This is my blog while I am in the Super Semester class at Lindenwood University. My hope is that this will help document my time learning broadcast journalism.

Apr 3, 2016

Ready. Set. Crunch Time.

The weeks leading up to spring break were exciting and flew by. This is the time where I got a good chunk of my work done and spent much more time planning upcoming projects. Being a member of the content team was filled with pressure and stressful. I learned a lot about myself and the projects I want to accomplish before the semester is over.

Content Team

This is where the magic happens. Or at least where the more stress and hair pulling happens. Being on content team was constant work and lots of editing to produce something that was just a small minute and 30 seconds of a story. I am of course proud of what I do, but at the same time there are those moments of doubt where I consider if all that crazy work is worth the story.

This is what happens when your subject is taller than the tripod. Big thanks to him though for helping me achieve this.

Over the course of those few weeks I had the pleasure of working on various stories, most of which ended up being about sports. Some of the stories are not up yet, but will be soon on the YouTube page for LUTV News. As a part of the content team it was important for us to have material for the shows. It made the show and producer kind of look bad if there were no real stories in the broadcast. I tried my best to supply the show with a story as often as I could. When Avid decided to crash on us, forcing us to hold multiple stories it was a total mess. I never want to see that message again:

This basically says that we can no longer edit our stories we have spent multiple hours working on.

Things eventually were figured out for the next broadcast, and hey, we had plenty of content for that one! I did have a nice time being in the studio for each story I did. It was fun to be able to be at the interview stand and present something that I worked hard on.

It’s that side glance look that all the reporters are doing these days.

Coming up next after spring break I have a lot of ideas for stories, and I cannot wait to put them into action. I think I might take a break from the sports world and focus on something more feature like and more interesting to me. Basically, if I could, I would just film food-related stories all day if I had the opportunity. In a perfect world I would be working for Food Network alongside some of the biggest chefs and producers today.

Learning From Each Other

As a team we work together to get things done. We have all grown a lot these past few weeks. Many of us seem to have been able to learn from one another at some point in the semester thus far. I’ve learned editing techniques from Sammi, filming angles from Phil (basically all the good b-roll from Snow Snow) and tips and tricks on appearance from Cassie H. We are a weird bunch, but we are eachothers’ weird bunch of people.

Just a bunch of crazy news kids hanging out waiting for spring break to start. We’re not weird. You are.

One More Thing…

This post would not be complete without my Morning Glory video relating to what I experienced these past few weeks. I know I skipped last post, but I remembered this time. No worries. Sometimes I feel like this clip is kind of how our newscast can operate. Of course, again, this is a stretch, but as a working newsroom we all run into these “problem people” or more so for us, problem situations. Oh and the graphic problems, yeah, been there. That happened, kinda.

These next couple of weeks will be very telling on what will happen through the ending of the semester. Basically, we will all find out if I will actually graduate. It has been a long five years.