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.