First Shift at KBIA

KBIA is great! The staff and news directors give you a lot of freedom to do what you want. The atmosphere is very relaxed, and there are a lot of people willing to help and answer any questions one might have. My first 4 hour shift at KBIA was not a traditional reporting shift, but I do feel as if I learned a good deal about producing stories for the radio. The story I worked on was a audio slideshow about the True/False Film Festival. One of the convergence reporters working at KBIA for their capstone, Jacqueline (not sure if that is the correct spelling) asked me if I would edit and produce a audio slideshow about the festival. The interviews had been done and photos had already been taken, but it was my job to put it all together. There was a substantial amount of audio to go through from the interviews, but unfortunately some portions of it were unusable due to technical problems with the recording. The first time I went through the audio I pulled out bites that I thought would be good to use in the slideshow. When I had the reporter who assigned me the story listen to it, she said that they were good bites but they needed to be shorter. I shortened the bites and arranged them the way I thought they should be arranged. Again, Jacqueline told me that I needed to shorten the bites even more, and arrange them in a way that was "fun and artsy." I must have rearranged the bites about 4 or 5 times before the sequence was approved, and although it was frustrating, it gave me a much better sense of the structure of a radio story and what makes it interesting. Radio stories should have a variety of voices, and those voices should be animated. The natural sound needs to be intertwined throughout the story, not just in the beginning or at the end. The next step was choosing the pictures to go into the slideshow, and then arranging them to go along with the audio sequence I had created. Although the other reporter picked out some photos she wanted to see in the slideshow, I had the final say about which pictures made it into the story. I looked for a variety of photos, including close ups, wide angle shots, and action shots. The whole process took me over 4 hours, so I had to work on it at home and brought it into KBIA early the next morning. The slideshow turned out well and they put it onto the KBIA website. My next shift I pitched a story about the new fire station, as the groundbreaking for the new station was that day. Jan thought it was a good idea and suggested I go out to the site to get nat sound and talk to people. After about 20 minutes of getting lost I finally made it to the site, but alas, there was nobody there! I called the PR contact for the new station about 6 times, and his phone was busy every single time. i also attempted to contact several other officials but with no luck. It was about 4p.m by the time I made it back to the newsroom, and by that point it was too late to pick up another story so Janet told me it was alright if I just went home. It was discouraging to not be able to get the story, but I worked very hard in trying to do so. I am glad that I at least put together an audio slideshow for the KBIA website, and I thought it turned out pretty well.

P.S. NOTE TO THE EDITORS: When looking at the file in my finished stories folder look under KBIA/TrueFalse2009/truefalseslideshow.ssproj

Here is a link to the slideshow as well: http://real.jour.missouri.edu/content/kbia/slideshows/TRUEFALSE/index.html

-David Goldstein