Back to school

I am not so much ready to be back in school. Monday afternoon, I was especially not ready to be back. It was a little difficult to be productive, especially because I kept not being able to get tapes from people. But Amber and I wrote some teases, and then as we were all reviewing the web site with Staci, I had to leave, so I missed out on all that fun.

Wednesday morning I went to work on the web site again. Staci changed some things up, so now we're trying to make sure everything else still works with it. That includes picture sizes, lengths of teases, etc. The morning meeting was really long; there was a ton of news that day. So the time I wasn't at the meeting, I was trying to make the web site look as good as I could.

That was a way boring recap, sorry, but I'm still on spring break mind set. Next week I will dazzle your mind, I promise.

Let's talk sports...reporting, that is

Today in class we began brainstorming what it would look like to develop a sports news department of KUJH-TV and tv.ku.edu. Before coming to class today, the idea didn’t seem all that challenging to me. I thought, “Sure, we can easily put together some sort of sports reporting deal. If the Kansan can do it, so can we.” Today I discovered that it’s not that easy. But I’ve thought about it some more and have formed some sort of “modest proposal” for a sports department here at KUJH-TV News online.

Click here to read more.

Clean-up crew

As I walked into the newsroom bright and early at 9 a.m. this morning, I realized how much I like having two different shifts on different days at different times because I get to do--you guessed it--different stuff. Monday afternoon is "play with posting stories on the web" time, and Wednesday morning is "fix everything that's wrong on the flash page and go to the morning meeting" time. And that is what I did today.

At first glance this morning, the flash page seemed fine. But upon taking a closer look, I think I made some sort of edit to 4 out of the 5 stories on flash. We had the John Randle story still up, which I immediately took down because it didn't have the new information. Later Rick informed me that what I didn't notice was that there was video for that story that didn't match the copy at all. More on that later. Another story's headline didn't fit in the flash and had some mistakes, and there was yet another story with video that did not match copy.

I don't know why, but man do I love finding errors and fixing them. That's the beauty of online journalism. You can post, go back and fix, and go back and fix again. It was addicting this morning. While I was still trying to perfect the site, the morning meeting was starting, so I had to drag myself away from my task at hand. It was rough.

My favorite job of the morning however was fixing up the John Randle stories. Staci took the video off of the original story. Then I went and got the tape for last night's broadcast, re-captured Natalie's update, found her script, and posted it all as a new story. That was pretty fun for me because I never work past 3 p.m., so I never get to post video or story copies or anything like that. Yeah it was exciting. So humor me and go check out the final product.

Pictures, please!

I was posting a story to the web a few weeks ago about athletic scholarships, and I needed a picture to put up on flash. The problem was that Chris Kaufman was just going to use archive footage or something for the b-roll, so we didn’t have anything good to make a picture out of. So then Staci and I looked in the “library” of sports pictures we have in the newsroom. Let me just tell you, it was pretty bare. There were a few pictures of basketball players, but basketball was not the focus of the story really. I don’t remember exactly what we did, but I think we just posted the story without a picture.

Now I don’t know what it would take to get some pictures we could use in our files, but we NEED them. And I think we especially need sports pictures. Today in class we were discussing that one of the problems with sports journalism is that sports don’t happen during normal working hours. Which means we do stories about sports during the day without actually filming anything. Which means we have nothing visual to put on the web.

The first step in this process could be as easy as getting some archive tapes and capturing some pictures from that. But the problem with that method is that the picture quality wouldn’t be very good. My next idea is we should get some people on our staff, like KUJH reporters or even us online producers to just go and take a bunch of digital pictures at different athletic events. Whatever the way, we could really use some pictures.

I know this is probably really basic and obvious, but we’ve gotta start somewhere. I don’t think we should start going off on crazy ideas like different types of video or logos for everything under the sun until we get pictures. People love pictures. We should have a picture for every item that runs across our flash page on tv.ku.edu. Let's give the people what they want.

And just a side note, I’d be more than willing to get you some pictures at...let’s just say a men’s basketball game, for example. I’ve got a digital camera; just give me a press pass. :)