I arrived for my shadow shift yesterday a bit earlier than supposed: not that much just 50 minutes. It was my first shadow shift and I wanted to be there before the due time to get a sense of KOMU and its people. I was later introduced to Michael Kelly, a KOMU reporter who is actually a B3 student as well! Michael decided to work on a story on building a second nuclear reactor in Missouri by Ameren UE, a company that provides utility services for parts of the state. The story took him to Jefferson City and needless to say, his shadow, that's me, had to follow him step by step. It was exciting to follow a professional broadcast reporter and see how these people do business! Michael is an amazingly energetic, focused and to the point reporter. He knows what he is looking for and happens to get it very well, even when the story lies in hours of exhausting and boring talks in official meetings!
KOMU reporters use different cameras than we do at Broadcast department. Seeing those cameras, which looked kind of fancy, I couldn't wait to learn how to operate them. I asked Michael about it and he said KOMU will have an equipment training session for us when we start doing our actual shift.
At KOMU, one person has to do all the work: shoot, talk to people, put the story together, write the script and edit the video. And Michael did every bit of it very well! Once in Jefferson City, being the shadow of him, I stood behind Michael in a fully-packed room of over 120 people. Since Michael was busy shooting videos, I started taking occasional notes from what the speakers were saying just to provide an additional help to him. I did not want to be an observer only, one who follows the reporter at every step but does not bother to lift a finger to be a real help. And Michael was kind enough to make me feel some worth in doing the story with him. Once back to KOMU's modest newsroom, I sat by him and would offer my suggestions whenever I felt like I had one. And being such a cool guy as he was, Michael was quite open and receptive to those suggestions.
We were there for over 90 minutes but Michael only shoot for around 30 minutes. A good reporter like him know what he wants and just doesn't waste his time shooting for hours and later using only a little bit. The more you shoot the harder it will be later to find good little parts you want. And in a profession with tight deadlines as journalism, one has to be an excellent time and resource manger.
Legislative stories are not sometimes that easy for a reporter to digest, let alone explaining it in intelligible terms for an audience with varying degrees of understanding, knowledge and education. Out of my print experience, I knew that and was curious to see how Michael would manage it. And he did a superb work of breaking down and making a complicated story very intelligible to a casual viewer. Jim, the well-known face of KOMU news, later duly acknowledged that! And I couldn't be happier than that to see that Michael's hard work paid off, of course not to mention my own little contribution to it!
Working with the KOMU reporter, I was amazed by his fast editing skills. I decided to learn from that and try to be as fast, yet careful, in my editing work in the future! I have to see how that will go!
Coming right from Convergence department's Fundamentals of TV, Radio and Photojournalism class, I had no idea about iNews! It was a good opportunity to see a professional reporter using it and I tried to thoroughly observe and learn about it. I never stopped posing questions to Michael from to time about things which were new to me and felt wanted to know more about them! Needless to say, he always made sure he had answered my questions properly. Some people, or all of us at times, do not want to ask questions about things which we don't know less we would be considered dumb and ignorant! But well, I always think two essential preconditions to a good learning process are: not hesitating to ask questions whenever you feel you want to and to put aside your ego and think about only one thing: learning and learning. For those of us who are afraid for whatever reasons to ask questions at times, here is a meaningful saying: there are no stupid questions, but only stupid answers! So, and I am telling this to myself first, don't hesitate to ask otherwise learning will not go very smooth!
After 11 hours of work, I enjoyed being a true shadow of Michael!
