Day 5 was an early one. I was scheduled to arrive at SEVEN in the  morning! It was a little rough at first, but totally worth it. When I arrived I met John Lindsey, a news director at WNCN. He gave me a quick tour of the building before we started doing anything else. After the tour I sat with John in the control room as he explained how they do the cut ins. Cut ins are, well, when the station cuts into the national programming to do local new and/or news. These happen at specific times in the program which are broadcasted to the local stations. The director of the cut ins will code the program they use before they begin. The director, the sound editor, and the camera operator all work together to produce the cut ins. I sat with John during the first cut in. Funny enough as he was trying to code the show he coded the wrong one so he pretty much winged it. It was a bit sloppy but it seemed to turn out okay. For the next cut in I sat with the sound editor. He control the levels of all the different sound inputs, such as microphones, any music, and sound from videos. He makes sure that nothing is too loud or too soft and that all the needed pieces can or cannot be heard at a given time. While they weren’t doing cut ins myself and an intern got to mess around with the sound board and coding the show a little bit. For the next cut it I sat with the camera operator in the studio. She controls where the cameras are facing and makes sure that they are in the right places at the right times. Earlier in the morning she also sets up all the camera angles for most of the day. She is the one who cues the reporters or meteorologists as well. She makes sure they know how much time is left in the spot which is fed to her by the director in the control room. She was a very funny woman who was almost always singing into the coms. For the last cut in I sat with the director in the control room again, only this time it was the intern who was doing the directing. She did a very good job, everything went according to plan.

Once I had spent about two hours in the control room/studio, I sat in on a news meeting. The reporters that were there along with the producers of the news shows that day were discussing what stories they had or expected to get that day. After the meeting was over I sat with the producer of the 12 o’clock show. He was setting out what was going to go when and picking out clips from footage for the editor to edit together for the packages he needed. I asked him a lot of random questions about things I saw int he room. I asked him about things such as the analytics system they use, it’s the same as the N&O, in what circumstances do they like using live shots vs. pre-recorded shots, what he does on a standard day,  and others.

After that I sat with an editor for a while. He was the one who was working with the producer of the 12 o’clock to edit all the packages he needed together. The editor had a tv in his edit bay that I ended up watching a bit, then suddenly the feed went down. For some reason, I never found out why, the channel began to experience technical difficulties. When the station first sort of came back online I was told that it was showing their old logos and color schemes. They were recently partnered with CBS locally and so they changed their look. The editor told me that the corporates probably wouldn’t be fans of the fact that 1)  The station went down, and 2) That they were showing older logos. After about 15-20 minutes the station came back on.

Then just before 12 I went back to the control room to observe the 12 o’clock news from behind the scenes. Coolest part was I got a mini job. I was tasked with pressing play on a live streamed view of the beach just before it was supposed to be shown live, so that we wouldn’t run into ad problems after the original feed broke down. The show itself was pretty standard, but really cool getting the back stage look at what goes down.

I spent my day riding around the triangle with Amanda Lamb, a reporter at WRAL, and Chad Flowers, her photographer. We started off the day at the Justice Center in Downtown. Amanda said that she started everyday there looking at all the arrest & search
warrants from the last day or so. She does this to see if any interesting cases come up that they might want to cover, or to see if any new leads on cases they are already working on. Mostly they look for cases involving people who would be a danger to the general public. Around the Justice Center the topic of interest seemed to be the arrest of two women who broke out into a fight the day before. Most of the reporters we spoke to were annoyed by the story because TVZ, or ABC11, was making a big deal about it because they had someone on the scene yesterday who was able to get video of the incident. I also got a brief tour of the building, I was told that things were pretty slow today as not much was going on. The highlight of the trip seemed to be the spotting of two women dressed in a Super Girl outfit and carrying a Piglet backpack.

After our visit to the Justice Center, it was time to start working on the story for the news today. After some debate, it was decided that we would follow up on a lead about a Good Samaritan from a motorcycle accident that occurred last night. It sounded much more promising than the story the station originally wanted to cover about a gym closing. Chad was a little worried about the direction of the story due to the fact that the driver of the motorcycle who ended up dying was the one who was at fault during the accident. So instead of covering the crash itself, it was decided to frame the story around what our Good Samaritan’s experience was.

Once Amanda was able to contact her we decided on a meeting spot out in North Cary. After a quick spot of lunch we met up with the young woman for an interview. She was very cooperative and I am very moved by her story. She got to the scene of the accident, she thought, very soon after it happened. She pulled over to the side of the road and made her way to the driver of the motorcycle. She explained that he was in very bad shape, covered in blood, as well as not breathing and no pulse. She began to give him CPR. She didn’t stop until the police and EMTs arrived a few minutes later. She noted that she was the only one who was trying to help the young man. An older gentleman had come over to her but exclaimed that he didn’t know what to do, while all the other people either just watched from afar or didn’t stop at all. She was very vocal about her opinions on that matter.

Once the interview was over we headed back to the WRAL studio. There the footage from the accident the night before and the interview from today were going to be edited together. While Amanda was writing the script for her story I sat in a planning meeting for the news shows that evening. After that, I sat with the women at the news desk. They are the people who monitor all the police radios and other news sources to determine if anything news worthy is happening. If there is something interesting happening they will dispatch teams of reporter to the scene.

Once Amanda was done with the script, I went with her and Chad to film the bridge in the
control room and then to the recording studios to record the voice over for the package. Then I sat with Chad while he edited all the pieces of the puzzle together. Then the story was done and all ready to be aired on the 5 o’clock news. I left before they aired it on television but I got home in time to watch it.

Here is a link to the story on the WRAL website: http://www.wral.com/good-samaritan-stopped-to-help-man-after-crash-near-rolesville/15730542/

-CJ

Today, I spent the morning at the News & Observer office in Downtown Raleigh. Despite initially having trouble finding the entrance to the building, I managed to arrive a few minutes early. Once there, I met Susan Spring the Director of Newsroom Operations.  I spoke to Susan for a little while before she gave me a tour of the Newsroom. She explained to me the basic layout of the floor and points of interest. They have a large screen on one of the walls that shows statistics from their website. She then showed me their research library, which houses a log of almost all the N&O papers over printed and other resources for the reporters to access for research. Then we met up with a group of 3 new hires and interns from McClatchy Co., their parent company. I walked around with them for a while as they were also taking a tour of the office. We also were able to sit in on the morning news meeting where all the reporters and other employees come together and plan out when their stories are going to be put up on the N&O website as well as whether they will contain video or not.

Once the meeting was over I met with one of their newer hires (she started Monday), Presley. She was hired specifically to work on a newer project of theirs called Collegetown. From what I gather, it is going to be used as a news outlet for the four major school in the Triangle: Duke, UNC, NC State, and Central. She was very determined to find new and interesting ways to get out the news out to people so that college students would be actively engaged in the content produced by the Collegetown site. She mentioned that they were planning on working with students who attend the college for articles since they would actually be there.

After speaking with Presley for a while I met two of the guys who handle photo and video editing. I had a lovely conversation with them about media and how people interact with videos. We talked about how videos are presented, what goes into them, as well as how&when people view them. We also spoke about video games a little bit, and how they have affected the media.

Lastly, I spoke with an investigative journalist, Daniel Kane, who was not a fan of his job title. He is a strong believer that all journalists no matter what they work on or where, they should all be investigating and asking “Why”. Daniel was the one who broke the story about the “Paper Class” scandal at UNC. He said it stared out as a different story but evolved when he found the discrepancies in the grade books. He thinks journalism is a good way to bring attention to things that are broken so that they might get changed.

Overall, visiting the N&O was a lot more exciting than I originally thought it was going to be. I found the varying opinions on the direction of the paper news to be very interesting, as well as the amount of both new and old technologies present at all the desks. I also got a t-shirt! AND A COOL PEN!

-CJ