Team C 4:20 Newscast

I believe this newscast pulled through well in the end, but just before air time we were in hot water. Several complications with story writing and printer issues were the reason.

Early setbacks with Flavia’s reporter story idea fell through, causing her to completely shift gears. While she came out with a good wrap and a good interview over all, she struggled to make deadline due to a late start on her new story. With plenty of over-the-phone communication including figuring out how to tweet by cell, this slowed my work on the rundown and story writing.

Jake did a great job of stepping up and writing a new kicker when the one I’d written failed to meet our news director’s approval. I had been on the phone with a reporter when Professor Nicholson said that it was not OK to write a story on the topic I had originally chosen. As a result I wrote the wrong kicker, Professor Nicholson discovered this late in the day, and fortunately Jake corrected the mistake in good time.

With the setbacks that happened, I found myself finishing my last story for Z-block--and making last minute adjustments to the rundown as Flavia’s story came in--just moments before our 4:10 p.m. deadline. I figured I could quickly hit print and we’d just make it on time to take position outside the studio. But in our hurry I’d forgotten Professor Nicholson’s announcement about the malfunctioning printer. I hurried to the BJ lab to print instead, but by the time I’d logged into a computer and brought our rundown up it was mere minutes before the show. I appreciate Jake wanting to find a way to assist with the printing issues at the last moment, but with Professor Nicholson’s instruction, he made the better choice to man the mic with a readiness to read his scripts off the computer screen if necessary.

I was able to print out one complete script before air time and have it ready for Jake to read. I signaled Ryan where necessary so he knew when to roll sound, but overall he did a great job of engineering without a rundown and script right in front of him.

Just before the show Ryan had let Jake know that he’d saved his audio files for his foner in Audacity rather than MP3 format, rendering them useless for the show. Jake did a decent job of ad-libbing instead when it came to the foner. Yet after that story I found we were lagging behind in time, and I made the decision to pull the R-Word story from the rundown. This set us slightly under on time, but by the end of show we had made up that time and finished about five seconds before our 4:26 p.m. end time.