News Injection

June 2, 2015
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6 p.m. producer Shawn Wittrock let me put my fingers on the keyboard and enter content into his line up.  Now this is something familiar, yet it was different.  What's that strange number under the heading tape ID?  Shawn explained that that was the software automatically assigning a number to the video.  Now they could always find the video on the server. In my day the video was on the video tape.  Now the video was on a computer hard drive and easy to find.  When I was in the newsroom ten years ago, we could search for the missing tape for hours.  Those were the good old days.  Thanks Shawn for your patience in letting me build you line-up, accomplishing in two hours what you do in 20 minutes.
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More challenging was input into the website.  Garrett Powders was one of my students at RSU but not in new media.  Garrett taught new media to himself.  Garrett was always one of our most tech savvy students,and it paid off in a big way when, just a month after graduation, he landed his current job as a web content producer.  So, Garrett led me through the maze of boxes and drop down menus to enter text, pics and videos.  It was like the maze in The Shining movie.  Jack Nicholson never found his way out.  Garrett guided, "Click here, now there, now here, now there, there, there.....there."  Eventually the story popped up at www.newson6.com.  Garrett says it took him about a month to remember how to do everything without looking at notes.  I would still have been in the maze, the matrix.