Housesitting

I have been watching my friends house for the week and I haven't had access to a phone. I do have broadband internet access and have been using my computer to keep in touch with people. It has given me the opportunity to become more acquainted with Google Voice. It is really an amazing service. I have spent over a week using it as my only phone using its text and voicemail features to communicate. I don't know what the future holds in terms of potential VoIP features or payments for the service, but right now I really can't believe it is free.

Parents as Teachers

I've been working on a story about Parents as Teachers for what seems like an eternity. I finally submitted an edited draft of the script today. Such a relief. I've been pretty disappointed in myself because this has taken me so long. On the bright side, it has been an opportunity to learn how to balance doing day turn stories with a feature. I have been able to turn several shorter stories over the past few weeks. I'm really hoping I get final approval and can get the audio mixed quickly. I've never been so ready to be done with a story.

Life After Mizzou

I've started thinking more about what I'm going to do after I graduate. Going to grad school is becoming more and more appealing. I feel like it would be worth the monetary investment and would be a good resume item should I ever decide I want to teach. The question is where. Starting out at a program as good as Mizzou's narrows the field of appealing options pretty dramatically. I really like it here and will apply here if I apply anywhere, but I think I'm ready for a change of scenery. I'm thinking of looking at some programs in New York so I can make connections in a big city. I suppose I should just apply and see where I get in before I spend too much time speculating on where I want to go.

Summer Slump

It has been pretty crazy to go from my reporting class last semester straight in to the Editing class I'm in now. I'm so used to having a break after classes end in the Spring. I've taken summer classes before but never with no break at all. I have to admit I'm getting pretty warn out. I really wish I could find a way to stay more motivated more consistently. I think the people who can stay consistently enthusiastic about what they are doing are the ones who end up getting ahead. The class ends at the beginning of July and that's when my summer will begin. To think, someday I won't get summer breaks at all. Hopefully getting paid will make up for it.

Conference Clusterf@#%

I have become OBSESSED with following the conference realignment story. I don't know what it is about this story, and why I can't stop reading about it. I was born and raised in Missouri and have been a Mizzou fan for my entire life. Maybe that's it. If it is, it's the first time the school has done anything that I became this involved in. Maybe it's because it seems like a once in a lifetime story. I must admit I feel some guilt about the fact that there are much more important things going on in the world that I don't become anywhere close to this involved in. I have pretty much cut off the typical places I would go to get news and have been spending most of my time reading PowerMizzou. On a side note, I think it is very cool that Gabe DeArmond (primary writer for the site) is a j-school grad. I think he does a very good job and assume he owes some of that to his education here. Heres to hoping this story comes to an end soon, because I desperately need to get on with my life.

New Floors

I've been helping my friend put new floors in his house over the last few days. He decided to go with laminate which is completely new to me. I worked in construction for a couple of years and saw a few different types of floors installed during that time. Hardwood was probably the most interesting (and best finished product) to see being installed. The guy that did our hardwood flooring was named Dan and he drank Busch out of cans from the time he arrived on the job site until he left (probably when he was too drunk to be interested in working anymore). He had a very large mustache (presumably soaked in Busch beer for most of his waking hours) and i referred to him as the "floor whisperer". Who knew a drunk man could put in such beautiful floors, but he sure did. The laminate in my friends house is designed to look like wood and they are getting pretty good at making it look real. There were some tricks to installing it, but once we figured it out it went pretty fast. It's primary advantage, though, is its low cost. Wood is expensive and, drunk or not, Dan's work doesn't come cheap.

Google Voice

I finally found a way to get a Google Voice invite a few weeks back. Someone I follow on Twitter sent out a link to a special page for students to request invites. It only requires that you have a .edu email address to submit to them and you will receive an invite within about 24-48 hours. So far the service is really cool. It does many things, but notably it gives users a Google voice number that you can forward to any and all phone lines. You can create groups of callers and have them forwarded to certain lines and you can text for free from it. It gives you free domestic long distance for those of us who still have landlines without it. Another very cool product from Google. This one might be up there with Gmail for me. The company kind of whiffed on Wave (at least so far) so it's nice to see them come back such a cool product. If you have a .edu address and want to try it out, follow this link to request an invite.

BEER!!!

I started brewing beer recently with my friend phil. It's something I've always wanted to do but never found the time or money for. It has been surprisingly successful so far, probably due to the assistance of a friend that has quite a bit of experience. Our measure of success for the first batch was 'something drinkable' and the finished product was much closer to 'something enjoyable'. We tried to make it as simple as possible for the first batch and intend to add to the process as we get better at it. I'm considering buying some brewing equipment of my own in the near future. At this point all the equipment belongs to Phil.

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.

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.