I FOUND ONE!

I got to have one of those moments where you're at another newsroom working a day turn and all of the sudden its, "HEY! I found a story idea for 4804!!!!" Unfortunately, it was the last week of my newsroom shifts.  It's a story I'm pretty interested and might pursue later this summer.  It would require oodles of reporting, though.  So it may not have been suitable for a week turn project-- at least not without significant pre-reporting.  The story is how Missouri will be experiencing a spike in HIV in the very near future.  We had a syphilis spike for whatever reason (like I said, requires a lot of reporting...), recently and an HIV spike generally follows syphilis.  I find these kinds of things interesting and I'm not too sure why.  It's obviously an important story that is being missed by major media.  I'd like to report on it.... it's just a matter of having the energy post 4804.

The benefit of working in a day turn environment is it really, really makes you think on your feet and move a long a lot faster.  It helps get your speed + accuracy down.  Doing week long, indepth things does this to a certain extent... but having this dayturn experience really helps with some of the more minor editing techniques that could otherwise take a long time.  For example, putting together an audio story quickly and learning how to just drop things in and edit on the fly.  You learn speed out of necessity.

That's really all I've got for right now.  I have to find another topic and post it pretty quick so I can get full credit for blogging.