Team D Newscast (4:20)

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Today's newscast was tough for a few reasons. The first time I produced I had the AP wire to rely on for stories. Sadly there is no Syracuse University wire on ENPS so I knew that there weren't going to be a lot of stories (especially given that it's a Wednesday). I knew we'd have to do a lot of borrowing from other news-teams this week to make this work so I emailed all of the producers last night so we could get on the same page. So I knew what everyone was doing before I got to the producers meeting today. Also, I didn't get much sleep the night before (Sport Management research paper) and I had to go to the stadium before class to do some things for my internship with the Chiefs so I was pretty tired, which made things a little harder. Anticipating that there wouldn't be many stories to choose from this week and not wanting our rundown to be light, on my way to class I remembered that my friend Sam has been working with The Fly on a new CD. I knew Sam had class at Newhouse at the same time as me so I got out my voice recorder and grabbed him for a quick interview before class.
Hannah was really helpful and organized which helped me out a lot. At the beginning of class she actually gave me a sheet of paper telling me where she would be at different times before the newscast. Also, during the time between her interviews (I was pretty impressed that she got two interviews) she offered several times to help me with writing stories and I ended up taking her up on her offer and she did a story about internships (I think it was originally Jake's story).
Things were going pretty smoothly early on. Because I already knew what all the other groups were doing ahead of time I was able to come up with a rundown really quickly. But as the day rolled on, it got kind of hectic in the newsroom because of all the story borrowing going on. Because we were relying on other groups so much this week (we were waiting on Jess for an architecture phoner), there was also a lot of waiting going on.
Simon got his phoner about sustainability at SUNY Oswego done pretty quickly and did a nice job of helping me edit and write the stories as we went along. Hannah got back too late from her last interview to be able to put together a wrap but it wasn't really a problem and she ended up just doing her piece live in the studio. As 4:20 neared, I really thought that we were going to be light so at one point I moved a floater about Zipped Magazine (which I believe was originally Flavia's story) up into the A block. At the last minute I decided to drop it back down to a floater, thinking that Hannah's story on Otto tryouts might run a little long. This ended up being a good decision because we weren't nearly as light as I thought we'd be, as we had only about 30 seconds left after the break. I give Simon a lot of credit for improvising a little bit on the SU softball kicker so that we didn't go over.
Overall I have mixed feelings about how things turned out today. I liked what I was able to do with my story about The Fly and I think I wrote more stories than I did the last time I was a producer, which is good. Simon stumbled over a few words as the anchor and I blame myself for that because if my writing had been sharper I'm sure Simon would have sounded smoother and probably wouldn't have slipped up as much. Also, as soon as the newscast ended I knew I made a huge mistake by leading with the dead body on South Campus story. I just know I'm going to get ripped apart for that when I get my grade on Sunday. For some reason I thought that because a death was involved that it would be good to lead with but in retrospect I guess it wasn't really relevant since it happened last Friday. So that's pretty frustrating for me. Still, we weren't light like I thought we'd be and our timing ended up being almost perfect. So there were positives.