Week 9: Road Kill

It was another stressful week at KBIA. After last week, I decided that pitching a longer form feature story was a better way to go than doing day turn stories that take more than one 4-hour shift to complete.

So, Jen and I teamed up to do a story on road kill. It was my idea—I did a little story on it at my internship over the summer and thought it would be interesting to do for KBIA. Janet seemed a bit skeptical about it on Tuesday because we admittedly didn’t have a relevant news angle to it, but we kept pursuing it with her approval.

I feel like doing stories in one shift period is very difficult just because getting a hold of people and having them call you back is difficult. Tuesday was a bit of a disappointment. We made a slew of phone calls and ended up with only one interview. Thursday was much better. We got two or three interviews done and decided we would each go out separately over the weekend to get some good nat sound of cars and wildlife.

I think we’ve made the decision to narrow the focus of our story to be just on road kill involving deer because there’s a big safety hazard involving deer. October and November is also the high season for deer accidents, which are much more prevalent in Missouri than most other states.

Our original concept was to follow someone who picked up and disposed of animals on the streets, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen because of people not wanting to talk to us. It is also interesting because we keep getting pointed in different directions to the people that actually collect the animals. It seems like no one knows who’s in charge of the animals on the street, which seems like it could be a story within itself.

Anyway, I think the story is going in a good direction, slowly but surely. It’s hard because I’m still feeling the constraints of working within two 4-hour shifts just because I’m so busy with other things. KBIA is nice because they do have a laid back environment and seem to trust reporters to make the right decisions on our own, which is refreshing.

So, I think our story will be up to par eventually, although it may take a little while, so I hope nobody rushes us, since we are working as hard as we can. It will be a good story eventually.