Week 5: Busy

This week was unique from what I usually do because this week I am also supervising the reporting students with their stories, which is a nice change and challenge.

My group is working on a story about field trip budgets being cut. Overall, I am incredibly impressed with how ambitious they are. They opted to do a KOMU story opposed to a Missourian story, so I admire them for taking on the challenge. They talked to a ton of people, but they were able to pull it all together.

At Newsy on Tuesday I was assigned to continue on a story another student had started. It was on the Facebook poll put up asking if President Obama should be killed. I hadn’t even heard about it, but it is as awful as it sounds.

Anyway, despite coming in with pitches of my own, I finished up the research on the Obama story and was surprising assigned to start producing it in Final Cut. Going solo on my first production story freaked me out a little, however, I used it as an opportunity to figure out once and for all how to use Final Cut. It turns out that just sitting down and messing around with Final Cut is very useful.

It took me a while to produce the story and I’m sure someone could have done it better, but I did it and I’m excited that I was able to produce something on my own. Here’s the link: http://www.newsy.com/videos/hate_in_the_facebook_age

On Thursday, I had the idea to do the story about President Obama being in Copenhagen to schmooze the Olympics committee into choosing Chicago for 2016. However, apparently somebody had already pitched the idea and it was rejected because Newsy didn’t think they could turn it around in time before the Olympic city was announced, which would trump this news.

I understood that. So I teamed up with my fellow convergence colleague, LaurieAnn, to work on a story about China’s 60^th anniversary of communism celebration. It was an interesting story, so we wrote a script and found a lot of different perspectives. Check out the link:

http://www.newsy.com/videos/celebrating_60_years_of_communist_rule

My group finished their story somewhat successfully. It was cool to be on the other side of the reporters and see what goes on behind the scenes that you don’t necessarily get to see in the reporting class. I have my last group next week (project managing shifts seem very short), so hopefully they’ll do just as well.