My Night As the Media

[Hayabusa]

I'm a mostly Native American student at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri: a historically black college and university. As part of our grade, the entire Electronic Newsroom class hosted a live broadcast from the campus-owned JCTV public television station. I was chosen to be camera operator.

While our primary results came from the major news networks and were relayed to our anchors, we did have several field reporters at nearby polling places, as well as reporters covering local Democratic and Republican watch parties in the city.

We broadcast roughly every 30 minutes for about 5 minutes each time, and were frequently praised by both our instructor as well as the head of the TV station for our efforts. One of the field reporters, named Cherita, probably did the best of them all: interviewing a candidate at her watch party and paraphrasing his or her responses during her call-in to the studio (we unfortunately didn't the technology at hand to do actual live reports).

Our only fault came at the very end, when we both missed our cue to announce that Obama had been declared the winner, as well as having the teleprompter die towards the very end, forcing the anchors to wing it.

Coincidentally, Obama was announced the winner right before what was supposed to be our final newscast of the night.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting night that provided a lot of experience for all of us.

[grannie4peace]

1. when i was in school we got to make commercials

you had to do all aspects of the taping. i liked the camera work best!!!!

[Hayabusa]

3. Camera work

is awesome, I agree with that heavily. Whether it's the actual work, or joking around with the techs in the broadcast booth (as well as many others) in our free time. I also, about a month ago, operated all three cameras during a political interview show that the station did, interviewing the Secretary of State. The camera's are largely self-standing, but the shots do need to be lined up at the beginning and we need to make sure that they remain that way.

[ensho]

2. you all did good and thanks for the report

keep on 'being the media' and bringing people the real, true news.