Stories on Stories

So week two came and went, and all the little problems I knew would happen, happened! Although we got the show on the air and had all our stories in, the newscast didn't go as planned.

Team Thursday is already low on MJs and reporters, so it didn't help when we found out that many people had called in sick. This meant we were even lower on help for the day, so the morning started out stressful. The long day then consisted of lots of yelling across the newsroom, three very stressed out producers and a show that seemed not likely to go on. We also had breaking news on the death of Harris Wittles, executive producer of 'Parks and Recreation,' so there was a mad dash to call the LAPD and get the story in. 

Speaking of stories, story ideas are hard to find really. I check the budget the night before my producing day, to get a head start on knowing what is going on the next day. I also check up on ABC news, NBC and CNN. However Wednesday night, I was worried to find that there weren't a lot of big stories, just smaller and unimportant ones. I hoped that the expanded budget that gets released in the morning would have more for us to cover. But Thursday morning in the morning meeting, we struggled. The UCLA Superbug was a huge story, but other than that the news didn't seem big. We tried to flesh out a lot of different stories, but they seemed like fluff and weren't very visual.

The lack of volunteers really hurt us when it came to getting stories on air. A lot of the news we decided to cover was close to campus or on campus, but we didn't have enough people to cover everything. And then we didn't have enough people to edit video or SOTs. Even more frustrating was the number of people we had who didn't know how to edit, or who weren't camera trained. It was frustrating to have to keep checking on someone writing a story that should have taken 10 minutes, take over 30. My patience wore a little thin this week, which was something I have to work on.

Being graphics producer was an interesting position, since I haven't done graphics since freshman year. But I was unaware of some of the requirements for my position, which put a few people in a pickle (again everyone, SO sorry!). But overall we managed to get the show on air, and although we were light on packages, didn't have nearly enough volunteers and had mistakes on air, at the end of the day we produced a newscast. And that's what we're here to do, right? The mistakes will happen, the important part is that we learn from those mistakes each week, and strive to keeping doing better!

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