Survivors

My second week working at KBIA was a major improvement on the first. I think I did pretty well my first week, but it’s always hard when you’re getting used to an environment that is new. This week I worked on a story about the Jewish Student Organization hosting a speech by a local resident and holocaust survivor. I started out by contacting some of the people involved with the organization to get some soundbites to use in a short piece for the afternoon. After talking to a few people it became obvious to me that the story wouldn’t be very good if I didn’t contact the speaker and get a bite from her. I found her in the local phone book (it took the KBIA staff a second to find me one) and had a conversation with her that provided me with compelling bites that fit the story much better than what I had gathered so far. I spoke with Janet before leaving and she suggested covering to the speech that night. She thought it would be interesting to get an audiences perspective after the event was over and run it on the morning broadcast. I went and I ended up with a story that was much more interesting than I had expected. I thought I would ask students how the night made them feel and get fairly typical and unemotional responses. I was partially right. I got a few of those. Before I left I decided to ask one more person what their feelings were about the night. He was an African American man (several years older than a traditional college student) who was there with his wife. I didn’t really expect anything in particular besides a point of view that was different from the ones I had gathered so far. I was surprised to find out that what he had to say would turn what would have been an ordinary story into something special. He said he came there because it was the 16th anniversary of his wife losing her family in the genocide in Rwanda. He said that they wanted to hear the speech and talk with the speaker afterward because they share a connection with her. While I was interviewing him, his wife and the speaker were saying something to each other in French. A survivor of the holocaust in German occupied France and a woman who lost her family many years later in a different genocide in Rwanda, sharing their experiences with each other in Columbia.

The story is here. Make sure to listen to the audio not read the text. It was written to be an audio piece.

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.

Live from True/False

For my first shift at KOMU I worked with Alex Rozier. The KOMU shift for a convergence reporter consists of shadowing a reporter working on a story for one of the day’s newscasts. The convergence reporter is supposed to observe the person they are following and take still photos related to the story for KOMU’s website. The whole situation was a pleasant surprise. I was a little worried that I would get assigned to a story that didn’t have a very good visual element. Alex was covering the grand opening of the True/False film festival live on the 5:00 and 6:00 newscasts. It was really neat to see how the live spots work. They weren’t able to communicate with the station through the typical channel so they used cell phones and did the story without the ability to hear the cues from the studio broadcast. For my part I took some photos inside the packed box office on Ninth Street. The slideshow I made is running alongside Alex’s story on KOMU.com. You can see the story here.

Let's have an auction

I did my second story for the Missourian this week. This time the editors wanted me to attend a statewide auctioneer competition and create a video of the event for the website. I was pretty intimidated by the project in general because video is definitely the medium I have the least experience with. I was the only member of the press covering the event and as a result I received a lot of attention from the organizers. I feel pretty good about the amount of soundbites and b-roll I was able to get. The big areas for improvement are on the technical side. I didn't think to bring a light so my interviews are extremely dark. We used Final Cut to edit. Because I wasn't familiar with the program the time I could have used to voice the video was taken up by learning the software. I'm glad I've been assigned to do some video this early in the semester. Hopefully it will be less intimidating later if I need to do it for a team story.

Here is a link to the story.

Year of the tiger

I did my first story for the Columbia Missourian on the celebration of the Chinese new year at Jesse Auditorium. The assignment was to accompany the reporter that was writing a story on the event and get audio/photos that would add to her story. As with most reporting projects at this point in my career my thought process started with evaluating my strengths and weaknesses and how they would affect the story. The best way to explain this is to do it in categories.

Audio: Audio is still a bit of a mystery to me. It is probably my favorite medium and if I had been born 50 years ago it would most definitely be my primary focus. To be completely honest here, on this project i focused primarily on getting good photos and let whatever audio I got accompany them. As I’m writing this it occurs to me that i should find some time to focus some attention on creating a good audio story. Perhaps the best way would to go to an event that has audio/visual components and try to create a story that exclusively uses audio to describe it. In the end, I spent a lot of time getting photos together and quickly threw together some audio for this. Probably not the best strategy, but you can only take on so much at once.

Photo: This part of this assignment was the most interesting to me. I don’t know if this is unique to me, but I feel like a still camera to a journalist is as necessary as a notebook and pen. I carry my camera with me to every story I do whether it be a photo gallery or exclusively video. You can’t properly document an event without taking notes and to the same degree I think you cannot document it without still images.

I started the process of documenting this event by consulting one of my convergence professors. I had never shot a stage show in a dark auditorium before, and I knew enough about cameras to suspect that the lens I had would be little use in that setting. My professor confirmed my suspicion and suggested I rent a lens from the school that is quite a bit faster than the one I would have used otherwise. The lens I rented was an 80-200 so I thought I probably wouldn’t be getting any wide angle shots. I should note here that it was really cool to use a lens that can shoot at f 2.8 at 200mm. Taking closeups in the dark from that range is something that had never been possible for me. I shot with that lens and my own d200 camera right up to intermission. During the break I met up with the reporter doing the written story on the event and she asked me to get a shot of a girl she was interviewing in her traditional Chinese dress. I told her I would try and explained that with the equipment I had I would have to be across the room to get more than the center of her face. At this point she told me she had rented a camera from the school and said that I could use that. She then handed me a d700 with a 14-24mm f2.8 lens. She told me I should just hold onto it for the second half and take some shots with both cameras. If you know about cameras you can imagine how exciting this situation was to a guy wanting to get some photo chops on his first assignment. When the show was over I had taken over a thousand pics between the two cameras and was on a high comparable to a child’s after being put in charge on an FAO Schwarz.

I should probably apologize here for all the boring camera talk, but the experience warrants being documented if only for me.

Working with the reporter writing the piece was a really fun experience. After the show we sat together at the convergence desk in the Missourian newsroom for most of the night working on our pieces and taking time to help each other out when needed. She submitted her piece at around 4am and I finished mine a couple of hours later. In the end it ran on the front of the Missourian website for about 12 hours and made the top 30 stories for the paper for the week. All and all a very rewarding experience that reminded me of why I chose to come to journalism school at Mizzou.

Here’s a link to the story.

Camera

I bought a Nikon D200 this week. While I appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to borrow equipment from school, a camera is something I feel like I should own. I'm hoping this will help me get used to thinking like a photographer more of the time. I can't help but feel that developing solid skills with a still camera will help my visual skill set to improve as a whole. Now it's time to practice.