Twitter v. Facebook

I've noticed a trend in both the media and the people I hang out with to be dismissive of Twitter as a place where people share the mundane (e.g. what color t-shirt Ashton Kutcher is wearing today) and it kind of bothers me. The longer I use Twitter the more I begin to rely on it. I don't know if i was an early adopter in most circles, but within my group of friends I was. I've noticed that the kind of mundane information that my friends complain about is very commonplace on Facebook (a place where many more of them have accounts) and the longer I use Twitter the more I rely on it for information that is important to me. Perhaps it is a result of news outlets adopting Twitter as a place to quickly distribute information. It may have something to do with the ability to follow people who aren't following you. Whatever it is, I feel like my friends are missing out on an opportunity to get the latest information, while saving themselves the time they spend looking for it. Oh...and if you are waiting for the next Britney or aplusk tweet, you're missing the point. Unfortunately the numbers indicate that you 'point missers' are also in the majority.

Of Montreal

I had a reporter for the first time this week for my Missourian shift. I worked with him over the weekend to find a story for him to cover and ended up coming up with something that wasn’t on a day when I would be there. I assigned him to go get audio from the Of Montreal show combine it with images from photo to make an audio slideshow for VOX. The finished product turned out pretty good. I didn’t actually edit the show, but I spent quite a bit of time coming up with ideas for reporters throughout the week.

Summer Missourian

My Missourian shift was fairly uneventful this week. It was part of a very long day that included a 4 hour KBIA shift in the morning and an 8 hour Missourian shift that evening. I went to the story meeting, but didn’t have much to contribute because it was my first shift. We also don’t have reporters this week so I used my time there to get used to the Trax system and to look for stories for next week’s reporters. I feel like I have a decent grasp (the photo editor was very helpful) and have some ideas for stories for Davis to work on next week.

Summer semester begins

This week I produced three radio stories for KBIA. It was pretty much covering your standard day turn stuff which is what they need right now because their broadcast students haven’t started yet. I told them I would be glad to cover whatever day turn type stuff they need me to until they get more reporters in the flow of things. One of my stories was a pretty boring piece on potential flash flooding. Spoke with the National Weather Service in St. Louis for that one. The other two stories ended up being pretty interesting. The first was a follow to a story about a teen who escaped the juvenile services vehicle that was transporting him and jumped off a bridge into the Missouri river. I just did a basic follow up to see if they had found him and what they expected to find (or not find) when they did. The second story involved the Kahler case and was about the courts decision to allow his son to testify over closed circuit television. I was almost done with what would have been a pretty one sided story when I got a call from Kahler’s attorney. I immediately interviewed him, but had to leave after that. Courtney finished the story and gave me a producer credit. I told them before I left that I didn’t feel comfortable running the story without putting the second interview in and they agreed. If I were an employee of KBIA I would have been able to stay to finish it myself. In my current situation I have many other obligations, including more to class and some to work, that prevented me from doing that. Links to the three stories are below.

Flood

Bridge

Testify

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.