Ain't No Hollenbeck Girl

I just want to say that what Sarah Hollenbeck did during her Friday reporting shift was phenomenal. Not only did she do a very good job of telling a very difficult story, but she kept in mind and exemplified some of the things we're been talking about in both Jen and Kent's classes recently.

'One day in the near future, there will be no such thing as a lead story, because viewers will already know all about anything worthy of being the lead.'

Sarah was in Holts Summit all day to cover the deadly house fire. I was producing so I didn't have to be at the station until 12:30. But when I woke up at 10, I arbitrarily checked my Twitter and saw that Sarah had tweeted 3 times already about the fire. From there, I went to our website to see information there as well. Kent has said in class that we should have reporters calling the station by 11 a.m. to get preliminary info about their stories on the web. Sarah obviously had been doing this all morning.

Perhaps it's just because our in-class discussions are so fresh in my mind, but this really stood out to me as a great attempt on Sarah's part to practice this new-fangled 'multi-platform' journalism everyone seems to be talking about. And it didn't take away from her story. She did excellent reporting and had an excellent lead story at 5 and 6, but she still took the time to update on the web, too.

At the end of the day, Sarah (presumably) checked her Twitter for the first time in several hours. I heard her say from across the room saying how cool it was to see that people around mid-Missouri had been retweeting her tweets all day. That comment really proved to me the potential worth of Twitter if we use it correctly. I must say that I doubted its effectiveness at first because I didn't really understand what we were supposed to use it for. I thought it was just another way to redirect people to our website. That may be true, too, but I was impressed to see how quickly we could get out the biggest news of the day by far via Twitter.

News...'despite the struggling economy'

"AND WHILE THE ECONOMY IS DOWN IN THE DUMPS... ONE FAMILIAR PLACE IS SEEING A BOOST IN BUSINESS. MID-MISSOURIANS ARE CHECKING INTO THIS FREE PLACE TO HANG OUT."

"NOTHING IS STOPPING STUDENTS FROM ADDING TO M-U'S ADMISSIONS. EVEN WITH THE BAD ECONOMY ENROLLMENT IS UP. THAT'S NEXT ON KOMU 8 NEWS TODAY."

"THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS CAPTURED THEIR SIXTH SUPER BOWL TITLE TONIGHT... BUT WITH THE STRUGGLING ECONOMY... HOW DOES THAT CHANGE SUPERBOWL CELEBRATIONS IN MID-MISSOURI? THAT'S NEXT ON KOMU 8 NEWS AT 10. COVERAGE YOU CAN COUNT ON."

There's no denying that the economy is, well, not so hot. But economy seems to have become the new weather. Instead of: "Well the weather is warming up, and so is . . ." it's become: "the economy is down, but . . ." or: " 'such-and-so' is doing 'this-or-that' despite the struggling economy."

The economy is the worst it's been in recent history, true. But is it necessary to make a reference to it at every moment possible? Let's get interactive here...go into iNews and search the 2009 archive for "economy". In the box that says 'maximum hits' type in 50. How far back does the search have to go to fill those 50 hits? As of March 7...only 3 days! Now set 'maximum hits' to 500. How far is that now. Once again, as of March 7, it takes us back to the end of January. That's 500 mentions of the economy in about 35 days! Who's doing the math? Don't bother, I got this. That's 14-15 times a day on average. And that's just searching for 'economy' as in 'struggling economy', not 'economic' as in 'economic struggle'.

Feel free to disagree...maybe it's not too much. But what I feel like what the newsroom as a whole is doing is using the economy to build what would normally be non-stories into either tales of horror or make-shift, fuzzy feel-good stories about businesses succeeding 'despite the dismal economy'. I use the word using because instead of generating quality story ideas, we're taking the easy way out by going to a business that is or is not doing well and trying to take the 'angle' of the economy's effect on them. But that can be so superficial. Did anyone notice what happened with Square D in Columbia the past few weeks? Two weeks ago, an engineering magazine named Square D the top industrial plant in 2008. A quote from that story: "Despite a faltering economy, the company has increased shipments by 153 percent since 2004." Well that's great, but payback's a - well...you know. What happened to Square D this Friday? They cut 67 jobs. So much for them being so successful "despite a faltering economy."

On the producing end, I think this reliance on the economy to catch viewers attention (or at least scare them into watching) pervades in our work as well. It's the scaring thing that concerns me the most. This offense occurs most in headlines and teases. Are many of the stories we tease related to the economy? Sure. But is there a more creative way to tease them without leaning on the crutch that is the economy? I don't know for sure, but I think we can dig a little bit deeper and try to find out.

For KOMU 8 News, I'm Andrew McKibbin, hoping that 'despite the struggling economy', we can maintain the quality of our news delivery.

Flash Fun!

Producing shifts were WAY better this week. I had quite a bit of fun, and I'm feeling a lot more confident in the booth. There are still some things frustrating me, but I'll get better with time. I need to continue to improve my writing for sure. If only there were a sure-fire solution to doing that. Different TAs and Producer Chairs pull me in different directions so it's hard to feel like what I'm writing is right. Practice makes perfect though, I guess. It's the same with stacking my 'casts. The more I do it, the better I'll be at building those thematic chunks of content.

Web editing this week was kind of fun. Did some stuff with yesterday's stories. My fave was with Gelardi's stuff on the car dealership closing. I added the front image to the story page to give a little continuity. Then, I remembered from last night that she had had a graphic in about sales at that dealership. So why not include that graphic to give readers/viewers a different look at the numbers there? So that's what I did. Made it a JPEG 4x3 and online it went. But why stop there? I also put my newly-acquired Flash skills to the test. I made a sweet bar graph of the car sales data. The bars were the ups and for downs I added an oval with the exact number inside. I like it . . . it's hot!

Busy week coming up this week. I'm producing the 6 on Tuesday AND Wednesday, neither of which I normally do. I switched off of my Friday 6 and Saturday 10 shifts to make the most of True/False weekend with the wife. I got her passes for our one-year, so I figured I had better make time to go with her, too. So the first part of the week will be stressful, but a relaxing weekend will surely follow. We've reserved tickets to . . . I don't know, something like 9 movies (1 Friday, 5 Saturday, 3 Sunday). I'm really looking forward to it!

FML!!!

KOMU 8 News at 10 on Saturday was crappy!!!

Was it my fault? Maybe a little. Could I have done things differently to make it go a little smoother? Perhaps. Did I get screwed over by my PAs? Definitely.

It's over now so there's nothing I can do. Just move on and learn from it. That doesn't get me any closer to a resume tape or job though. It's so frustrating!!! We'll try again next week I guess.



I had an awesome, producer-y dot-com moment the other day. I browsed on over to KOMU.com to check out what stories had been on the past day or so and I saw the lead image for the superintendent search story. The picture was of an empty board room chair with some water glasses and stuff in the foreground. The headline read something lame like "Superintendent Search". The new headline hit me like a sack of bricks . . . "Filling the Seat". And then in the abstract, something like "The race to fill the seat of Columbia Schools Superintendent is down to two candidates." I thought it all worked together pretty well, considering the lead image. Once again, the curse of ACMing off-the-clock struck again as I did all this at home.

We met with Matt, Liz and the rest of the development team last week to catch up. Not really sure what happened or still where we're supposed to go, but there's time. I know we're going through the KOMU archive to try and find development stories. I'm just not sure what we're eventually going to use that stuff for. I'm very unsure of what my contribution will be to this project. I'm not on the mapping crew so I guess that's not me; I'm not a reporter so I'm not really doing that either. I don't know where what I'm doing fits into the grand scheme of the project.

Pretty routine .com shift today. No 6 o'clock news cast; nothing new to do for the web. I messed around a little with some of the headlines on top front. Otherwise, not much going on. Still trying to recover from last night's disaster newscast.

DEVELOPING STORY: Development Project

Okay, so after our group's meeting with Matt last week, I'm feeling quite a bit overwhelmed by the task at hand. Although, I'm not really sure what the task at hand is. And I think that's what makes it so overwhelming to me. I'm the kind of person that wants to know: "Here's what you need to do; here's how you're going to do it; here's when you need to do it by." But I get the feeling that's not how this project is going to work. Another source of my uneasiness is the fact that I have no idea what we're talking about - all these TDDs and TIFs and whatever-the-hell else we're going to have to get into. And I'm not sure I quite get the question: who pays for Columbia's growth? Well duh!!! Columbia does! Or is the question more: at whose (or what's) expense (not strictly monetary) does Columbia's growth come? These are some ideas I feel I definitely need to get clarified.

Nonetheless, I'm going to do what I was told to do. After all, that's all I really know to do at this point. After a simple search in ACM for the term "development," I navigated through the results looking for relevant stories and placed them in the KSR-development category. I made it through all stories from today (Feb. 8, 2009) through Jan. 1, 2007. So I guess I made it through the past 2+ years. That netted us 35 KOMU stories in the development category. So there's a lot of material to consider, and at the rate of 35 stories every two years, there's still much more to uncover. It's going to be a lot of work to lend a self-fulfilling hand to this project.

Producing went much better this week, I think. I'm overcompensating in the booth a little for my timidity of past weeks. Previously, when I would get heavy, I would freeze up and have to lean on my TA to help my with what to drop. This week, as soon as I got heavy I was champing at the bit to drop something. I was more assertive, but unnecessarily so at times. Just have to find a happy medium. But I'm getting better, for sure. I'm more confident, more relaxed. I know what I'm doing. It's just perfecting everything like I know I have to do.

Holly and Randy have given me some names of people they know in the markets in which I'm interested. That's getting me excited about job hunting and networking to try and finagle my way into a job somewhere. But then there's the fact that I have no idea when I'm going to have a good resume tape, much less how I even make one of those when I've got the stuff to put in it. I'm just so nervous about what's going to happen. The real world = definitely scary.

.com editing is pretty standard for my Sunday afternoon shift. Just tidying up the mess, if you will, left behind by yesterday's content. Almost 24 hours later, we still had "Breaking News" on the homepage (body found in Missouri River). Not really breaking any more. So I got that taken down. The image in top news front for one story (Festival Promotes Heart Health) was sized wrong so I had to resize that and get it back online so it looks pretty.
http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/535fe0cd-80ce-0971-0046-d984faa9ebc9
I also added several sidebar pictures in stories to duplicate the top news front image and added descriptions to go under those.
http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/53a9fbdf-80ce-0971-004d-42e3a2fe21ad
http://www.komu.com/satellite/SatelliteRender/KOMU.com/ba8a4513-c0a8-2f11-0063-9bd94c70b769/53f66cf8-80ce-0971-017b-8877892603b8

There's the update. Reporting live from the Ocho, Andrew McKibbin, KOMU-8 News.

Producing Pressures

I've determined that Sunday afternoon is far from the ideal .com shift. There's hardly anything to do. But I was able to accomplish a good bit today. Jennifer Noncek had her 8 On Your Money HFR run today and so I got to do some work prepping all that to go online. She had TONS of web extras for me, which was awesome. I had to scan in a handful of PDFs and she had some other links, too. We got an image uploaded as well, and then edited the web version of her story for AP style, spelling, grammar, etc. That was lots of fun. I felt like I was back in my copy editing class again from last semester. So it was definitely cool to be able to put those skills into practice again.

So there's .com week #2. But what else is going on in the life of Mr. McKibbin?

The pressure is definitely on. At least in my opinion. Only 3 and a half months 'til graduation day, and that figure is shrinking fast. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do now. Producing really seems like it's the ticket for me. It's just a matter of being good enough at it to land a job. Last week's Friday 6 wasn't so hot. I just am not quite comfortable yet, or at least confident yet, in my decision-making and writing. But hey, I've only been at this for 2 weeks. It seems like a good excuse, but excuses aren't going to get me a job. Every show that passes that is un-résumé-tape-worthy keeps me from inching ever-closer to landing that first job. I thought I was a perfectionist; I thought I was meticulous; I thought I was obsessive. But I'm not . . . well - not enough . . . at least not yet. As I said, I've only been at this for two weeks and I know that's the kind of thing that comes with time. I just feel like I don't have time to not be good enough. I have to get good; I have to get perfect. And I have to get there soon. I HAVE to get a job.

At this point, I need to strive to make those small steps, win those small victories. And not stress about making such huge strides. Shoot for the moon though, eh? Land among the stars . . . something like that. We shall see.

KOMU.com: from the comfort of your own home

OMG, jenleereeves, what on earth have you done to me??? First it was Twitter, then this newfangled blog thing, then Ning. Now you've turned me into a KOMU.com web editing junky!

I awake from my deep slumber Tuesday afternoon after producing the morning show. All I want to do is lounge around my room, watch t.v., play video games and other college kid stuff. But first, why not arbitrarily navigate to KOMU.com (Answer: because it will suck you in, sending you into a downward spiral of "p" extracting, image resizing and subsequent blogging about it)? So I'm scrolling through the Top-Front and I find a slew of pretty glaring mistakes (see below). Thanks to the KOMU database thinger, I found the link to ACM, and that was that. I've been seated in front of this screen for 40 minutes now, dedicating my life to making KOMU.com beautiful.

Once again, all from the comfort of my own home. Thanks Jen, for ruining my life (but not really, you've just made me a .com nut).

Top-Front Badness:
Top-Front #1, Clinch Trial: Extracted "p's" to get rid of ugly space between head and abstract
Top-Front #2, Nuclear Plant: Headline was entirely to long, shortened; HAD NO ABSTRACT!!! Moved first line of story up into abstract.
Top-Front #3, Help for Homebuyers: Image was tiled (EEW!); resized.
Top-Front #4, Cruise Line Jobs: Image wasn't big enough; it had a strip at the bottom that was just grey. Resized image.