To the Depths of Hades and Back Again

This class is DONE! Not that I didn't enjoy the company of the editors or my fellow reporters on this long arduous journey, but I must admit the great joy i feel in having finally completed convergence reporting. Although it was by far the most intense and life consuming class I have ever taken, I learned a lot along the way. First of all, my interviewing skills have improved ten-fold. I am now much more comfortable during interviews and I feel that I have the skills and knowledge to ask the right questions and roll with the information I get, even if it is not the information I was expecting. My technical knowledge has improved greatly as well. I am now confident in my video editing skills using both Avid and Final Cut, and I have a much better eye for jump cuts, over exposed shots, sequences, and framing. I am also comfortable with Cool Edit and Photoshop, two programs I had not used very often before taking 4804. I was able to learn how to use the equipment better too. I know most of the settings on the Sony camera, I know how to set up the wireless mics, and I know how to adjust the ISO settings on the Nikon digital cameras. Knowing the equipment helps me produce better work in the field, in turn making my job in the editing room much easier. Perhaps most importantly though, my news judgement has improved immensely. No matter how good you are at editing, shooting video, or writing, you can't make a bad story good. The best stories start with good story ideas, or the ability to shift gears and recognize if you stumble upon a better story than the one you set out to find. This is what happened to Jordan and I for our second team feature story. We were having trouble finding a good story, so we set out to do a story about unions in Columbia. When we started talking to some of the union representatives, we learned that the issue they were really worried about was how MU's new pension plan was going to affect low income workers. Once we discovered this story, we were very excited because we thought we were really fulfilling the watchdog role in a way. We felt like serious journalists. I think the story turned out well but unfortunately the editors did not think there was enough new information for it to be published. The most discouraging part was that the Columbia Tribune ran a very similar story to our only a few days alter, but ours was better. Although that was very difficult to deal with, it pushed me to try harder to get some of work published.

A few suggestions for improving the class:

1. Buy some cotts for the Futures Lab. There were several nights where I basically slept there, and it would have been nice to have a bed.

2. Have the editor who worked with a team all week be the one to grade that team's story. It is hard to understand when you get a C on a project and you worked with an editor every day improving the story. We always appreciate the input of the editors and we are here to learn from them, but lets face it, all of the editors are very different and have very different views on what a story should be about and what direction it should have gone. If one editor tells a team to do certain things and the rest of the editors don't agree, then the team should not be punished for that. If one editor graded the project she/he had helped edit all week, I think the team grades would not suffer so much and it would be more fair.

3. Provide more opportunities for our work to be published. After spending an entire semester reporting, I was not able to get any of my team stories published. I was close once, but because the subject of the story no longer wanted to cooperate, Erica and I were not able to get the nat sound we needed for our story to air. I think that the expectations of the convergence editors are higher than that of the newsroom editors. I often see work published that is not as high of quality as some of the work produced in this class, and I wonder why we were not bale to get our work published. I know that just because something is published doesn't mean that the convergence editors would have published it, but I think that it does us a disservice because we do not have as much work for our portfolio as students in other sequences.

These are just suggestions. I thoroughly enjoyed working with all the editors and my fellow classmates, ad I would like to thank everybody for their help, hard work, and dedication. Until next year, GOOD LUCK AND HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!!!!

Investigative Story Week 1

So it turns out that none of our story pitches were excepted, at least not in their original form. Unfortunately, Craigslist was nixed, so we had to turn to our other options. Our third story pitch about handymen in Columbia was also given the red light. That left us with only one of our story ideas still standing, the story about the stimulus money being used to give two Columbia fire stations a face lift. The editors thought that this was a decent idea but wanted us to refocus our story to be more encompassing. At first Tony and I decided that we were going to take the same approach that we did to the fire stations and investigate if five other projects were using their stimulus money wisely. After some discussion with the editors and much deliberation, Tony and I decided that we would be even more encompassing and just investigate all stimulus spending in Columbia. We set out to give citizens an overview of what projects were slated to receive stimulus money, how those projects were chosen, how the stimulus funding mechanism works for Columbia, and what Columbia citizens stand to gain and loose with the completion of these projects. This was undoubtedly a daunting task, as the stimulus package is a highly complex issue, but we were able to get a great head start by interviewing the assistant city manager of Columbia, Paula Hertwig Hopkins. Hopkins is in charge of the city's stimulus spending and gave us an excellent overview of how it works. Currently, Tony and I are exploring important individual projects the city is seeking stimulus funding for. I am very excited about this story because I think we are fulfilling both the watchdog and the explanatory roles of investigative journalists. We have conducted several interviews already and have several more lined up for next week. i am confident that we have put ourselves in good position to produce an excellt story.

Preparing to Investigate

Next week we start working on our investigative stories, so the bulk of this week's work was spent preparing for that. Not only were story pitches due on wednesday, we actually had to pitch them on wednesday this week, which put some extra pressure on coming up with good story ideas. It was an imposing task coming up with a good investigative story because it requires a few extra components not present in normal team stories. I was forced to ask myself, what makes a good investigative story? I decided that it has to uncover something not previously known, often fulfilling the watchdog role of journalism. Or it must explain something that it complicated to understand, but necessary for citizens to know. I think that Tony, my partner for the investigative stories, came up with a good idea about exposing the seedy side of Craigslist, particularly in Columbia. It fits in well with current events, as a man was arrested for murdering a prostitute he met on Craigslist just a few days ago. I think this would be a very interesting story to pursue and anticipate that it would be extremely popular. I came up with an idea to investigate the plans Columbia has to spend stimulus money on giving two fire stations in town a face lift. When I discovered these plans my immediate question was, is this a good use of stimulus money? Is giving these two fire stations a makeover really going to help firefighters do their jobs better? Wouldn't this money be better spent on new equipment for the fire fighters to help them in the field? In order to answer these questions I would ask fire departments in other counties/cities how they would spend a large sum of stimulus money. We still do not know which story the editors will want us to pursue (if either) but Tony and I will get working on our story as soon as we find out what it is!

A Columbia Culinary Story...SWEET!

Okay, I know the title of this post is an awful pun, but I have been thinking about it all week and I had to get it out. Well now that that's out of the way we can get down to business. This story was a lot of fun to work on. First of all, Charlie and I got free caramel machiato something or others, courtesy of the Columbia culinary students, as well as a slice of delicious chocolate cake. I really cant think of a better way to start the day. Its a good thing we got those coffees because we sure needed the caffeine. Charlie and I went to the career center twice for about 5 hours each time, once at eight in the morning, and ended up working on the story until 9 that night. Thats a long time to work on a story in one day, but I think all the hard work paid off in the end.

Getting to the end wasn't easy though. We had quite a few technical difficulties with the camera, as well as some human error. The audio levels weren't set to the proper settings on the video camera, which made some of our audio over modulated. Because we were shooting a lot of footage of things that are white (cake frosting, chefs uniform) some of our video was overexposed as well. We realized it halfway through shooting and were able to correct it though, so we salvaged most of the video. It was also very loud in the kitchen so we had to deal with the humming sound from all of the equipment throughout our audio.

Despite these difficulties, I am proud of our final product. I thought our text piece was clear, concise, and well written. With some help from Victoria and our student editor, I think the video turned out well also. We had victoria look at our video at about 12 on thursday, which I know is a little late, but we had a lot of footage to sift through to make the video. Anyways, Victoria told us that the video didn't really cover any material that the text piece hadn't already gone over. She told us that we could improve it by tightening up the editing, redoing the voicing, and getting rid of the jump cuts. After some consideration, Charlie and I decided to scrap our old video and take a new direction. The focus of the new video was to highlight the winning students, their passions, and how they got to where they are. We rewrote the script, I voiced it instead of Charlie, and we went back to the drawing board in terms of b roll and interview bites. After many hours of editing and several more critiques by Victoria, I think our video turned out well. We also took pictures and ended up choosing one for the story. Overall we had three strong components and I think we deserve a high grade *hint hint*!

Latest

Well the 5th team is in the middle of the pushing through all of the final steps of our projects. Some of the things I am directly working on is I got our backstage passes designed and created. They turned out pretty well, except for on the one print out I got a little W-happy on the web address. As for my other aspects, I am starting to do twitter updates through the 5th team page doing today in Rock and Roll history and linking back to Backstagegallery.com to help generate traffic from interested users. For example: Today in 1946, Al Green is born in Forrest City, Arkansas http://tinyurl.com/dy2u8f

I think this is a pretty cool idea and hopefully it helps bring in some people. As for my other projects, I've been a little overwhelmed with other classes to really tackle these at the current juncture but in the next week hopefully I will be able to get these done. That's all for now.

NEWSY!

I'm really excited about my Newsy newsroom experience this week! The first thing that struck me as I walked into the Newsyroom was the rock band guitar controller and drum set laying next to a big screen TV sitting in front of a very comfortable looking couch. As soon as I saw the sweet set up they had, I knew I was going to like working there. But it wasn't just the video games, it was the snacks! They had free chips and candy, I was literally like a kid in a candy store (although I had to act like I wasn't interested at first, you know it's not professional to go straight for the food your first time working somewhere).

All joking aside though, I really loved working at Newsy. I was told that most 4804 students usually only pitch stories when they are there and are in and out pretty fast because they already have enough people working to produce content. But that wasn't my experience at all. As soon as I got there I was put to work. I helped some other students gather quotes and clips and write a script for a story about a new law in Afghanistan that critics claim essentially allows husbands to legally rape their wives, but that Afghani officials said follows Muslim religious law. I learned how to search the recordings of news programs and cut video clips to be used in the stories. I also learned how to pull sections of video straight of the internet. During my second shift I was able to shadow a senior convergence student working at Newsy during the editing and producing process. I learned specifically how newsy packages were put together and picked up some cool Final Cut tricks that will definitely help me in the future.

Working at Newsy was a really great experience and I enjoyed myself immensely. In fact I enjoyed myself so much that I signed up for the Newsy class next semester, Advanced Global Converged News, and switched my concentration to online journalism. I liked the environment of Newsy, the people working there, and the work being done. I cant wait to be more involved in the writing and production of stories at Newsy next semester, and to see what great experience I will gain!