My Frustrations As A News Reporter
The week of November 2nd, was a very busy and frustrating week for me. I had three big stories planned to present in the super semester newscast. I made sure I did my research before actually submitting my story ideas to the graduate assistant, Caitlyn Baker. However, my new stories would once again get destroyed later on due to transportation issues. Moreover, I was planning on doing a vo-sot news story about a Saint Charles woman’s house getting vandalized for months with racist graffiti all over her walls. This would have been a great story to do because I could have gotten footage of the racist graffiti and the damage done to her house. In addition, this is still an ongoing case and Saint Charles police still don’t know who the criminal is. For this reason, I thought this could have been one of the best hard news vo-sots in super semester but since I could not do this news story, I was very angry. Another news story that I wanted to do was the construction on Fifth Street and how it would affect drivers living in Saint Charles. This would have been another good opportunity to make a successful hard news vo-sot but someone else already went to Caitlyn for this story, and I was very disappointed. Furthermore, I was planning on doing two different vo-sots on businesses that I thought were located in downtown Saint Charles. One of the locations consisted of a business name change to a restaurant. Also, the other location was a jewelry store that was closing down due to the worker’s retirement. My plan was to shoot two vo-sots in one day, and I was going to present those two hard news stories for the super semester newscast. Little did I know that Caitlyn founded out that those businesses were located in Illinois and this made me feel so bad because I got my hopes high for absolutely no reason.
Continuing this further, I have been planning on doing a hard news Nat package on the reason why the Lindenwood University President decided to change the Lindenwood logo and slogan. In this scenario, there have been a lot of issues that I had trying to set up a location for me to shoot this news package. In addition, the president told me that he felt that it would be best to do this news package at the television studio rather than his office because he wanted to get two other people that had something to do with his decision involved in this story. Also, he wanted to be at the television studio because he thought it would make my life easier. At first, I thought this would have been a good idea to shoot my news package at the studio but I later founded out that I would run into a brick wall. My professor Mr. Voss told me that there was a show that was going to take place on the date that the president wanted to shoot the news story. Moreover, Mr. Voss said that the only way that I could shoot the news story with the president is if we did the interviews very quickly so that we wouldn’t hold up the class from shooting their show. At this point, I was very confused on what to do because I had no idea on how long it would take to interview three people in a short amount of time. Nevertheless, I was extremely worried because I didn’t want to interfere with the other class nor waist the president’s time. This was an issue that I had to take the entire weekend to think about it in order to make this news package happen. Afterwards, I was in panic mode because my goal was to finish all of my Nat packages very early in order to finish my other packages. In the meantime, there was a story that I got a chance to shoot over the weekend. This story was about how the Delmar Loop’s St. Louis Bread Company restaurant was closing after being there for so many years. My friend Mike Gibson drove me to the site, and I filmed the restaurant along with other places on the Delmar Loop to get a lot of b-roll. In addition, I decided to interview my friend Mike because he has lived in University City for the majority of his life. After doing more research, I founded out that there was a petition for people to sign to keep the restaurant from closing.
This week really taught me what news reporters go through on a daily basis. I learned that whenever a story is destroyed, to keep finding other stories and never giving up. Overall, news reporters must be willing to whatever it takes to catch a news story that will get viewers interested, even if they put their lives on the line while reporting it. In conclusion, news reporting will be my starting point to being a broadcaster, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to be successful.
