New Saturday Format!

Last night at Jason called to do the six for him... I decided to take the show for the following reasons:
1. I'm broke.
2. The experience.
3. I had nothing better to do (except clean my room).
4. Jason did my ten last week when I was exhausted from my retreat.

And it actually worked out well... Today was the first day (since I've been at KOMU) there's been two anchors on a Saturday show and I got to produce it. I know it's so nerdy, but I love it when I get to try new things!

Working with Jen and Nick was amazing because first of all, we're such great friends, but also because I thought their dynamic would be great on air and they are just very go with the flow people. As my mom would say our personalities blend.

One of the big stories was Claire McCaskill's rant on the bailout executives and how much money they made... I planned on doing a cold open with her SOT which talked about kicking sand in the faces of American taxpayers, but then Amanda Jagdeo suggested using it in a headline -- I got uber excited.

Ever since I was back in Detroit, I became obsessed with watching the local news there and critiquing it. I wanted to see what they did and what KOMU could do, but also to see how they structured their newscasts and the content decisions they made.

New boxes aka putting a slug/headline in the boxes came from Detroit, and using SOT's in teases and headlines became this huge idea for me. Tonight when I used it, I think the headline was incomplete. I needed more explianiation on the end of it. I used the SOT and then had Nick say, "KOMU 8 News at Six starts right now," and I don't think it really worked as well as I hoped. I needed Nick to say something else after the SOT.

I love trying new things... new dual anchors, SOT's in headlines. I'm so glad I have another year and change left so I can keep trying these new things! Wow... I sound like a geek. It's fun!

Sick... so I have time

I get sick once a year... always around the end of January, early February. Freshman year I got the flu, last year minor flu stopped by a very early dose of Tamiflu. Junior year? I just got confirmation of a sinus infection.

Now, I am not one of those people who are going to let a little illness get them down. I hate missing work and feeling unreliable. I hate missing school and falling behind. Overall, I just power through whatever I've got because it just makes sense to me. It's the classic control freak in me.

I made it to three of my four KOMU shifts this week. Unfortunately, the one that probably matters the most (no offense Jen!) -- my reporting shift for B3.

Let me just say... producing, doing my web shift (or for that day teaching recuts) and writing cutins are not fun when sick. In fact I don't recommend it at all. There is such a thing as taking rest when you are under the weather.

Because there is no nightside reporter on Monday nights, there wasn't a whole lot for me to do when I got to the station for my web shift (and Nick had it under control), I got the task of teaching recuts delegated to me. I actually enjoyed this role a lot for this reason: I truly got to explain the concept of iNews, NewCutter, NRCS, NewsChannel, Pathfire, among countless other things to the new PA's.

Now I've trained people on recuts more times than I can count, and you can tell the difference between the people who learn it and the people who memorize it. The people who learn it then understand the difference between what everything is and can process it a whole lot easier. Plus, the things they learn they connect with reporting later on. And as nerdy as this sounds, I liked being able to help them learn it.