wasn't the only one, even in my team, to have the problem of shift work grossly overlapping work on team stories. This is unquestionably going to affect the quality of our team stories. I don't know - nor do I think anyone else is this class knows - the process we are supposed to go through when going into the newsrooms. If we knew a little bit more about the necessary steps to get these stories web-ready, I think things would go much more smoothly and get done quickly enough that the stories are still newsworthy when they are finally published. Had I known the convergence editor would need to look at it with me at some point, I could have gotten in contact with her and arranged a meeting last Thursday.

Again maybe this is just because convergence journalism is relatively new and unfamiliar or because I'm not used to the newsroom atmosphere yet. It just seems like there could be a better way of doing things.

Total Loss of Composure

This week I learned that sometimes, you just have to let a project go and be water under the bridge. I went to shoot video for komu.com on September 11. The idea was good - go out and talk to people about their remembrances of the day. Problems, however, popped up everywhere. I went to a park during the day to talk to people and get b roll of them doing their park thing. I was really hoping to get moms, and then get b roll of them with their children on the playground. No such luck - none of the several moms I approached to were willing to talk. Then I went to the vigil that night, talked to people again and got b roll. I forgot how difficult is it to shoot at night. So I came back to KOMU with great stories from the day, but no b roll, and okay stories from the night but very dark b roll.
The day was a wash.
After a discussion with Jen Reeves, and a minor panic attack, I just tallied the day up as a learning experience and did another video project on Thursday.
I think I learned to plan out video shoots as well as possible beforehand... and to shoot a heck of a lot of b roll.

Artistic skating fun and challenges

It’s been a week of everything happened at once. I have wanted to work with Shauna since 4802. I mean seriously who doesn’t. She’s the one who pulled a nice final project all by herself in the summer. And that is just real cool. And this week and next coming week I am working with her. Surprise? I am quit exciting for the fact that I am working with good group partners, and we have a good story approved.
We got what we want for our group project. And I went to and shot video for the artistic skating. Shauna did a practice on shooting this story, and she definitely gave me quite a bit of inputs in it. But it’s harder to do shooting on this story than I thought I will be. Most of them are one or two seconds long. So it probably means quit of a bit of editing. But I can deal with the long editing session, And I just hope this video is good.

An Ode to a Blind Chihuahua

So I just finished leading a few high school seniors around the j-school, and I could only smile when they asked if reporting was as much work as it seemed like it would be. I answered them honestly, told them how much time I was spending in the little lab in Gannett, but in doing so, I realized that even as hectic as the last few weeks have been, I really do enjoy what I'm doing. I'm going to take that as a good sign.

This week wasn't too bad. I'd already done a Missourian-plus story, so I knew what it would take to get all the components ready in just one week, but it's always difficult to coordinate the different parts. We had some trouble finding times when we could all meet, but at other times, we used our different schedules to our advantage, because someone was usually available to go somewhere or do something.

I feel like I've gotten really lucky both of the last two weeks - first, to find Donna Kasper, the woman with celiac disease, and second, to find Kristina Hogg, a woman who found a blind chihuahua and also happened to be a vet. Lynda is right - it's better to be good than lucky, but at the same time, luck only seems to happen for me after I've made a few dozen calls. I just hope that strategy continues to work for me as the semester goes on. It's so much easier to write a good story when you finally find that central compelling character.

This Week in Convergence

My past two weeks at KBIA have really given me more confidence in my interviewing. I used to get kind of nervous to interview people- even sudents for class. In my first shift at KBIA, I had to talk to the Director of Residential Life and this week the Director of Student Financial Aid. Both of these men were very nice, well spoken and willing to help me out. I realized that people love to talk and tell their story. If you give them an opportunity, they will. I have to remind myself of this, and not get intimidated by people with fancy titles.

I'm also excited to get started on our project for next week. I've already begun reporting and its going well thus far. I'm nervous about taking photos at night at the Heritage Festival, but hopefully it will work out.

espn U

We welcomed a new member into our group, which is great, but now it is more difficult to find a time for our group to meet. We will need to arrange that soon. The good news is that Justin received the binder from the National liason so we will know our guidelines for the project. Also, Justin created a facebook page that we are working towards.

Cowboy Action Shooting

Wow, what a week. I went out to cover the Single Action Shooting Society with Sarah and Sean. The event was really an eye opener. I mean what could be better than a bunch of people dressed up as cowboys shooting off a whole bunch of guns. The best part … they let me shoot some too.

Doolin Riggs was the contact that I had, I showed up and about halfway through he asked “do you want to shoot any?” Now, I had shot before, but never in an environment quite like this. This was timed. Every shot counted. A miss costs 5 seconds. Nevertheless, I took him up on the offer.

So we walk to his pickup and out of the back of his truck he pulls a holster, with space for two pistols in it. “Put that on” Doolin says. So I do. Then he hands me two .45 caliber pistols, to put in the holster. “Hold out your hand,” Doolin says. So I do … he hands me a .45 caliber rifle. “Now hold out your other hand,” Doolin says. Right about this time I remember thinking something along the lines of “holy crap what have I gotten myself into.” So Doolin hands me a 12-gauge shotgun. I walk to load up with 2 pistols, a rifle, and a shotgun … There’s times I love being a journalist. This was totally one of those times.

Our story went off without a hitch, we gathered plenty of B-roll, which is always a good thing. We spent loads of time in the edit bays trying to make this story as perfect as possible. We were forced to use a few shaky B-roll shots, but all in all I feel we turned out a product that was exactly what I envisioned when I pitched the story.

This is one of those stories I won’t quickly forget. We got to spend time with a bunch of cowboys, shoot some guns, and then come back and have plenty of material to turn out a good package. In case you’re curious, my time on the stage I shot was 72 seconds, about 30 seconds slower than most of the other shooters. You never know … I may go back the next time they shoot and see if I can try again … that is, if the J-school hasn’t consumed my life by then.

You'll shoot your EYE out (I almost did)

I am at the DMV right now so forgive me if I am a little crabby…

This week was the start of my first official successful television story.  On Sunday I went to a shooting festival in Fayette, Missouri with Sarah and Steve (sounds like a country song).  Every month, members of the group SASS dress in wild west-style clothing.  They also carry loaded guns representing the wild west period.  What do these people dressed as cowboys and cowgirls do with their loaded guns?  They eat fly infested homemade cupcakes, and have a grand old time shooting targets.  This coming together is not just a love for guns and John Wayne movies; it’s a game.  In a field, these people have set up a Wild West town.  Each person is stationed to go to whatever establishment is on site (a bank, emporium, jail, etc), and their mission (if they choose to accept it) is to solve a problem in a planned scenario.  In the jail for example, a criminal is on the run, and it is time to bring this outlaw down.

Safety is obviously a concern for these people as they do not want anyone to get hurt.  I was actually almost shot during the filming of this story, but I won’t go into details now…instead there’s a video of my brush with death which will later be posted on this blog.

During this assignment, I confronted one of my biggest fears: a video camera.  I shot all of the footage for this story, and could not stop thinking how great this piece would be as a radio story for American Public Media’s Weekend America.  I was so intimated by the camera that all I wanted was my beloved marantz to sooth my gentle and emotional sores.  Alas, I conquered my fears by the time the shooting festival ended.  I recorded over 90 minutes of raw footage (raw, you know you like it), and even though some of my shots were shaky or at times out of focus, a majority of the footage was boo-ya-ka-sha strong.  In fact, our story is going to be airing on KOMU, which means I didn’t totally fail as the videographer.  However, I cannot take all the credit for this story’s success.  My group did a phemononal job.  I am amazed how these groups are organized.  So far, the people I have been assigned to work with each have different specialties. Each of my previous group members have been bold enough to experiment with different mediums. Sometimes I wonder if by the time I graduate I will end up in radio...who knows, I could be the next Katie Couric.

Matt Velker is a sports FANATIC!!

(Preliminary note: The title of this post has nothing to do with its content.)
Since I started convergence last spring, it seems as if I learn something new and valuable every week. This statement may imply that each week of reporting gets consecutively easier. Well, that assumption is false. Every week is just as trying as the next. There's no limit to the problems that can spring up in any stage of a story.
This week the big lesson was: you can never research a pitch too much. The quilter story idea we had ended up falling through, we changed angles, but still had no real story. We wound up switching to one of our rejected pitches and making a story out of it. The whole thing worked out, but I would have rather had a really strong story to begin with so our group's efforts could have gone towards molding and refining it, rather than having to fluff up something that was more of a non-story. On the up side, I'm now a cool edit pro, and also got a great photography/photoshop lesson from Karen.
P.S. Thanks, profs, for that lecture on when NOT to use soundslides. It totally reinforced some things I had been thinking and gave me some backup in fighting the production of a mediocre extra that my group and I would have tagged on to our piece!

Here's Hoping.

I was going to wait to blog until after our story meeting with Mike and Lynda at 3 p.m.-- except I have to go and make money and pizza directly afterward and will miss the 5 p.m. deadline. I'm trying to be good! But I'm really really hoping that Mike and Lynda don't take a look at our ideas and tear them to pieces. I put a lot more effort into those than I did in, say, Convergence Reporting in Summer 2006.

I am super-crazy busy and also super-crazy-sick of meetings! But that's OK- I understand that if we want to get this documentary class off the ground then meetings are a necessary evil. I met with Mike, Gary Grigsby of Broadcast, Paul Sturtz of the Ragtag and Seth Ashley of Stephens College on Tuesday. I thought that even though, as Alyah said, we may have to kidnap a professor to commit to teaching the independent study next semester, there is still enough interest to get things going. If any professor reads this and WANTS to teach an independent study next semester-- I have a list of people you can contact!

In other news, we're hoping to get a story idea approved and our own documentary into production within the next week! Here's hoping.

Stories I Love

This week has been really long, yesterday in particular. I had an interview for a few hours with some artistic roller skaters for my Missourian shift and another interview at 10 30pm for our group story on pinball. Both stories I am very excited about which helped me to keep awake. I love having the opportunity to go out and meet people that I ordinarly wouldn't have the opportunity to meet. Both groups of people, the artistic skaters and the pinballers, are really amazing people with great stories to tell. I am so thankful that I am the one to get to tell their stories!
I was worried that Mike, Lynda, Karen and Curt wouldn't like our pinball idea, but I am glad they did! I am looking forward to putting the finishing touches on both stories this next week and this weekend.

Ah, the beauty of Re-pitching

Living in Columbia has it's advantages. A college atmosphere, a bigger city than I grew up in, and the Journalism school. However, since we are discouraged from covering anything that has to do with MU, or any annual events, what the heck is there left to report on that everyone else isn't already doing?

Story of my life.

It was frustrating to hear that none of our stories were good enough. With other classes and deadlines, it is hard to find the "gold" caliber I know Lynda, Karen, Mike and Kurt expect. Group projects are hard to coordinate, because everyone is so busy at this stage in our educational "journey."

I love people

Some may think that a white girl from the suburbs of Chicago, and a hip hop artist from the heart of Kansas City or St. Louis wouldn't have a lot to talk about. Well, they'd be wrong. I think I even proved myself wrong. Something I learned when I did tsunami relief in Thailand is that people are people everywhere. We may look, speak, act and live differently, but at our core, we're still the same. While there, I learned that this one particular woman who speaks Thai, worships Buddah, works as a prostitute and who's about twice as dark and half as short as me, has the same issues at her core that just about any woman in the world does...including me!

I guess my theory is that if a Thai prostitute and I can connect although we're almost polar opposites from opposite sides of the world, why shouldn't any of us be able to connect -- in some way -- with anyone in our own country, city, or even university? Not that you'd have to be best friends, but just that you'd be able to "get" each other...to connect.

Our group story for the week was to talk with local hip hop artists and discover that scene here in Columbia. When Steddy P and I first talked on the phone, I really realized this wasn't some uppity buisnessman who wears a suit, tie and whitey-tighties (who knows?) to work everyday. Steddy had a different story to tell and a different way of telling it. I'm so glad I got to hear and see it unfold during the time my group members and I spent with him and the other artists. We got to have a cultural lesson in Mizzou's backyard, and it reminded me how much I value experiencing someone's story and learning from it. People have a richness and depth that too often we fail to see. I'm glad I got to be reminded of this in a really tangible way this week.

And also, it was fun! Avid didn't even act up too much...

The little things

Sometimes I take it for granted how much fun journalism can be. Too often I look at this as a job, a chore, a task I need to complete for a grade on a piece of paper. Then there are the assignments and the story subjects which are just plain fun and interesting. This week I had one of those opportunities when I went to cover the Bob Barker induction to Missouri's Hall of Famous Missourians. The whole event was probably more dramatic and robust than it needed to be, but seeing the wide diversity in ages and backgrounds of those in attendance showed me the large influence this man has had on many Americans. It was a light hearted little story and even with the immediacy element requiring it to get out quickly, the Missourian reporter I rode down with and I still had time to grab some ice cream at Central Dairy in Jeff City. Bob Barker and ice cream makes some of these days fun.

Please repitch 3 sports stories... oh no!

So this week our editors asked us to re-pitch. This doesn't overly distress me, since for my last group project I was also asked to re-pitch. However, for some reason our editors decided that our pitches (the Heritage Festival, the Sustainable Living Fair, and a story on high school football equipment) showed a passion for sports. Thus, they asked us to pitch 2-3 more stories... about sports. Ignoring the gross assumption that though only 1 of our 3 story pitches involved sports -- one of the more ad hoc stories we pitched at that -- we must have a passion for sports, I fail to see why our editors would choose to limit our topic choices to such a narrow segment of the news when we had already apparently had trouble coming up with a strong enough pitch to run with for the week. Now, I find myself forced to desperately grasp for any sports idea I can find to turn out some suitable ideas for Friday. I know nothing about sports, and in fact I actually actively detest the obsessive recreational activity. Ouch.

Let's see how group project week 2 goes.

The most random experience of my life

Last night (as I told Beth) I had what could probably be the most random experinece of my life to date. Yesterday, we were told that our feature story would be on a house for travelling musicians. Since this weekend is very difficult for our group in terms of scheduling, we grabbed a marantz and camera and went over to the house to see what a pot luck dinner was like there. Unannounced (we hadn't been able to reach them), Beth and I barged in and asked if we could look around. Before I knew it I was sitting on the middle of the living room floor with, holding up a microphone and being entertained from some pretty decent musicians. After several songs they closed with a song called "Greasy Little Weasel From Texas". I'll give you 2 guesses about who that is about but I think you'll only need 1. Beth got some great pictures and I'm really excited to go back on Sunday.

Story Ideas...Grr...

It doesn’t really bother me that this class requires hours of interviews, lugging equipment up and down three flights of stairs and practically living in the convergence lab. In my mind, those things are the easy part…if there is such a thing in our field. The hardest thing for me, by far, is coming up with story ideas. Each week I tell myself I will concentrate on looking for story ideas as I go about my daily routine. And I do look…I just don’t find. I still end up scrambling around on the Internet the night before a newsroom shift or group meeting. Am I just not looking in the right places? Lynda told us once to think of story ideas like a batting average, meaning if 3 out of 10 ideas were “hit” at all, we were on track. I can’t help but think that my story idea average would leave me sitting on the bench. So how do I make myself more receptive to story ideas?

From Quilting to Cake!

This week was nuts- We initially were given a chance t do our story about a New Franklin quilting club. After doing more research we realized the club had been disbanded due to "loss of membership"- We tried to do another angle which was why are senior centers losing membership, is there a disconnect there? What is the deal with Seniors not coming out to centers? We could not find any answers to those questions- SO we changed directions... on MONDAY- We went to the home of Amy Beverly who bakes cakes out of her home as well as other things- we interviewed her, edited the clips and produced a story in 3 days- I now realize that its OK for stories to change, and you cant wait on them- you need to move if you need to- It is very important to get ontop of your sources and get the framework for a story as well as a plan B- Thats what we had- Plan B can sometimes be you Best friend-

week 874639

I can't even remember what week this is...so I just picked an arbitrary number. Well, this week was fairly productive.
On Tuesday, Erin met with the power-team-of-men who are also interested in the documentary course. People at the meeting included: Mike McKean, Gary Grigsby, Paul Sturtz (Ragtag), and Seth Austin (Stephens College). They discussed various options about the course. Erin reported that nobody really wants to take charge of the project due to time constraints, among other concerns. I think we are going to have to literally kidnap (is that illegal?) a faculty member to teach this class. Still, everyone is optimistic. We are thinking that the best option is to have the course as an independent study next semester consisting of 6-15 students. The course would combine brief history/theory with actual production. Then, by fall semester, hopefully a topics course could be created.
The team (Wale, Erin, and I) are going to meet with Mike and Lynda tomorrow afternoon to pitch our three story ideas. After that, we will probably chat with Seth and get his feedback on our ideas. I think the more feedback we get, the better.
And if our ideas are completely shot down and torn apart (eep!) by any of the above mentioned people, we will go back and try to dig up some better ideas.
Wish us luck!

KOMU

This week I was told to help out with a story about Southern Boone County High School that is implamenting a new drug policy. Last time I was at KOMU I asked to do a soundslides because I wanted to work on those skills. This story didnt warrent any visuals, so I suggested to Mr. Reeves that I do a Q and A section, like the one that was on the front of the Missourian that day (it was fresh in my mind and so I am going to take credit for the idea). I went and recorded the 24 min Q and A and spent time helping Jer Maskel and Sarah Smithies with their stories and live shots. When we got back I typed out the Q and A and had Nick Carpenter look over it. Then I helped him with his assingment. I really enjoyed today because I was going after a story that I was thinking about proposing, and then doing what I proposed to do. As everyone knows, I am the worst story/media proposer so it was really nice to be right for once. I had a REALLY good time this week.

Avid & Me

As I wait for Video lab to receive my files, for the 3rd time tonight, I feel a mix sense of clarity and hatred...clearly, I hate Avid is a better way to put it. The stress this week has been mild, probably due to the fact that our story was on the local hiphop scene and what not, so chasing around Columbia emcees and the like actually kept my spirits up. At least this time around I feel like I'm covering a story that's worth while. And by worth while of course I mean something that I'M interested in...b/c, of course, that's how I judge worthiness.

But similar to a tornado, the eerie sense of calm was quickly displaced by a destructive and life-sucking force...Avid! Our love-hate relationship has come to a screeching halt and now I'm regretting having never signed a pre-nump. Oh well, I can only hope that as Avid continues to take cheap shot after cheap shot at my defenseless being I am able to take it in stride and combat Avid's excessive abuse with abstract blogging. Hoping for the best.

Reflection

So, this is reporting. Awesome.

In previous classes such as J2100 and J4802, I would always think about the reporting class, and it always seemed daunting at the time. "Well I'll be a better journalist by then." "There will be others to help with story ideas--they will come easier." "My schedule will work out." Well, I'm in the class, and--not that I'm not a better journalist now than I was before--I was wrong. Most of it was jsut as hard as it was back then, and this class is still daunting as hell. Running around is no fun, but there is a nice little voice in the back of my head telling me that if I can do it now, with other classes, a job, and a club sports team to run, then once I have a real job at a paper/media outlet, where that is my job and I have nothing else aside from family to worry about (basically no homework).

As for the stories I have been working on, my critter story hit a bit of a snag my first week due to the fact that the program hadn't even began. I had a story done, but it had something missing, so we put it on hold until I can contact a teacher to come into their class. As for our feature story on the RBHS rain garden project, we were hindered by multiple things, including a project that had not started quite yet, Labor Day weekend (which meant we had one less day to report due to the fact that it was about a school), and incredible editiing difficulties. The final product was admittedly mediocre, but it was a good learning experience, and something to build on.

Convergence Reporting vs. Social Life

Elle asked me today if convergence students were beginning to be the only people I see these days. Nothing against convergence students, they are awesome people, but I am starting to enjoy it when people have no idea what I'm talking about when I mention the J-School. My Missourian shift was on Saturday, where I spent all day shooting the dog health fair at the Columbia Canine Sports Center and fighting with Avid just to capture my video. Oh Avid. We will be friends someday, I hope. Of course, I hadn't used the lab's wireless mics yet, so I couldn't figure out how to connect them. So my audio was pretty gross. But it was good refreshing myself on Avid's editing nuances and how much I hate them. Then on Sunday, I went with Stephen and Sean to Fayette, MO at 9:00am to do a story on their Single Action Shooting Society (SASS). It was pretty awesome actually. The people were so friendly and we got some amazing footage (plus I'm a wireless mic pro now). Stephen even got to shoot some targets. I wish I hadn't been too chicken to try it myself. I went back to the lab at 1:00 to finish editing my Missourian story and uploading our SASS video. So I was in the lab until 8:00pm. It's scary to think that every other weekend will be like this. Hopefully I will be able to still see my non-journalism friends. I know I will learn a lot in this class though, and despite this process of stress I must go through, hopefully I will come out better for it. Cheers for a new semester!

Reflection

It has been a pretty stressful week trying to balance the group project, work, a russian exam and planning the first magazine club meeting as the president. I am starting to find my balance, but I am realizing that it isn't all that easy. Sometimes I feel like people just don't understan, but what can you do. I feel like the group project went well... needs some work still before it airs, but nothing that can't be fixed. As far as my Missourian shifts things are going well. Editing the first story is coming along slowly due to lack of time on my part, but it's getting there. I am really excited about my story for next week though!

Lesson for this week is balance, balance and more balance.

Meetings and more meetings

As the title of this post suggests, there were a lot of meetings this week. I imagine this will be a trend throughout the semester. Besides meeting with each other to brainstorm and set more goals, we also met with Brian Brooks and Paul Sturz from Ragtag. Dean Brooks explained the academic logistics, while Sturtz detailed the documentary logistics. Oh logistics.
We know now that getting a class approved and started can take a while...this means a full-on documentary course will probably not be available to students until Fall 2008. Unfortunately, Wale and I will have departed Mizzou by this time. Sad.
Sturtz was helpful and seems ready to be involved in our project. He said he could connect us with current filmmakers to discuss our ideas and, also, said that he would be willing to help coordinate guest speakers for the course. There are a lot of details involved with getting this project rolling, and we are slowly starting to compile all of them. This is going to take a lot of hard work. For real.
Next week, we are hoping to have our documentary story ideas narrowed down to a top 3, which we then plan to present to Mike and Lynda and get feedback. I'm really hoping we can start working on our mini-doc by next weekend. More details to come...

Baptism by Fire

I saw an article in an MU alumni magazine about the Missouri Method (you know that thing where they thrust us out into the field and make us learn in the real world, gasp), and it was titled “Baptism by Fire.” How appropriate.

My first two projects are finally finished, and while I am somewhat relieved, it doesn’t matter much, since I have already started work on my next team project and am scrambling for more story ideas for KOMU in another week.

My first team story was Powerball, and while it was a nice first effort, I agreed with the grading that we didn’t go in-depth enough. I’m okay with that, just needed to get my feet wet before diving all the way in. And while technology is not always my strong point, I did two graphics that were pretty sweet (at least I think so). It took me forever to remember how to do a rollover in Flash, but once I saw that finished project it was so rewarding! Overall, I am really proud of my team, even if the final product wasn’t as great as we would have wanted. I saw a lot of other teams complaining about people not doing their share of the work, or complaining about their editors not working well with them, and we did not have either of those problems. John, Ryan, and I were all busy at different times, but we all put in our fair share, and Stephanie, our editor, was always around when we needed guidance.

My (team project) hopes for the future: have a strong team effort, find ways to make my stories deeper, improve my reporting skills.

Now for my first shift at KOMU. I would call it a disaster, but it seems like others didn’t see it that way. I wrote a web exclusive story on Flat Branch Creek in light of the Stream Extravaganza on Thursday, September 6, 2007. I went and took pictures of the creek, which I was worried about since my past pictures haven’t been so hot, but they all turned out great. That was quite the pleasant surprise! And then for my story, I talked to the woman organizing the Extravaganza. That’s right, called her that day and asked her questions. I’m a pretty shy person, so that was a pretty big step for me. I finished the story, and sent it off, but the day still felt confusing to me. I spent most of my day in the convergence lab, not at KOMU, so I didn’t really get a sense of the newsroom environment. I think for my next shift, I’m going to ask to do something newsroom oriented, or tag along with a broadcast student to do additional web content or something. Anything to get me into the newsroom, just to see what it’s like.

My (shift) hopes for the future: spend more time in the newsroom to get a feel for the environment, do something more convergence-y for my additional web content (not a print story and photos)

So three weeks down, how many more left? I am really trying to take Lynda’s advice and just take it one week at a time, but for an over-booked, over-organized, over-my-planner-is-my-life-and-I-look-at-it-constantly type of girl like me, this class is killer.

Reflection

The week was hard and our group story seemed even harder. I was excited by the fact that our group was able to do a "hard news" piece. Usually, I prefer the health issues-which tend to be features- but this was challenging (we had the home foreclosure story) and I felt I learned something...other than the journalism techniques ;). Needless to say, I also learned how useful it is to have a group willing and ready to carry their weight. I've had my share of good and bad groups, this one was definately one of the better ones (yay Sili and Matt).
However, I do have a complaint...when it came time to construct our story, we ran into a few frustrating problems. We weren't able to work inside KBIA (understandable, too many BI students)...but we weren't able to work in the Convergency Lab for a bit because the instructors were having a conference with another student (understandable, they don't have a conference room, and you can't fit everyone in one of their offices). So we were left with no where to work for a while- I realize that they are working on the new Reynolds building, but is there any short term solution?
And off the topic...when are the other computers in the convergency lab going to be hooked up and ready to go?

A bunch of meetings!

So we finally met with the legendary Paul Sturtz yesterday. Our project is so slow to take off, I don't know if it's laziness or just how incredibly hard it is to find a great enough story idea that you want to spend the whole semester working on. I can't wait until we start making this mini-movie, but it's these pre-stages that we're finding hard. We've all reported before but documentary reporting is a little different. aaahhh! I wish an idea would just fall from the sky and hit me in the head! Sturtz was able to kind of help us get the ball rolling with fleshing out ideas, which we are still in the process of doing.

We also met with Associate Dean Brooks on the practicalities of starting a course. I was thinking it would be possible to get this course going next semester, but he informed us that since early registration is happening in about a month, that, it wouldn't be possible to get the course going until next fall! O Well, either way, I won't be here anymore, It just would've been nice, ya know!

We also met with each other, like 3 times, infact i'm in a meeting right now with Alyah and Erin, we've kind of digressed from topics, so I thought I'd blog! luv u guys!

What a week! I've done 3 projects and I'm tired. I worked on a big graphic for the Missourian ALL day yesterday, but its good that I'm getting so much graphic experience because I think I'm going to be doing a bunch of graphics for the election site. I really want to make a map (possibly interactive, if I can get that far) on the candidates campaign trails. That way you can see where your candidate will be, if he/she is coming to a place near you, etc. It will probably also feature debate sites and things like that. I also considered doing a graphic of the amount of money the candidates collected and compare it to what they spent. I think that could be an interesting visual. I have been looking around at lots of election 2008 sites and some 2006 ones, so I have a lot of content and layout ideas. It sounds like Jen is rounding up a lot of people to help us out, so hopefully I'll have lots of time to devote to graphic tasks. I haven't been able to make it to any of the big meetings yet and I'm really upset about that. I want to be part of the discussion, but I'm taking an internship for credit and that takes up 2 afternoons a week, and my Missourian shift is a solid 8 hours on Friday, so I rarely have spare time! Communication was a big issue last time, so I don't want to be missing out already. But, I have come up with lots of ideas and I'm planning to talk them over with the key players and start them as soon as possible.

Adelante Update

Ok, Alison, Cisco and I met last week to think about the radio show. We officially decided to try a readership survey for our research component. We are going to put it up online as well as somehow distributing it with the paper. We haven't figured out those exact details yet, but we are meeting with Katherine next week to flesh it all out. We are going to ask the basic stats (age, sex, occupation) and also about primary language, nationality, and how they consume media. That way we can get some idea of how many people are using the Web site, or would listen to the radio show, etc.

Our host is going to be Nick Jimenez, who is fluent in Spanish. It seems the show is going to be pre-recorded which might get in the way of our idea for getting people to call in, but we are going to start with brainstorming story ideas and lining someone up for an interview with Nick about this month's cover story.

We also decided it would be a good idea to get the word out that Radio Adelante is one more outlet for 4804 projects. So anyone in reporting who is reading this, and speaks Spanish or has a story idea that would appeal to a Latino audience, you story could appear on air with us!

Wake Up Call

We just finished our first group story for 4804, and what a trying week it was. Several trips back for more shooting and interviews, many hours in the lab reteaching myself Avid, and trying my best not to delete our files on the Video Lab. Late nights spent in that drab editing room, and a couple classes skipped to make deadline, made this a long and tiring week. Then Thursday came and just about nothing seemed to go right. Here we go, time to make or break. Andy and Nick did a great job stepping up when the computer ate our project and we had to start basically from the beginning with raw video. Did I mention this happened an hour before deadline? We were able to throw together a good, coherent story. But then the grading and critique came and we saw what is expected to make it in a real newsroom setting. Our story could have used some more work, but in the end I'm happy with what we turned in considering the circumstances. It's just the first story with many more to come. This is the best way to learn!

I had always heard of the Missouri method of journalism. I knew it meant learning things by doing. But I didn’t totally understand just what that meant until I actually took this class. I feel like I can do work that was previously B+ work, and now that we’re in 4804, that B+ has become a B- or worse. I’m not disagreeing with this form of grading, it just takes some getting used to. This class is all about raising the bar.

I recently (30 minutes ago) completed my first story for the Missourian. It challenged me to say the least. My topic could have been a little better, I should have recorded more audio, and in the end I was forced to put a story together with the lack of information I had. The editors helped immensely in directing me, but not having any deadlines except to get this finished by the end of the day was a new thing to me. I’m used to having deadlines spread throughout the week, so I know if I’m on track of things or not. When you crunch a week down into a day the whole game changes. Learning how to budget my time accordingly during the day to get my story done was the biggest challenge for me.

Reflection

So here comes the end of the week again. Two stories down, and there is one new week coming up.
As for my last Missourian shift I pulled out okay, and got the story of Pep Rally done. I could have done a better video editing in it than it have done for now. But because of limited time, I wasn’t able to do a better edit than I could have done otherwise. Surely it was nice to have Alex the editor to come out with me to the food ball field and help me out with the shooting. It’s always nice to have someone to tag along to do story “the first time”.

But I think the bigger problem and challenge for me is not getting enough and quality story ideas for myself to pick up and do my shift with. I was struggling with story ideas most of my week. Luckily Curt pointed me to a good direction, and I got my shift requirement fulfilled. But I just have to pick up my sources of information, and hoping that by next week, I can do better. There is a lot events going on this weekend compare to last week. So hopefully, I can do a better job of submitting story ideas, and interviewing people.

Meetings

Wale, Alyah and I met with Paul Sturtz, the owner of the RagTag Cinemacafe and one of the founders of the True/False film festival. I'm the group representative for the meeting of the documentary minds next week, where I imagine we'll be hashing out even more of the details for starting the actual documentary class, but Paul Sturtz got me thinking about the actual documentary production.

It's such a different process from simply coming up with a story idea. We're going to be working on it all semester, so we all need to be really jazzed about the idea, and essentially want to have it take over our lives (and not mind so much). There's also more of an imperative to find a narrative, like in a novel, except true. It's going to be very intense.

Wale and I also met with J-School Dean Brian Brooks this week, and got more info about starting the class. It seems that the absolute fastest we can get this running is Fall 2008- as a "topics" course, and then as a full course in Spring 2009. Now we just need a committed professor, a course description, and a syllabus. Oh yes, and a proof-of-concept feature film.

Convergence - 1; Broadcast, Photojournalism, Magazine, Newsed - 0.

After talking to students reporting in the other sequences this week, it's pretty apparent that convergence students have it rougher than others. We don't have beats, so coming up with story ideas can include an exhaustive look at everything happening in mid-Missouri. We don't have set expectations for each story. A lot of reporters for the Missourian, sports reporters for example, have an almost formulaic approach for how most of their stories should be written. We HAVE to approach each story differently. We don't have as much familiarity with the different newsroom when we only go to them maximum three times a semester while others are in them daily. We get to be those people that ask the questions everyone around us figured out three weeks ago.

Basically, whatever the situation, convergence reporters are the odd ones out.

Even though I'm fairly confident that this reporting class is causing me more premature gray hairs than the other sequences would, so far I'm not regretting my decision. The eventual higher pay straight out of college isn't the only motivation, either. We're much better prepared than other students. Sure, we don't have the strong specialized skill unless we work on it in our free time (which is when, exactly?). But we are much more creative in coming up with story ideas because we can't fall back on current events. We can't just glance at a community calendar and say it's newsworthy. We actually have to wander around and talk to strangers to get a compelling story. We have more time to do pre-reporting, to fully explore the depth of a story. We have a wider skill set - one of the dot com regulars at KOMU commented on how she wished she could 'do things like that' when I was editing audio for a slideshow. We get a grade on every story so we can actually improve our skills intentionally instead of through practice alone.

It's a little rough. I get less sleep. I have to force myself to approach people who have no idea who I am or why I would want to talk to them (why did I have to be born shy?). I make mistakes because I'm not as familiar with video cameras and Marantz recorders as the broadcast students or with still cameras as the photo students.

Ultimately, though, the only way I can justify coming to this school is continuing with, hopefully succeeding in, the convergence sequence.

This week

This week I worked on a group project with Kelly and Lauren following Janice Templemire. Janice is a nurse at the Ellis Fischel Mulligan Breast Health Center and a year ago was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Janice made our jobs so easy. She gave us magnificent quotes and spoke in perfect soundbites. We learned a lot about time management and working as a group though. With the labor day holiday this past weekend, we didn't get an interview until Tuesday. This quick period for editing and putting our story together gave us a better understanding of real world deadlines and turn-arounds.

Each of our group members had different strengths and we all complemented each other well. Kelly did a great job with our video. Lauren was excellent at interviewing and gathering information. I got to put all the information together and write the story.

Overall, this week taught our group how to work well together and utilize our time wisely.

ESPN U continued

Hello! Well, I am just adding on to what Justin was talking about. Our group finally met and we addressed some concerns about the project: mainly that we all want to be able to produce something out of a semester's worth of work. At first I thought that could only mean multimedia projects but then we talked and I realized that we can show all of the steps it took to create and execute a Mizzou-specific marketing campaign. In addition we are hoping to make a trailer for ESPN-U, mainly focusing on MU spirit. But once again, we cannot jump into things without knowing the company's guidelines. I'm pretty excited for this project! :)

Chocolate Rain Drives Me Insane

My first KOMU shift was a blast.  I talked to Jen Reeves several days before my shift, and had a pretty good idea as to what I would be doing.  I ended up setting my sites on putting together a soundslides presentation.  I teamed up with reporter Lorenzo Hall, and we ended up covering a story on a tomato festival in Columbia.  This annual event showcases more than 50 varieties of tomatoes.  These tomatoes were diced up, and then served to visitors at the festival.  We got there early, and I collected some natural sound of the event’s volunteers cutting the tomatoes and describing how some tomatoes are easier to cut than others.  I also interviewed people as they were tasting the tomatoes.  I asked them to describe the taste and the texture of the tomatoes.  I was pleased with how the soundslides project turned out.  One thing I did forget when taking photos was to turn on the manual focus in shots with a lot of movement.  Some of my most important pictures were too blurry, but I had enough backups shots to save my butt. 

Watch the soundslides story here.

Week 3 has been a success. There was a meeting of the big-decision makers, and the response to the Web site was pretty positive. There were suggestions made for it, and I am glad to have feedback. I am in the middle of a new version which I hope to have ready for our next meeting. The meeting attendees also liked some of the ideas Jen and I told them we were hoping to put on the Web site, and I had a brainstorm session for the kinds of information we want for our databases. Sean Powell and Jen Reeves were in on that brainstorming. Jen is recruiting students in the computer-assisted reporting classes, and Reuben has offered up some engineering students to help put up the databases and maintain them.

Next: hopefully we can get a SplashCast player on the Web site, and some graphics for the site.

First Group Story...

...done. I was happy that I got to try some things that I know I am weak at - voicing and doing a little 'man on the street' work. Of course there were technical problems... every project comes with another piece of technology that will fail or fool me.
It was nice to take a story that was covered by the AP - and subsequentially, every other news organization - and take a different twist on it. The problems with doing a health story is that HIPAA comes into play, meaning we had to work around the inaccessibility to patients. I ended up at McDonalds, Mexico's hangout, and talk to random strangers.
Next week it's back to KOMU for a shift. The week before wasn't so successful, but I have hope for this coming week!

Reflections

This week was definitely a new experience for me. To start things off, I worked my shift at KOMU on Monday. When deciding on what story I should contribute to the WHOLE news room decided that I should be thrown strait into the fire and have me contribute to a story that more or less had me go talk to man hating women who believed that pregnancy was not about the man at all and all about the woman and how women essentially hurt the birthing process..but hey I did get some good experience in working with photography and soundslides.

I am starting my second feature story this week and thus far everything seems to be running smoothly...lets hope this continues.

2 weeks down

With Labor Day weekend thrown into the mix, this weeks project went off pretty well i feel. Aside from scheduling, we found a very interesting person with an amazing story to tell. This being said, I would like to share last week with you. At KBIA, my 8 hour shift was actually more pleasant than I anticipated. Not only did I get to do a story about immigration (a more meaty topic than most other people seemed to be working on) but it was a long format story and I even did the voicing. It took practically forever to finish and I never actually heard it on air but the feeling of having the dreaded first story over with was quite better than i expected. Bring on next week!

ESPNU and dependency on people in other states

It's been a slow start to the ESPNU project, but that's through no fault of my own or the rest of my group. We're kind of dependent on my rep from ESPN getting me the materials and specificities needed to REALLY get moving. I have repeatedly been in contact with her, and should have most of what we need in a matter of days. In the meantime, though, my group and I have made the most of the situation. At a meeting yesterday, I think we made significant progress across the board, coming up with some creative ways to market the network. We decided that coming up with a creative ad campaign to facillitate across campus would be a good idea, as would creating some promotional-type segments to post up on a professional-looking facebook group. We have an idea for a message-board, multi-media based website, but don't know how practical that is, since none of us are real comfortable building websites.

ESPNU has stressed to me that they want to target alumni, so we'll be in touch with the Alumni Association to get a better sense of what they would want from a college sports network. We also will be in touch with ESPN radio affiliate KTGR 1580, who have a strong Columbia sporting-event presence. Our first home football game is just 8 days away, and hopefully we'll have enough materials to have a strong game-day presence. We've got great ideas, an excited group... now if bureaucracy would just get out of our way!

We met last night at the Berg to discuss our gameplan for our capstone project. Unfortunately, there is not much that we can do until we get the information booklet...but do not fret, our thinking caps were on and we made some really good preliminary plans. We plan on tackling the marketing aspect of the project by making a trailor specifically for Mizzou. We discussed some ideas of who, how, and what we will try and film and then how we would get the film out there. We also talked about possibly meeting with one of the advertising professors to get some tips on how to tackle the strategic aspect of the marketing. We also agreed that we need to have something tangible to show at the end of this project and some possible ideas to present to ESPN-U! Overall a good meeting and I am looking forward to getting the information and moving forward! I did miss everyone not being in class this week!

A KOMU Live Shot

Yesterday I worked with KOMU reporter Lorenzo Hall on a story. I'll post more info about the experience later, but for now here is a video I put together about what goes into setting up a live shot.




You can watch the 5pm report here:
http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/e1510af9-c0a8-2f11-00f9-0c01aee9ba1a

oh, convergence

I guess I had forgotten over the summer what a roller coaster ride this convergence thing is. On one side, I absolutely love it. I love talking to people, gathering information, and editing it together to make something worth looking at. However, it is rarely that simple. Our Celiac story came together really well last week, but this week has been a little shaky. Our original story idea has morphed in light of new information, and we're still looking for a defined focus. Dan and I worked a KBIA shift together yesterday and weren't able to retrieve our audio from the CF card.
Technology can be really frustrating, but I'm glad to be experimenting and troubleshooting now, rather than later. I do think it will help me in the long run. I was talking to Matt Z. in the lab last night, after our failed audio fiasco, about the meaning of convergence. Sometimes I tend to think it refers to my forehead's compulsion to converge with the wall.

Super cool New Service

These guys were purchased by Google 3 or 4 months ago and I applied to be a beta tester a LONG time ago... well tonight I finally got invited, and I have 10 invites. If anyone is interested send me an email and I'll get you hooked up.

Here's what Grand Central does: you choose a phone number and you can keep it for the rest of your life, you give this number out and it automatically and forwards all of your calls to whatever actual phone you want *free*, you can also screen your calls, have custom voicemail greetings "hi mom, I'm busy studying tonight but you can leave a message and I'll call back when I'm done" for people and all kinds of cool things.

I just signed up.

first two weeks, first thoughts.

So it's already been a crazy two weeks. Two stories down; my KBIA shift story was surprisingly easy to report, and the report our group put together on rural healthcare has come together really well, if a little rough. Yet...
I find myself struggling with multimedia. I have my own camera, so I don't have to be dependent on the D70's anymore and a 3-hr time limit (hallelujah!) but getting good shots of actual people is coming hard to me when I'm still trying to figure out how to correctly set the white balance for half-tungsten half-dark kitchen lighting.
In the same fashion, I feel my video skills, while adequate for the purposes of Fundamentals, are not quite up to a professional level, and I'm not willing to put together half-okay video pieces. Audio is the only thing I'm really comfortable with right now, and even that can be very frustrating. I'm feeling like I have a toe in too many ponds and not enough time to focus on one thing and make that good.
Maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist....
I wish at the very least someone other than my photojournalist boyfriend would tell me how to set the white balance.
That would be nice.

Take A Deep Breath

Sometimes, being a Journalism student is tough. It’s not as if I expected it to be a cakewalk. The students who have gone before me passed on plenty of horror stories. Still, I was far from prepared for my first shift at KBIA last week. I hit the ground running and still felt like I was getting nowhere. At one particularly frustrating point, I left the newsroom for a breath of fresh air. As I wandered across the quad, I thought that this shift had to be the worst experience I’d had at Mizzou. When I left campus ten long hours later, though, I wondered if it might have been one of the most rewarding. I felt like I accomplished something, and like I had done it myself, because no one in the newsroom had time to hold my hand. Yes, being a journalism student is tough…but if it wasn’t would it be worth doing?

Has it been three weeks already?

So, uh, today was supposed to be my journalism-free day where I caught up on everything I've been neglecting for the last couple of weeks while trying to turn out stories. Except journalism has apparently become a compulsion, since I kept making calls and sending e-mails about next week's story. Now, I'm writing this blog about journalism.

The last two weeks have been so insane. I can't believe that I've already done an entire story, finished my first week of shifts and am preparing to do it all again for the rest of the semester. I thought it would be a lot harder to get back in the swing of things, and I expected to have forgotten a lot over the summer - or realize I didn't learn everything I needed to last year. But, I've been pleasantly surprised. I was really pleased with our first story, and I'm also really happy with the Soundslides package I did yesterday for KBIA. It's hard to believe that tomorrow morning we'll have another story to run with, and the cycle starts all over again.

I also just want to say thanks to everyone who helped me out over the last couple of weeks - even though I'm not always thrilled with my hectic schedule, I can't find any fault with the people I'm working with. You hear so often that the j-school is so competitive (and it is), and though yeah, everyone wants to be the best, I love that we still help each other. Whether it's having an awesome team that works together on an incredible package or just getting a tip or help from another reporter, it's just nice to know that we're all in the same place. We're all getting better, but especially with convergence, it's hard to master every single skill we need, and it's nice knowing that someone can help you this week with one thing and you can get them back later when they're working on something that's your area of expertise. But I'm just glad to have this little 4804 community to rely on. There's still a lot of pressure, but you know you're not alone.

Life is nuts...but awesome!

WOW.

The first few weeks of school have been insane! My first KBIA shift was this Tuesday and after literally two minutes of being in the newsroom, I found myself out the door and in the car with another girl driving to Jeff City to report on a Vietnam Veteran recognition ceremony. Definitely some good opportunities for visuals...who doesn't like seeing cute little old men and women in uniform? But, alas, all of the convergence cameras were checked out and KBIA had none at the moment either, so there went that idea! All in all, we got some great audio interviews with the aforementioned "cute little old men and women" and also audio from speeches at a podium, one of which made me get a wee bit teary eyed. Then we came back and threw it all together later that evening! I also would like to add how incredibly amazingly awesomely wonderful CoolEdit is compared to BiasDeck! Thank God for CoolEdit! Literally. It's a beautiful thing.

Basically, I got to write, cut and voice the story and although it was overwhelming at first because of not having a clue how to work some of the equipment at KBIA, there were some great people who helped me along the way. KBIA is a great working/learning environment. The story ended up airing just this morning as well! Yay! I also had a KBIA shift today where I did a wrap for tomorrow morning's newscast about the state penitentiary in Jeff City...did you know that Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin escaped from that very penitentiary a year before he shot MLKJ?! Crazy stuff.

So, after a crazy week here at the Zou, I'm excited to be headed back up to Chicago for my friends' wedding this weekend! Isn't it weird when friends start getting hitched?

: )

Was Lee Greenwood in class today?

It has come to my attention, there has been a rumor going around that Country-Pop legend Lee Greenwood has been attending Convergence classes at the J-School. I know what your thinking, how could we be so lucky, right? Wrong! Lee Greenwood is a menace and this malarkey has to stop. Sure he had seven songs reach number 1 on the U.S. Country singles chart including Going, Going, Gone, Somebody’s Going to Love You, Dixie Road, I Don’t Mind Thorns (If You’re the Rose), but sitting in on Convergence classes!? And to make matters worse, I’ve heard very bad things about his sneezing/nose blowing habits involving all of those sitting near or around Lee Greenwood. I say we take action the only way I know how, immediate random screenings of anyone and everyone coming in or out of the J-School day or night. Any persons looking, smelling, acting, or singing, in accordance with said Lee Greenwood traits should be detained and held until further testing. These are sad and serious times we live in, times where aspiring young journalists and aging county-pop legends cannot coexist. We must never back down, never surrender. We will prevail, and God Bless America.

Hopefully this works

A true sobriety check..

SO- I have been posting in the other room-- MY BAD here is the posts from last week and this week:

August 29th:

Convergence 4804-the beginning...

This week has been very hectic- BUT even though I am overwhelmed with things to do and it is only the second week, I feel confident I will get through- Traveling to a 150 year old Theater was amazing and knowing that it is only 15-20 miles away from Columbia is also such. I am a little aprehensive about what the next month will bring, because I want to do good work, not only in the field of journalism, but in my core classes- I think with my story I did good work, found a good angle, and got alot of good sources to back the information up which made it appealing to others.

=SSliker#21

------NOW here is this weeks post!

For the Missourian this week I went to a sobriety checkpoint to shoot video for the Missourian website. This was my first experience shooting at night. After looking at the finished video, as well as receiving an e-mail from Karen, I saw that there was a tilt in a couple of the shots within the video. I have to be honest, I did notice something of a tilt while I was shooting, though I thought it was the view finder which was not straight, I felt my eyes were playing tricks on me. I don’t know why there was a tilt and this is something I need to learn how to correct. I did think that some of my video was shot well. I was able to get detail shots, and close ups of what happened. I learned that it is an ongoing process to continue to search for bits and pieces of the whole picture. The smallest detail can lead to a big sequence of events, like the guy I shot at the end, I saw he was struggling to pass the line test and the eye test so I continued to shoot and ultimately he got arrested and cuffed right in front of the camera. My frazzee died before the night was half over, so in the future I will use it more sparingly. The experience as a whole was great.

Posted by MizzouSteve21 at 8:24 AM 0 comments

My Week?

So the whole Labor Day holiday really ended up messing with my week. At this point, losing a day this week has put me in a perpetual state of 'catching-up.' Awesome. Even more awesome is that come Tuesday afternoon all three of my pitches to the Missourian were shot down. Leaving me with, well nothing. Luckily I've since stumbled across a promising story and have been able to land some quality interviews within the last 24 hours.

Unfortunately, my shift at the Missourian, as well as my Religions class starts in 40 minutes. What that looks like to me, is that I will have to arrive at the Missourian later this afternoon and continue to 'catch-up' on what I've missed...I love this game. But all in all, I'm hoping to produce a really quality piece. Although, not to get ahead of myself, I anticipate the first draft being torn to shreds and then having to do some serious, and last minute, rewriting. I've lost my hope for the best this week, but continue to retain my hope for the logical. I wish everyone else the best of luck in their endeavors throughout this monumental, 4-day week.

Week 2

This week has been a very long, yet productive week. For our story I conducted a couple interviews, and at the beginning of the week I ruined some sound bites by saying stuff like "right" or "yeah" at the end of the bite. By the end of the week I have conducted better interviews, and also learned how to use some of the equipment (phone interview, the board) at KBIA. The wheels are turning, rusty, but turning.

Thompson Enters the Race. I Enter the Room.

You will have to decide which event bears more note in the coming weeks. If Old Fred's solid performances on Law & Order and glowing ratings from his slew of ex-wives bear any relevance, I suppose I am in for an uphill battle. Still, I will do my best to keep things interesting. The internet does not need any more "feelings journals" wasting Blogger's server space.

I am glad to be done with my first shift at the Missourian, and despite my misunderstandings on when my project needed to be filed by (and apparently inability to go more than 30 hours without sleep or food) I feel I learned a bit more about what it takes to turn a multimedia project on a tight deadline. With another Missourian shift coming next week, this time I have learned my lesson. (Professors offended by students putting class over... going to class... you might want to stop reading here). It looks like the 11am budget meeting will be taking precedence over class next week. I think that in order to produce solid multimedia content within a relatively short timeframe, it is key I find a solid print reporter to pair off with at the week-opening budget.

Perhaps someone who has already had this experience can comment, but I find the convergence relationship with the Missourian strange. My first impression is that although we convergence reporters are supposed to work for the Missourian, we have little interaction with Missourian editors and our position in the newsroom is tentative at best and an imposition at worst. Let's hope next week proves me wrong.

The President's Secret Trip to Iraq

If you are at all interested in some of the very cool things we do in the convergence sequence I highly recommend you start reading or at least checkin on this guy's blog every once in a while.

Jim Long is a master of new-media and actually is a relative big-wig over at NBC, he's does a lot of camera work and some field producing for them, he is in the presidents' travelling press pool and can often be followed on Twitter as he drives and flies to various locations with the president, and with other NBC personalities for live-shots around the globe... pretty interesting stuff. 

Anyway, his latest post is about being called in, and shuttled off to Iraq on Air Force One under the veil of secrecy this past weekend. 

Last week/this week

Last week was insane, so although I saw the note to myself ("BLOG!!") in my planner every time I opened it up, I never actually got around to doing it. I'm only taking 12 hours this, my last, semester and although it's the least number of credit hours I've ever taken in a semester, it certainly doesn't seem any easier than my usual 15 hours.

Last week I attended my first Adelante news meeting with Fran and Jessica, and it seemed a bit unorganized. It wasn't anything like a Missourian budget meeting, where everyone seems to know what's going on and what they need to be doing. Some reporters don't have anything concrete they're working on, and others have quite a bit. It was only the first meeting though, so I'm sure things will improve each week.

We didn't move too far ahead last week. We met everyone on the staff and talked with Sara Cendon about learning how to update the site more often (I hear they use "El Wohlebertron"). This week we are meeting again to hopefully get trained by Sara and to organize our ideas about the Adelante Hour (or whatever name we come up with for the radio show-- it will be in Spanish though).

Right now I am using the time I would be in my cancelled Spanish class to redesign my website portfolio. I created one for Electronic Photojournalism last semester (here it is) but it doesn't work well for showing my clips and resume so I'm thinking my new design will be something like this. We'll see how it works out but I like the simplicity. My site from last semester only looked the way I wanted it to in Safari-- other browsers made the table borders ugly. Like Jonathan, I am always eager to hear suggestions!

My blog Efforts

Well, I've been furiously blogging for a couple of weeks now on my own personal blog.  The idea is that I want to have a very strong base of content on my portfolio website before job hunting season.

Part of my personal brand is going to be my ability to effectively test and research new-media companies and opportunities and how they can benefit journalism and news organizations. I've begun that by reviewing and chiming in on current internet trends, I'm hoping that if a potential employer happens to read some posts that they'll see my strong writing ability and my eye for new and inventive ways of presenting the news.

One of my huge goals for the semester (and actually within the next month or so) is to do a lot of usability testing, a whole re-write of the content, and the post a lot more examples of my work to my personal web site... At least that's the plan.

I would love it if you would check it out and either email, instant message, or just leave a comment on this post with your thoughts on how I can improve it, it does needs a lot of work!

Finally Updating

Well, I finally have some substantive things to talk about here in the Convergency Room, so welcome me back please!

I've been a little behind, but behind the scenes I've been busily writing, thinking, and researching for class.  My Adobe Air project is coming together, I've got a solidified team of hard working, and smart people who are going to help bring this idea of mine to fruition.

There was a lot of politics and social issues we had to work out before coming to the final groups. Essentially, there were 3 journalism nerds who were all very adament about not just competing, but winning, so we formed an adhoc group to collaborate and assist each other to win. Well, we've since lost one of those people, but the two remaining folks (myself included) have indeed joined forces and brains to further the projects and competitions.

We both have a stake in both groups and both ideas, so that's a very positive thing, while nothing is formal, we have agreed to provide consulting services to each other's groups at least in the initial phase.

We've got some solid ideas and some solid Computer Science people to help bring out crazy ideas out and into the real-world.  I'll be excited to present my status update next Monday in class because I would love to hear the rest of the class's input on my project and ideas to make it better.

-Jonathan

Oh, Crap.

So, I forgot to blog. This has never been a deadline I’ve been very proficient at actually meeting. I also frequently fall asleep in class. I have many academic character flaws. But, hopefully my truantness this week (and complete forgetfulness last week) will get me in the habit of blogging on Mondays.

But on to more pressing matters. I’ve fully committed myself to the documentary proof-of-concept project for capstone. I’m actually very excited about it- and Waliyu, Alyah and I are off to a running start. We’ve decided to try to go ahead with surveying the J-1100 class (the careers one, that I didn’t take) about their interest in a documentary class and/or sequence. I’ve looked into using surveymonkey.com to distribute and analyze the results- I think it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier than giving out paper surveys and doing the analyzing ourselves. After all, I don’t remember a thing from Statistics 1400 or whatever the prerequisite was for the J-School.

We’re also working on story ideas for our actual documentary. We’ve tentatively decided that we want to aim for a 25-40 minute documentary, and are looking for local stories that could justify that long a treatment. I’m struggling with story ideas- they’ve never really been my strong point and I’m feeling very out of the Columbia, Missouri story loop after being in Sydney last semester. Alyah rustled up an amazing idea from the Missourian newsroom, about the upcoming potential restructuring of the health care in Boone County jail. But we’re still looking, just in case.

We’re meeting with Paul Sturtz this week, and hopefully he’ll be able to point us in the right direction. But for now, I'm off to a Labor Day BBQ.

Better Safe Than Sorry

Sorry this is late- I was at the Missourian doing graphics all day yesterday and blogging slipped my mind. Beth summed things up really well. We're coming up with lots of content ideas and thinking about how we can improve the site. Since I'm getting lots of graphics training with the Missourian class, hopefully I'll be able to design some graphic elements since I'm not to adept at designing websites. I spent a lot of time this week looking at a bunch of different election sites and I made notes and sketches about what we could do. I'm also gathering the voter info. Things are coming along very well! Have a good long weekend everyone!