Working KOMU.com February 24, 2009

This week we had an interesting situation at the dot com station, we could either do a daily slideshow as we always do or invest our time with one story to tell a story through a slideshow. Brandon Lewis had gotten great video from a brush fire at a Christmas tree farm, so we made this slideshow. It was a good discussion, because although we could have done decent jobs making both, we tried to truly tell a story through the pictures.
As always, we made the story skeletons for our reporters. I've realized the two big days I work, Tuesday and Thursday, the reporter aren't thinking for the web enough. I'm really going to try and push the reporters when I'm working dot com and producing to take pride in the web angle. I knew this the whole time I've been here, but I'm finally doing something about it.....News Directors want to see your web abilities. So, if you have a great story that you can put on your tape, if you make a web extra, you can show that to them during an interview.
As the job search continues, I think everyday how glad I am to be thinking in a web sense. Mostly, in the end, the web experience could be the difference in getting an offer or not.

Working KOMU.com February 17th

Working dot com was splended yet again this week.  Athough Amanda and I messed around a little on flash, we weren't advanced enough to create something for the dayside reporters.  Hopefully this week, as we get the hang of it a bit better, we'll use it to make a cool web extra.

This week, I realized how important it is that I'm taking this class.  If nothing else, it allows me to walk into  news director's office and tell him/her that I understand news on the web.  Even though we are still just at the tip of the iceberg with our web knowledge, I'm confident hosting online programs and learning how to post video, write content and make slideshows will all help.  

In addition, this week's Best of Basketball was the best one yet.  Here's the link to that episode.  I wrote our web copy and made sure the video got posted.  I just think being able to show two fantastic athletes, combined with having fun while editing, made it the best episode so far.

One more week towards the inevitable end of college, but i feel a bit more confident than last week.

Working KOMU.COM February 10, 2009

This was another step forward in web knowledge for me. Amanda and I made another slideshow and set up stories for our reporters as we did last week. On the links and numbers page, I added links to a story about Autism and also to our slideshow. An important lesson I learned is to make sure franchise stories are new before working on them. I spent at least 15 minutes on a school report story only to find out it was a re-run. So, I wont be making that mistake again.

This week has been an eye opener for the job search. I joined TVJobs and saw a whopping 15 sports opening. It shouldn't be a surprise, all journalists at this school know sports has to re-create itself. Which is why I'm so glad to be taking this class. The added web knowledge can only help in an interview with a news director. Who knows how everything will work out, but at the moment, I still think at some point next year, I could be at a local television station talking about sports. Well, we'll just have to see wont we.

Working KOMU.com February 3rd

This counts as another successful week for Amanda and I in our continuing education of the web. Our big goal was to work with images this week. We went to each reporter and asked to borrow their video cards in order to get images. Once we collected all of them, we created a slideshow on flickr. Here is the link to the slideshow. In addition, we also helped put up reporter links on Robin Carnahan and discounts on the links and numbers page. Also, this week, we posted our first two Best of Basketball episodes both on KOMU's site and to the Best of Basketball Blog. I think all in all, I'm starting to understand the process of getting things on the web. However, I still need to figure out what people are really looking for on the web. So far, our stories are traditional packages. Hopefully we can figure out if people might want to see whole interviews on the web. All of this is in hopes of getting the best content to the viewer.