Second Practice

The second practice went significantly better than the first. I think probably because the "head coach" attended this one. He's a player who has already graduated, but is still eligible to play, and will be leaving after this semester, name of Eric wright.

He's very approachable. Willing to explain positions or plays or what each part of practice is for. He's very natural around me, doesn't try to clean up his speech, doesn't try to talk up his team. It's actually a lot of fun talking to him. I think the other players saw how he was acting around me and took his lead, so everyone seemed more comfortable on the field. Some players even came up and talked to me.


Now I'm beginning to wonder how practices should be covered. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the game to be able to tell if someone had a good practice or not. I read Dave Matter for my Missouri Football needs, and he tends to pick a player or a position to report on, but I feel like that is because everyone else is reporting on the team as a whole. He has the ability to go into detail. But I'm just starting to cover this team, and I'm worried I wil miss something. So I just tried to cover the mood and atmosphere of the team, as well as give an idea of what I learned, because part of the blogging was to try and explain parts of teh game to give readers an idea of how easy or hard it is to get into the game.

On a more technical aspect, I took a couple more risks this time. I laid down in front of people who were kicking, walked out on the field in the middle of scrimmage and let them run by me as I took pictures. Just things I would not have tried last week. Even if I'm not positive what I'm covering, I am definitely feeling more and more confident in what I'm doing out there with the team.

Sports coverage

I set out yesterday to cover a sports team as a "beat" for the first time yesterday. I wasn't really sure what to expect, or what to do. It's interesting, I spend a lot of time reading sports columnists and team beat reporters, but when it was me out there, I was completely lost.

I had spoken to a few people on the rugby team already, so they knew I was coming out, but they didn't really know me or what I was doing. and they weren't the first players to get to the pitch. So it was me, trying to seem unobtrusive, but at the same time trying to act as though I belonged. quite an odd feeling.

Eventually, word spread around of who I was, and nobody had a complaint about me being there. Luckily, no players tried to monitor what they said or how they acted around me. A few goofed around or tried to pose for images, which I took and then just didn't use. No sense in ostracizing them. Only one player, Phil Hojnowski, seemed comfortable enough to really talk to me, and even then it took all practice for him to open up

On the plus side, I had the freedom to wonder all over the pitch and talk to anyone I wanted, or take pictures from any angle. That worked out pretty well, though I wasn't yet comfortable enough to ask to do things like get on the sled.

My plan is to just try and make myself a normal part of practice, so that the team forgets I'm there and starts talking to me. I'm not sure how long that will take, but I think it's probably a necessary step, especially since this team is not used to any kind of press coverage, like basketball and football players are. However, I did learn a lot in my first day of sports reporting, and I think I did a decent job of taking pictures as well.

Another Clash with Photo

Learned another valuable lesson for the workplace this week, which is communication.

I got thrown under the bus a bit, though I still claim responsibility. When I got to the newsroom, and Andrew informed me that we were going to send Stevie to Hickman to cover a jazz musician who was teaching a small class to do a photo slideshow. It sounded nice, and I was all for it, so I went into the budget with that to pitch.

When asked if Convergence had anything, I said we had a reporter headed to Hickman. At which point the photo editor glared at me and very loudly said "What?!"

To be honest, I was slightly taken aback. And then I made the connection. Nobody had thought to ask if we already had a photographer on the story. It ended up not being a big deal, Stevie just focused on capturing audio, but I looked like a fool in the budget meeting, and the photo editor was pretty steamed up of the rest of the day toward me.

In the end, it worked out pretty well, Stevie got back with some decent audio, even if her segments with words in them instead of music had a faint audio tone, because she had her speaker level set too high. But the end product was nice, and it was a good way to end my shifts with the Missourian. Plus, lesson learned. Ask and make sure nobody else is doing it before you send a reporter into the field.

Live Stream

I walked into the newsroom last Monday dreading what assignment I was going to have, because I knew I wouldn't have a reporter. My attitude quickly changed. Upon hearing that we would be live streaming the town hall meeting, I got pretty razzed up. It's not every day you get an opportunity like that, after all.

The problem was, none of use really knew what we were doing. We did a little research, a little asking around, told the editors and everyone else we would make it work, found the video camera, and headed to test everything and figure out how to work the program with about 20 minutes between leaving the Missourian and having to leave for the town hall meeting.

Those were some tense 20 minutes. At first we couldn't figure out how to make things work, and then we couldn't get the camera to work. Then more things went wrong with the audio. Finally, with everything appearing to work and not a moment too soon, we headed for the Black Culture Center.

They didn't let us set up where they told us we could. We were off tot he side. Then there were more difficulties getting the thing working again. Turns out, the DV input for the camera is way loose from people jamming the cable into too hard, so I had to hold the wire in, because the weight of the hanging cable was enough to pull it out so that we lost the feed. At times, when I was panning with one hand, and zooming with the other, I was holding the firewire cable with my teeth. I was manually adjusting audio constantly, because although we were plugged into the audio system at the Center, many people weren't using the microphones.

But eventually, it was over. We had lost the feed a couple times, we had problems with audio, and there were a few complaints. But really, I've rarely felt better and more uplifted after an assignment. It's nights like that that make me stay in this major. My heart was literally singing with the thrill of what Andrew and I accomplished. Yes, it wasn't perfect, there were a lot of things that could have been improved, not least of which was getting a better camera. But I felt like I did some good that night, and the numbers said that a massive amount of people logged on to watch our feed.

We made a tangible difference, and it was a wonderful, wonderful feeling.