Public Broadcasting

I worked at KBIA this week for my newsroom shifts. For those of you who don’t know KBIA is Columbia’s NPR affiliate. My shifts were in the news department working on local stories to air during breaks in the afternoon NPR programming. I really enjoyed the atmosphere in the newsroom. It has a surprisingly laid back feel considering everyone is working on broadcast deadlines. It must be interesting to work on live broadcast deadlines all the time. It provides a very definite moment when your story MUST be done or it simply will not air. I ended up working on a few stories over the two days I was there. Thursday I did a piece about Earth Hour. I did a short version for that afternoon and a longer one with VOs for the next morning. Yesterday I did two short pieces. The first was about Columbia Photo staying open under new ownership, and the second was about the city officially submitting its application for the Google fiber network.

Cameras

For my second shift at KOMU I worked with fellow convergence student Jenna Pike. This was a prerecorded package story for the 10:00pm newscast about a new light timing system being installed on Grindstone Parkway in south Columbia. My fears about working on a story that wasn’t very visual for still photography came true for this story. We went to Jeff City and spoke with a department of transportation official in his office, then spent quite a bit of time getting b-roll of traffic on Grindstone. I took a lot of pictures of traffic lights and cars backed up/moving through intersections. I made a slideshow for the website, but it didn’t end up posted with the final story. They did use one of my pictures in the “KOMU story toolbox” on their site. Even though the photo element wasn’t the best I did get to take an active role in helping to create Jenna’s story. She wanted her stand ups to be in the car while she drove down Grindstone, and I did the filming from the passenger seat for that part. She had a second reporter shadowing her that day who shot some b-roll of her driving by in the KOMU car. You can see the story here.