Eyes Glued To The Computer
I underestimated the job of the Web Graphics Teammate. It may have been the fact that no one showed up for their web shift, or that at least added some stress, but this week was harder than I had expected.
It is so important as the Web Graphics Teammate to be "glued" to your computer. At all times the Facebook page, Twitter page, City News Service, CNN, KTLA, and so many more web pages should be pulled up on your screen. The website and social media is ATVN's only way to report breaking news during the day. Not to say that a Web Graphics Teammate should ignore everything else around them, but throughout the day, your computer will be your best friend.
In the morning, it was difficult choosing which stories we wanted to develop for the web. Most of the stories we were covering, with the exception of around 3, were not local stories and therefore, not ideal for our web page. I ran into the first roadblock when it hit 11:30 a.m. and we had one story on the web, with none of our material contributed, and no MJ's were back from their events. Part of this was my fault, it had completely slipped my mind that the web team should be gathering information on their own and calling people for quotes. That is something I will absolutely be focusing on early in the morning the next time I am Web Graphics Teammate.
The afternoon got better. I started filling out the graphics request sheets and was in constant communication with the graphics people on what I expected from them and what my ideas were for each graphic. In the end, I think the graphics, in particular the chroma key graphic, turned out nicely. I still need to brainstorm how to come up with better captions for the graphics, but with time I think that skill will come.
One of the things I really want to focus on using more my next Web Graphics day is social media. I now know that using the Facebook and Twitter pages will direct people to our web page to find their news. After each story is posted, it should be shared on both Facebook and Twitter to maximize our reach with each story. I hope that Team Monday can really focus on using our social media pages more to better ATVN as an organization spreading news.