Wednesday, January 30, 2008

John Edwards To Drop Out Of Presidental Race

In this internet based world, the word travels quick that John Edwards is bowing out of the race for the White House.

He is expected to make his announcement official today at 1pm, in New Orleans.

This is is second run for the oval office. Are you surprised that he is dropping out before Super Tuesday?
I welcome your thoughts and observations in the comments section.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Can You Hear Me Now?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been undergoing some construction in the newsroom.

The (cough cough) dust is flying but the work on our new newsroom is nearly completion. It’s been a six to eight week adventure, and in this period of time we’ve had to work through the sound of metal cutting through our concrete floors, the doors being propped open and the cold outside air flowing freely into our workspace so that the contractors can bring in new desks, duct work, insultation, pipes, frames and everything else under the sun which has stirred up the dust from places that haven’t had the dust disturbed in probably 15-20 years.

The whole thing is somewhat funny to me. Why, might you ask? Part of the job of the Content Coordinators is to listen to police, fire and ems officials talk the official “talk” also know as ten codes. More on that later. The day the construction crews planned on cutting into the concrete, they graciously provided the desk with some ear plugs. Part of our job is to be able to hear the scanners and yet we had to block out the concrete cutting sound. Hmmmmm. How do you do that?

Friday, January 18, 2008

Storm of the Century (Or at least until the next one comes)

There is a fine line between overselling the forecast for a storm and actually providing you with “accurate, balanced and to the point” information.

It is our responsibility to prepare you for inclement weather. We run crawls and extended weather coverage designed to keep you ahead of the storm. It is a process that involves a great deal of planning, coordination, teamwork, and some very long days out in the element for our reporters and photographers.

Much like the mail carrier (no, i won’t wear those blue pants) we bring you coverage through rain, sleet, snow and shine. We put our crews throughout the viewing area to report on the latest conditions in your neighborhood. Often times this means calling in extra reporters, photographers, producers, content coordinators and production staff rotating through a 12hr “on” and 12 “off” schedule.

Meanwhile, when we are not on air….we are providing constant updates to our website, http://www.nbc17.com. There you’ll find the latest school closings and delays along with winter weather tips, live weather warnings and advisories as well as the latest video and pictures submitted by YOU, our viewers.

If you have pictures of weather conditions in your neighborhood or better yet pictures of your kids enjoying the winter wonderland, we’d love it if you would share those with us so that we may, in turn, share them with other viewers. You can send your pictures to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Be Safe
-Jason

Stop, Drop and Roll

Today, all I wanted to do is stand in the middle of the newsroom…stop what I was doing…drop…and roll on the floor.

You see, the fire department was back for day #2 of testing our building fire alarm system.

Since we are nearing completion on the construction of our newsroom, it’s time to get final inspections. One of the most important inspections is the fire/safety inspection. In the event of a fire, the safety of every single newsroom employee is top priority. Rest assured the system works. In fact, my ears are still ringing at home…some eight hours later.

I totally understand that fire alarms are supposed to be loud but the tests were not 10-20 second bursts of the ole’ sirens. Instead, they were more like 4-5 minutes of non-stop (urrrnnnk…..urrrnnnnkkk…..urrrrnnnnkkk). If that wasn’t bad enough 50 strobe lights began flashing. All this while trying to listen to scanners, get updates from reporters who were calling in from the field and responding to viewers tips and emails. We quickly realized that…urrrnnnk…(sorry I couldn’t resist) conversations of any sort, no matter how important, were simply not going to happen while the tests were going on.

Our resident blogger, Ginny, actually became annoyed enough with the situation that she blogged about it, and even posted a short video clip to further explain our pain. Meanwhile, I’m now deaf (what did you just say?), my eyes still feel like I spent too long inside a techno disco club and the headache is still pounding. Ahhhhh…the sound of safety (urrrnnnk…..urrrnnnnkkk…..urrrrnnnnkkk).

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Sporting A New Look

If you happened to have watched our newscasts yesturday evening you may have noticed something looked different, and you would have been correct. We debuted a new graphics package on air yesturday, and I must say it is very cool.

A graphics package is often referred to as our “look”. Those graphics you see over anchors as they talk to you at home are part of the complete graphics package. The graphics that pop on and off the bottom of the screen with locations and reporter names etc are also a part of the complete graphics package. In short, our old look was ancient dated and needed to be redesigned.

The new graphics package is both crisp and bold. There is a heavy dominance of yellow/gold and blues to the new graphics but by far the biggest difference you will see is that all the new graphics are animated (meaning they move). The old look was static and had no animation.

A new graphics package is not unique. In fact, many news stations freshen up their graphics every 2 years by making slight alterations to the exisiting look. These are not usually drastic changes but rather offer a freshened up look to the existing package. However, in our case, we did a complete redesign. This is when you throw out everything related to your old graphic look and start from scratch.  Usually, TV stations do complete overhauls on their graphics packages every 3-4 years with refreshed looks in between.

So do you like the new look? Hate it? Let me know. Post your thoughts in the comments section.

-Jason
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