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