Smooth move

I'm real good. I decided it would be cool to change my blog design, but then I lost the video and don't know how to put it back on. Don't worry...I'll get this sorted out by the end of the week. I know you all can barely stand to go a few days without hearing me talk about being an x-man and ruling the world.

Addicted to the newsroom

I feel like the opposite of most people in our class right now. I did my 693 project already, and it wasn't anything fabulous. Now I'm working on the 695 project. I talked to Eric Sorrentino, the reporter about it, and we're proud of ourselves for following through on this. His story already ran in the Kansan, so now we're waiting until they run a similar story on KUJH to post the story to the web. Meanwhile I'm working on getting together this graph, which I'm also really proud of, and a couple other things to make it look pretty. There's not a whole lot to work with, but I'm trying. And I keep finding myself going back to the newsroom or staying late to work. It's addicting. And way better than any other work I'm supposed to be doing now.

So today and Monday I spent most of my time working on posting that story and creating a graph. I of course did some work to maintain the web site as well though. This morning I edited some stuff on the site, and Monday I posted a tease for the story about the Adidas contract. It's a pretty sweet deal, but even though Nike only provided stuff for football and basketball, and Adidas is covering all sports, I still like Nike stuff better. Just a side note for you all--I refused to buy anything besides Nike shoes from the age of like 15 until the age of 20 when I finally caved and bought New Balance shoes. That's all.

Anyway, we've also been working on our design ideas for "sports TV." I'm still not too crazy about that name, but the rest of the group is, so it's okay. I do love our design for the site though. It's cool looking. I wish I could attach part of it here but it's saved in the newsroom and I'm not there. But all of our ideas will soon be published on the ehub, so check there.

That's enough of this blogging business. But I gotta give some shout-outs to Emily and Justin for being obsessed with my blog and reading it on a regular basis and leaving me good messages. You guys give me motivation to try to make this interesting. There's just only so many places you can go when talking about online journalism. I'm gonna go watch That's So Raven now.

Stress!

Monday was rough.

The 693 in-depth project I was in charge of posting on the web was running Tuesday, which meant I had to have it all posted by Monday night. The first issue was that my 693 reporter had not yet called or emailed me back, so I had to call her again that day. She finally got back to me around 2:15pm. All I had was a script, so she was frantically trying to find some meaningful external links, pictures and anything extra we could use.

Then I talked to Staci. She showed me how exactly I was supposed to post the story, and it was way more complicated than I had thought. I had to divide up the story into pages, and technically have some visual elements and stuff for each page. The problem is, I didn't have many visual elements, and I didn't have the time to do it. Not only did I have this assignment that night, I also had a Spanish paper due the next day. Sweet.

So after that I couldn't really handle the newsroom and needed a break. Let's just say I was dealing with some stupid dramatic outside issues on this day as well. So I walked out of Dole and had a slight breakdown on the phone with my friend as I walked across the Robinson field. But after some time I felt better and went back to the newsroom to tackle the project. But man did I hate life for a short time.

I ended up just doing what I knew I only had time to do and that wouldn't put me over the edge of stressfulness. I hope it was okay. See for yourself. Now I just have to take on my 695 project, even though most of the class is dropping theirs. I hope I get some bonus points for this.

Anyway, today I spent another good part of my day in the newsroom. I put the copy of a story up on the web site and went to the morning meeting as usual. Then I was back in the afternoon to work on our proposals for the sports site.

I'm pretty much ready for the summer. And I'm pretty much really excited that I will be done with schooling in eight months! I can't take much more of this education.

Sports TV design

It has been difficult for our design team to create a final design of what we want for the sports web site without knowing exactly what the content of the site will be, but we have a start. Let’s take a look into the layout of what will be sports.tv.ku.edu, or Sports TV.

Read more.

Why can't I get my comments until I make a new post??? Annoying.

The issues facing the sports site

The new task ahead of us web journalists is to create a sports web site for KUJH-TV. There are several obstacles we will have to overcome, such as creating a sports staff or a class, as well as being able to get into different sporting events to cover them. Besides all of those, we must also consider legal issues.

The internet does not deal with legal issues as much as television and radio. I took a class last semester on cable broadcasting, and we learned that the internet rarely faces issues in legality. There is just much more freedom with the internet. I think the main issues that web sites do deal with are libel, privacy and decency. I don't think the legal issues that we would have to deal with on a sports site are much different than those of a regular news site. So what are those issues?

I don't forsee us at the KUJH sports site having to face many major legal issues. As far as the biggest issue, I think it would probably be libel or privacy. Sometimes those two issues have very fine lines and it is difficult to tell when that line has been crossed. When we have a bunch of beginner journalists reporting on big sports, they're bound to make mistakes by not writing all the facts or reporting on things that should not be touched. The problem will be when those mistakes make someone mad. Another issue we might have is the temptation to just write stories based on other media's sports stories without actually attending games, or other kinds of plagiarism like that.

In reality, I don't think legal issues are our greatest concern. Well, at least not U.S. or Kansas government legal issues. The opposition we could face with this site would be from the University itself. Sports is almost everything at KU. Like I said in a previous blog entry, if we start doing hard-core sports investigating, we could definitely step on some toes. And if we make something involving KU sports look bad, we make the University look bad, and they would not like that. So I think the main thing we have to watch out for is offending the University to a point where they put restrictions on us.

After hours

This afternoon in lab, I worked on cleaning up the web site and also putting up a couple new stories on flash. I was also supposed to write some descriptions for stories that won awards, but I got distracted with the other web site work, so it never happened. Sorry Staci. I also called the Douglas County courts or something like that to get information on the hit-and-run case.

Then when I came home today, I started looking at the tv.ku.edu web site and kept seeing little problems. Like teases that were too long and slugs that weren't capitalized correctly. I basically have issues with wanting to fix and change so many things on the web site when I go look at it later. Sometimes if it's obvious mistakes I change them, but other times I don't know if what I'm thinking is right. So then I just have to stop looking at the web site until it's actually my shift to edit it. I don't know if it's a problem really, but I definitely am always wanting to fix things. That's all.

I'm getting a little overwhelmed with the work I have to do in class. I have to put stories up for a TV News II reporter as well as a Kansan reporter. Meanwhile, we're trying to plan out all of our ideas for this new web site and be ready to present it in a month. I just hope I'm not forgetting anything. Whatever, I can handle it.

So to sum up, I put some stuff on the web today, I'm kind-of an obsessive editor and I'm trying to keep track of all the stuff I have to do for this class in the next month. Now, to try to spice this up a little, here are my two favorite moments from my lab shift today:

1. Professor Dick Nelson asked Laura Phillips if he could use her facebook account. I mean granted, he just wanted to get a logo off of it, but it was funny. Everyone else tried to convince him to start his own facebook profile. Not gonna happen.

2. Everyone in the newsroom stopped to watch the CNN for a few minutes because these cops were actually exploding two suitcases that were found abandoned on capitol hill in D.C. It was pretty sweet watching a suitcase get exploded. I'm pretty sure there was nothing suspicious.

That's all, I'm out.