Recently in Life outside the newsroom Category

The road to Chicago began a little late for my liking. Wildman Nick Nelson and my main man, Justin O'Neal, couldn't hit the road until about 6 p.m. thanks to midterm testing. Come on, it's March, it's almost spring break, it's St. Patty's day in Chicago and you're sticking around Lawrence to take a test? What the hell, you're in college, brother! I guess I just don't see eye to eye with younger classmen.

The highlight of the trip thus far has to be a pit stop we made in Brooklyn. No, not New York. We are talking Brooklyn, Iowa. It was heaven!

While Wildman was taking care of business, I saw "the claw" and knew I could win a stuffed animal. I put a buck in the machine and went to work. First time, no success. The second time, glory! I won this dog that reminds me of Quaildog from the old-school Nickelodeon show "Doug". Doug and his dog, Porkchop, had episodes where they entered Superhero mode and became Quailman and Quaildog. The stuffed animal is identical. Don't believe me, check out the proof to the right.

I took a few minutes to bask in the glory of actually winning a stupid stuffed animal. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I was blown away. I saw a Kermit the Frog stuffed animal and knew I had to make an attempt for him.

He was stuck up on the corner of the machine and there was no clear way to win him. Then, a lightbulb switched on in my brain. (Cue singing) "I can do anything!" Thank you Reading Rainbow for instilling this lasting tune in my brain!

I hope you are picturing the machine in Toy Story, with the aliens, Buzz Lightyear and Woody stuck in it. I threw another bill in the claw machine and went after Kermit. My first attempt: Success! I was ecstatic. Two stuffed animals for two dollars. Unbelievable! At Worlds of Fun, I spend an average of $35 to win a big stuffed animal. Here, I got two medium-sized animals for $2! I love Brooklyn, Iowa!

Wildman won a pink teddy bear, but is claiming it is a bunny. He's just trying to rub it in my face. There was a Bugs Bunny that was impossible to win, so now he won a pink bear and is trying to claim it's a bunny. Give me a break!

Although Clear Channel recently sold a sizable chunk of airspace and (arguably) shifted the dial that meters how much information it controls from "ludicrous" to merely "ridiculous," it still remains one of the worst corporations ever. Now, if there's one thing that popular culture has taught me about evil organizations, it's that they're almost always controlled by one super evil mastermind (assisted, of course, by a ruthless, sexless top henchman), but their day-to-day operations rely on any number of generally inept goons. In the scheme of today's topic, Clear Channel is that evil organization, and Mr. Steven Spendlove, the station manager for KFTY-TV, a Clear Channel TV station in Santa Rosa, Cal., is our utterly inept goon.

Mr. Spendlove has an idea. Long story short: His station stopped making money a long time ago (thereby rendering it useless to the Clear Channel profit machine), so, in a fit of managerial brilliance, he fired his entire news staff and now plans to rely on citizen journalists to provide the content he'll air as news. He will use footage given to him by independent filmmakers, students and community leaders as his news. Mr. Spendlove "hasn't determined" whether he'll pay the people who provide his footage. He hopes to follow the successful precedents set by citizen journalism coverage of calamities -- Hurricane Katrina, the London Subway Bombings, citizen reportage after a military coup in Thailand shut down their media -- and the advent of South Korea's OhMyNews, which accepts citizen journalism content and even makes a profit.

However, there are distinct differences between all of these other instances of citizen journalism, or what one could call "journalistic crowd sourcing," and what Mr. Spendlove is trying to do.

Let me philosophize for a second:

The opening line to Jean-Paul Sartre's Republic of Silence is, "We were never more free than during the German occupation." Sartre is, of course, talking about France's occupation by Nazi Germany in World War II, and what he's getting at is that under intensely oppressive circumstances, all of our actions become invested with moral significance. Triviality is stripped away, and every single action and decision we make assumes an amount of gravity and importance we do not assign any action or decision in our normal, daily lives. When people find themselves entangled in such oppressive circumstances -- terrorist attacks, hurricanes and political coups certainly qualify -- they act. The people who took pictures and provided other news content about these events did so with a sense of urgency. In the sleepy, warm Californian town of Santa Rosa, home of Peanuts' creator Charles Shulz, zany museum curator Robert Ripley, and the undefinable legendary growler Tom Waits (not to mention a rotating flock of tourists bound for the town's world-renowned wine tasting vineyards), nothing has that sense of urgency.

Spendlove's project differs drastically from the case of OhMyNews as well, because while that was an exciting new project steeped in the annals of democracy and the marketplace of ideas, the attempt to make KFTY-TV reliant on citizen journalism is a corporate ripoff of an exciting project steeped in democracy. Furthermore, as Spendlove (and lots of people in the mainstream media) seems to have forgotten, CITIZEN JOURNALISTS DON'T NEED THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. While traditional bloggers often don't do much more than "recycle and chew on the news," citizen journalists who create their own content are free to publish their work online, where it will be available to a large audience, without the help of anyone, especially the corporate media whores they most likely don't like in the first place. They won't get paid either way, but at least if citizen journalists post their own content on their own website, it won't face the censorship of editors under pressure from advertisers, it won't be lumped in with a bunch of other crap they don't care about, and they'll actually get to take all the credit for all the work they did. What's to gain from the alternative? The glorious prestige that will befall you by getting your homemade video to air on a bankrupt TV station that no one watches, no one advertises with, no one cares about, and is the weak little baby of a monstrous media conglomerate that doesn't even give a shit about it?

Good luck, Mr. Spendlove, but I predict the overwhelming consensus response to your call for citizen journalist contributions to your crappy station will be: Thanks for the offer, KFTY, but no thanks.

In early August of 1999, as a mere 17 year old preparing for my senior year of high school, I packed up all my earthly belongings and moved to Florida all by my lonesome to attempt playing professional soccer. That didn't work out as planned. Now it's early August of aught six. I've spent the last five years living in Kansas, which is something I never imagined would happen. Yesterday I once again packed up all my earthly belongings and began driving halfway across the country to Cliffside Park, New Jersey. I never thought I'd be moving to New Jersey either.

I still think the idea of playing professional soccer was a good reason to move across the country, but most people would probably argue that my reason for moving to New Jersey is a better one. It turns out that a college degree can actually help you get a job. Well, at least it helped me. I will be working as a web videographer for MSN Money.

My career goals have changed at least six times since 1999. After five years of college I somehow became interested in multimedia production. There seems to be something fun about multimedia production, in a nerdy sort of way. I'd love to tell you all the great responsibilities I'm going to have, but I don't even know. I'll do some stuff with video and some stuff with computers, but there will be some room for experimentation.

In a field of journalism that really hasn't come together quite yet, I hope this position will allow MSN to set a new industry benchmark for multimedia reporting. Regardless of what type of product I end up producing, I'm sure the work will be shown to the students in J694. And that's a good thing in my mind.

After spending a lot of time in an empty newsroom this summer writing the input/output tutorials, I hope my time and effort pays off for the next round of students. I do know for sure that the work I put into the turorials and all the other multimedia work I did at KU will pay off with my new job.

If nothing else, at least I know how to put pretty purple boxes around my pictures. Cause everyone loves pretty purple boxes.

I've always said, "The worst day I ever spent with baseball was a great day." But 12 straight days?

Yes, 12 straight days at the College Baseball World Series in Omaha working for ESPN provides the content for the first chapter in Max's, "How I spent my summer vacation" book. My journey actually began in 1967 when I played baseball for Knox College. But Div. III of the NCAA does not send teams to the CWS. Shoot, we didn't even make the playoffs for the Midwest Conference.

Step two of the journey was when I spent my first year out of college teaching English in a suburban Minneapolis junior high. I became a volunteer assistant coach at the University of Minnesota, then a powerhouse in the Big Ten. That's where I first heard about the College World Series.

My next stop was the University of Missouri where I began grad school in 1971 and joined the baseball staff as a volunteer grad assistant. I spent four years with theat program, but we never won the Big Eight and never had the chance to go to Omaha.

For the past 23 years I have lived some three hours from Omaha. I have followed college baseball religiously all of that time, but due to a variety of summer school and family obligations, I never had the chance to attend the CWS. And I had always wanted to.

That time finally came when an old grad school classmate connected me with the production manager of ESPN. When Ed Placey contacted me and asked if I knew anything about ptiching, I was tempted to give him the reply St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson gave his young catcher Tim McCarver on his first trip to the mound, "All you know about pitching is you can't hit it."

I can't hit it, and I have been proving that weekly as I play in my 20th season of Men's Senior Baseball. But I did convince Placey I knew enough about it to chart pitches, spot trends and suggest how that could best be presented on TV.

But that was pretty much the extent of my instruction. ESPN set up a work station in the equipment room right off the home team clubhouse. MY only contact with the outside world (and ESPN) was three monitors and a headset. Two hours into my work, two gentlemen from Omaha came in and started setting up computers. Greg and Steve were with a company called Game Plan and they were going to demnostrate for ESPN and the college pitching coaches a new piece of software that would help them analyze pitching.

While they had created, tested and sold similar software for football, basketball, and volleyball, this was their first time field testing the baseball program. The first two days were frustrating as I hand-charted the pitchers in the first four games. I offered almost nothing to the producers that they didn't already have from another source.

By the time each team started playing its second game, the value of the computer-based information was starting to show through. We had devleoped a database of batter, count, pitch type, result. From that you could see patterns emerge. Once I mentioned to Greg I'd really like to see the difference between how a certain pitcher was pitching left and right-handed batters. So Greg popped the program open, wrote several lines of C++, and presto, I had my data.

Now we were cooking.

During the next several days, Greg wrote a number of other changes into the program. As the program became more sophisticated, I worked with sideline reproter Kyle Peterson and his producer Tom Scofield to extract more from the data. By the time we reached the best two out of three championship playoff between eventual champion Oregon State and North Carolina, we knew some things about their pitchers their coaches didn't know.

I prepared scouting reports for each game that included charts and graphs with pitching and hitting tendencies. For example, I found North Carolina made outs on the first pitch 26 times in three games, while Oregon State made outs on the first pitch 16 times in five games. I found out relief ace Kevin Gunderson of OSU threw first pitch fastballs even though he was predominantly a slider pitcher. Those kinds of nuggest become pretty valuable in forecasting what will happen or explaining why something did happen.

Perhaps the biggest difference in working this event was the fact our crew of some 60 members was there together for 12 days. On most sports productions we come to a town, spend one day setting up, one day doing the game, and then we are all out of there. This event had more of a summer camp feel to it. We were there 12-13 hours per day, ate all of our meals together, and spent some of the off hours together as well. The comaraderie was impressive.

We only had one minor crisis. Our caterer who also works int he Hollywood movie business was aksed to leave in the middle of the first week. Seems one of the security guards heard some rustling in the catering truck around 3 in the morning. When he opened the door to check it out, several mice came charging out fo the truck. As you might expect that didn't go over very well with the Omaha City Health Department. The next day a local hotel was catering our meals. The did a ncie job, but didn't have the frills of the original Hollywood gang.

ESPN provided two meals per day. The Omaha World passed out free newspapers, and by the time the games were over, I was too tired to go out and do anything. I did not spend one single penny my first four days there.

I enjoyed every minute of those 12 days. I wasn't sure how this old body would stand up to working a succession of 12 hour days. Actually, I probably couldn't WORK 12 hours several straight days.

But this was baseball!

Congratulations to all of the 2006 journalism school graduates. Not to sound all sentimental and mushy, but I will miss you. I have had the opportunity to work with many of you over the last two-three years and I must say, it's been fun. You have demonstrated creativity and drive, I know you will go far in life. Please, stay in touch. Don't forget all the fun you had in the Multimedia Newsroom. Check back on this blog often and let us know what exciting things you are doing.

KUJH-TV News, the University of Kansas student-operated television news operation, received 10 awards, including five first-place honors in the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence region 7 awards competition. Awards were presented at the region 7 SPJ convention April 8 in St. Louis.

The SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards honor the best work in student print, radio, television and online college journalism. The contest was open to degree-seeking students enrolled in a college or university for the 2005 academic year.

Entries are first judged on the regional level, and all first-place regional winners are automatically entered in the national competition. National winners will be honored at the 2006 SPJ Convention & National Journalism Conference in Chicago.

In addition to the first-place honors, KU students received two second-place awards, and three third-place awards.

KUJH-TV News and its website provide students with hands-on, professionally supervised work experience. The student-produced news airs at 5:30, 7:30, 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. Monday through Friday while KU classes are in session during the fall and spring semesters.

To watch select KUJH-TV stories and learn more about the station and the student staff, visit the awarding winning web site.

Students and their awards are listed below. Congratulations to all!

Tom Hipp, first-place for sports reporting, Final preparations for Kansas Relays (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/3172)

Natasha Trefla, first-place for breaking news, Fire Arrest made in deadly apartment fire (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/6582) and third-place for in-depth reporting, Rehab rather than prison (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/8661)

Haley Harrison, second-place for in-depth reporting, Evolution and faith - a peaceful coexistence? (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/8343)

Audrey Esther, second-place for general news, County offering Spanish class to workers (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/7224)

Audrey Esther, Jamie Zarda, Eric Sorrentino, and Jesse Newell, third-place for online in-depth reporting, Clinic attracts record number of patients (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/4882)

Samantha Horner, third-place for general news, Students encounter spring break woes (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/2554)

KUJH-TV News online staff, first-place for online news, tv.ku.edu (http://tv.ku.edu)

Jimmy Chavez, Tracey Perlman and Tim Veatch, first-place for online sports reporting, Arrowhead game may sack local business (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/4780)

Denise Spidle, first-place for online in-depth reporting, Cheerleading becoming a risky business (http://tv.ku.edu/stories/9221)

Denise Spidle, a 2005 J-School graduate, will anchor the new 15-minute internet/TV news program "Studio 55" for The Daily News. Her fall 2005 in-depth story, Cheerleading becoming a risky business, where she teamed up with online producer Eric Sorrentino, won a Region 7 Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. According to a recent article in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits, Making Local Coverage Count in Naples, Fla. , the first "Studio 55" newscast will run April 3.

We are so proud of Denise. It is always exciting to see our students get out there, kick ass and take names. We look forward to following her career.

We had the privilege of working with Australian journalist, Olivia Rousset over winter break. She came to Kansas to do a story on intelligent design for the Australian TV program, SBS Dateline.

Rousset was only here for a week, we helped her track down sources and arranged for transportation for her between Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City. After working in Kansas, she flew to the east coast to conduct interviews for a SBS Dateline follow up story about Abu Ghraib. Little did we know that her work would end up on CNN - More images of abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Rousset is a true multimedia journalist. I know, I saw her in action. She researches, shoots video, interviews sources, edits video, writes text stories, and even blogs about her reporting experiences. The woman lives for good journalism. She is curious, conscientious and tenacious. She is an inspiration and a role model for today's young journalists. She can do it; so can you.

During my first visit to the Lombok TV newsroom they invited me to come back to watch the broadcast of their newscast, so I did. The first try was tharted, however, by a power outage in the area where their studio is located. These outages are reportedly common, because of a shortage of generating capacity in Indonesia, but it was the only one I actually experienced during my four weeks there. The next night we tried again, with more success. We arrived about 15 minutes before the newscast began. The power was on. The newscast production is very simple. They use two cameras, both of which are stationary. There is only one anchor, so the shot choice is limited. They use a standard head-on shot of the anchor, no graphics except for an ID chyron on the "presenter" at the beginning. The second camera gets a wider shot which they use for teases, close, etc. The solo camera operator also runs "prompter," which consists of a piece of paper with the script printed in a large font, held under the camera lens (similar to the KUJH update).

There are two people in the control room, a director and an audio person. The control room equipment is extremely simple. It consists of two Panasonic switchers (identical). One apparently is a source for the other. Some of the standard elements such as the open, commercials, etc. are on computer hard drives. They play these out using Adobe Premier (somewhat similar, it appeared, to KUJH's playout of some elements from Final Cut). All the news stories are on a single VHS tape, in order. The tape decks are located behind the director and he uses a standard remote control to start and stop the tape. After one story finishes, he watches his monitor for the first video of the next story and then pauses the tape; then rolls it again at the appropriate time for the next story. They leave a lot of leading pad on stories, so this cueing method seems to work. As mentioned earlier, all the chyrons within the stories are inserted during editing. So once the tape rolls there's nothing more for the director to do. All video in the newscast is in the form of packages, which also simplified production.

At the end of their packages they follow a practice that seemed common on all Indonesian casts, even those from the national broadcasters. After the reporter's outcue, they let the video and nat sound play for several seconds. They did this consistently, seemingly on every package.

The owner of the station was during this visit, because he was running master control. He is a very hands-on owner. Turns out he is an engineer who has built a lot of the equipment himself. They claimed he built the transmitter, but I don't think so, because it had all the markings – including a model number – of a manufactured unit. A lot of the other equipment did, too. When they say he made it, I suspect they mean he assembled all the components. He teaches at one of the local universities and said that Lombok TV is a "hobby". In any event, he is anything but the stereotypical Indonesian businessman, whose image is one of pretentiousness and arrogance. Most would not be caught dead actually working with the rank and file.

After the newscast, they asked me if they could interview me. Because of camera problems they twice had to send someone over to the newsroom (a short drive) to get another camera. Finally when they found one that worked, they asked me two questions: What I thought of Lombok TV, and what did it need to do to succeed in the future. They also asked me to tape a promo. They asked me to say, "Bersama saya Dick. Tetaplah di stasiun kesayangan anda, di Lombok TV, bersama dalam damai" (I'm Dick. With me, stay tuned to your favorite station, Lombok TV. Together in peace.") Why they would want me to do a promo, I have not figured out.

The other day I paid a visit to Lombok TV, the one and only local station here in Mataram.

Lombok TV is in a mostly residential area, and appears to be in what had originally been a house. The newsroom is on the second floor, in a room about 15 by 20 feet. It was very hot. There were airconditioners, but they didn't seem to be turned on. The newsroom is equipped with about six PCs, three dedicated to script-writing and three to video editing. The video editing is done on Adobe Premier; script-writing is done in Word, using a custom-created template. Apparently there's no rundown function.

The station staff totals about 30 people, according to Samsul Rizal, a reporter. There are 18 people on the news staff, three in marketing, three office staff and six in production and engineering.

The station's has been on the air four years—since 2002--and claims to be the first local station in Indonesia. Originally the station served mosly west Lombok and only a small part of east Lombok. Now it covers most of Lombok, some of east Bali, and a bit of western Sumbawa.

Local programs include shows about schools, tourism and interesting things in Lombok. Rizal said there is no emphasis on crime, in order not to make people feel unsafe. I wasn't entirely clear what he meant by this. I inferred that the station tends to be something of a promotional channel for both government and business, even though it is privately owned.

News coverage

There are no journalists on the news staff—that is, nobody trained as such. Apparently the people on the news staff were originally hired to do other things, before there was news programming, then given news jobs when news programming started. Most of the news staff personnel have more than high school educations, but only about 50 percent have college degrees. They've received training in news from consultants from national stations.

Most news staff members perform multiple duties. Reporters also shoot, sometimes as one-man-bands, sometimes in teams with another reporter. The system sounded a great deal like KUJH.

There are three anchors, one female, one male. But the newscasts feature only a single anchor per show. One anchor also reports, but the other two do not. Newscasts are 30 minutes long. There's no source of national news video, except some from events covered by TVRI. Sometimes the station will send its own crew to cover a story if it has local impact.

Rizal said advertising is difficult to sell. The government buys time for programs it wants to air. But although Lombok TV's viewing area contains at least two million people, the economy is about the size of Topeka. There's very little industry, so the economy is based on agriculture and tourism. Relatively few people have incomes high enough to permit much discretionary spending.