Edit the 1937 Cord Phaeton

June 7, Sunday

In progress

Write (choose sound) for NAT PACK.  Script bites.

Home trying to make audio work.
-Switches witches, which position?
-Many tests  Input 1, Input 2 etc

Hurry to station for editing.

Mark Pinkerton saves the day.

Video won't download.  Finally it does.  Teamwork.  Don't notice the shaky video.  Good job.

Travis Hensley the producer helps me get my script into the iNews line-up. It was a lot simpler in my day.  Jib moves and viz pics.

Shoot the1937 Cord Phaeton

June 6, 2015

Story in progress.............

Studying the new camera.
-Why isn't camera working?
-Switch cameras.
-Why isn't mic working.
-Switch mics.
-Mic still doesn't work.
-Try to get away with build in camera mic.

-Car auction rush.
-No tripod
-No mic

Sneak in to see if I have video.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

June 5, 2015

Photographer Michael Blair lights up most when talking about sharing story decisions with a reporter to make a superior story.

Michael has the same lament as every photographer I've ever talked with. Stories in recent years have become shorter, harder with less time for features or orchestrating images. The days when you might sneak a three-minute piece into a cast are over. Here, the standard PKG time is 1:30, but sometimes producers will squeeze out an extra :15 seconds for them.

The Fox station has fewer photographers and relies on MMJ (multimedia journalists) who shoot their own video. Then they pull the SD card out of their camera, ingest the video onto their laptops, edit the video on their laptops, and then ftp the video to the station via the internet.

Michael says it's faster and cheaper, but he believes his station gets substantially more quality both in look and content by having the photographer look after the visuals, while the reporter looks after the story information and then collaborate.

KOTV crews edit in the field, too. But they have to take a couple more steps to get their video back to the station. KOTV shoots with higher quality cameras that use P2 cards to store the video. After they have finished editing, they export the video back onto a P2 card through a card reader. Then, the P2 card is put back in the camera. It is then fed out of the camera through a "Dejero" unit to the station. The Dejero unit is like a giant cellphone with the signal capacity of six cellphones. So, while the FOX station usually ftp's their video to the station, KOTV typically sends its video back by cell pack. Of course, you can still send video back by microwave live truck. But the live trucks aren't used much anymore because the video can be sent via cell or internet.

The Dejero units have another advantage. The bandwidth is big enough and stable enough that you can go live. That was a surprise to me, that the cell packs are replacing live vans for live shots.

So Much More

June 4, 2015

For main anchor Scott Thompson, it has been an uphill fight for the past decade for the long feature stories that made him the most popular reporter in the market and won him his anchor chair.  Scott is so mild mannered that he might not work in most other markets, but because his "Oklahoma Traveler" stories were so loved by viewers, management tried him out as anchor.  People liked him there, too. He's the top male anchor in the market.

Scott says he argued for years for longer, deeper stories, and seems to have found a sweet spot in his So Much More queries.  They are not eight minutes, but some are close to four, almost three times the length of a typical daily reporter package.  Thompson had the nagging questions of why Oklahoma languishes at or near the bottom in categories like health and education. 

"How do we do better?  Why do we stand for that?" Thompson asks.  

Scott's wife came up with the title.  The idea is that Oklahoma can be "so much more."  In other words, we can do better.  But it also has another meaning.  "We have the potential to be so much more," Scott says.  

Scott says it was a tough sell because it seemed so critical, too negative.  He argued his mission is an earnest search for answers.  

Scott has sought out the best minds in the state to grapple with the greatest issues. Accolades poured in and Thompson got something he says he and anchor Terry Hood never had before, a billboard. 

The words on the billboard, So Much More.

Snipes

June 3, 2015

How do you fight the TiVo?  When you can zip through commercials, how can TV stations survive? That is one of many jobs assigned to marketing and idea man Jonathan Ferrante, the sales promotion manager for The News on 6, a title I had never heard of before.

Something Old. Thank God

Rick Wells is the oldest reporter in the market and gets the feature stories usually.  It is a shame that the feature has been beaten out of most newscasts as consultants clamor for ever harder news and higher story count.  I think it's a mistake because that gee-whiz story is often the only story remembered the next day and adds heart to the newscasts.  That's a brand worth having.

This afternoon I was able to catch up with Rick and photographer Ty Lewis for a wonderful story on a 1937 Cord Phaeton, maybe the most gorgeous of all American classic cars.  The son Doug Pray found his father's Cord after it had disappeared for almost fifty years.  Doug's father, a modest mechanic in the 1950s, had somehow saved the Cord legacy.  And this very Cord was his father's favorite, winning many first-place awards. Doug's father had to sell his prize possession to keep the Cord franchise afloat.

His prize-winning Cord had been in a barn near Detroit for 45 years.
The owner called Doug Pray when he saw his story on "The Pickers" cable TV show.   Doug paid the farmer what he asked and the beautiful Cord returned to Broken Arrow.

News Injection

June 2, 2015
..........
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.
.......
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.