New Frontier in the World of Sports and Weather

I am no longer on content team which means I no longer have to go out and get stories and have my weekends booked up with this work. It is both a relief and a bit sad as I was kind of enjoying making stories. I am glad that I don’t have to try and schedule interviews and meetings anymore with people for stories. I get to come in on Mondays and Wednesdays and get everything ready then for the news. I do hope I can do okay in front of the camera.

On our first day of practice it went okay, and then fine and then terrible. When we got to practice on the news desk the first time I did fine. I was able to read the teleprompter just fine and I did not stumble too much on any words. The next practice I got to try my hand at sports and weather. It was not bad it was just a bit hard getting used to the green screen and the map trying to point out stuff using side monitors and such. Then I got to try the news desk again and for some reason I could not do it. I messed up on a story and it made me laugh and I just could not stop laughing. It was horrible and the story was kind of a sad one so laughing during it just made it worse. Thankfully I was able to do the actual weather and sports just fine live the next time.

It was a bit tricky writing for sports. I apparently have a tendency to write long and try to get every bit of detail I can in a story which is not what we want for a newscast. I was able to cut some content and make it short enough for a good news read, but I still cannot seem to write short enough stories. Hopefully it gets better by the time I switch to anchor. The worst part of sports is the players’ names and trying to figure out how to pronounce them. I just had to say them confidently and make it look like I knew how to say their names.

Weather was not so bad it was pretty easy to write and to create the dekos or graphics. It really helped that I did not have to go out and shoot weather VO which made my job even easier. It took a few tries, but I feel I got the weather broadcast live down by the time I was finished in that rotation. I was not too great at ad-libbing however. I feel I could have done better in that area.

There was one day where our producer wanted to try and change things up and have the weather person (me) try and do the weather tease live on the news desk with the anchors. It went okay but I felt like I could have done better since it was all ad-libbing at that point. It would have helped as well during the current conditions map and five day forecast as it would have looked better if I wasn’t just looking at the camera the whole time. It was fine though and everyone said I did a good job.

I will be switching to anchoring next and I am a little nervous to try that. I have never had an urge to be in front of the camera and I feel like I will mess up, even more so after I lost it during practice and could not control my laughter. It is not that I am camera shy or anything, I just like working on the stuff behind the scenes more. I guess this will be a good chance to get outside my comfort zone and try something new. Now I am excited to try this out, which means I guess it all depends on what mind set you go into it.

The one thing I am not excited about is doing producing. I’m not excited because everyone else who has done it so far did not seem like they enjoyed it. It does not matter right now at least as I won’t be doing that for a while so I have some time to get ready for it.