My day as a TV reporter

Been asked to write a post about my experience last week as a television reporter. Did a story on Cedar Rapids Washington High School teacher Heather Adams, who is a big hockey fan and has become a mentor for the seven Cedar Rapids RoughRiders' players at Washington.

The story ran last Friday at 6. Hopefully you saw it and thought it was OK.

Leading up to the RoughRiders' home opener last weekend, we came up with an idea a month or so ago about doing a 1A newspaper/online story about the RoughRiders who go to high school here. It's a particularly young team this season, with 11 kids attending either Washington or Cedar Rapids Kennedy. Defenseman Tom Mahoney is taking online classes from his old school in Boston. I just can't imagine being in their shoes: 16, 17, 18 years old and moving away from home.

The idea grew from there. It was decided to make this a multi-media project, with pictures and video added online at www.gazetteonline.com. Photographer Crystal LoGuidice did a wonderful job with that, following around a few RoughRiders for part of their day at Washington.

And it was decided I would do a companion story on KCRG-TV. That's even though I know very, very little about television. In this day and age, we all here are being taught to be multi-media journalists, and I was the Guinea Pig, the first newspaper/online guy to give this TV thing a go.

So last Wednesday morning at 7, I met KCRG's John Sears (my dojo, as I call him) at the station and drove over to Washington to observe an Adams chemistry class that included RoughRiders players Peter Sakaris and Sam Warning. Keep in mind, this is WAY early for us sports guys, though we had nothing on Sakaris and Warning, who returned home with their team at 4:30 a.m. that morning after a game Tuesday night in Green Bay.

We watched the kids make waffles, of all things. Ingredients for the waffles were converted into metric measurements. Then we did the TV thing: Sears did all the camera work while I interviewed Adams, Sakaris and Warning. John also threw in a couple of questions.

No problem so far.  

After getting back to the station, John and I went into an editing booth at KCRG and popped in footage of the interviews and other camera shots he had made. He told me to scan the tape and find the interview "sound bites" I liked best. I was to write down where at on the tape the bites were and what the exact quotes were.

OK, I can do that. John had previously shown me examples of "scripts" for TV stories, so I had fiddled around the night before with some script ideas I had. Therefore, I knew the types of sound bites I was looking for.

Scripts? Sound bites? Those are words I never thought I'd be using when I began my newspaper career 20 years ago.

I finished the task, and handed John my script and the sound bites I thought would fit. He scanned everything ... then scanned it again. Oh, boy, I thought. This can't be good.

He reminded me I had about a minute and a half for this story, then suggested some cuts. It's a big change when you are so used to fully explaining things in newspaper/online stories and go to a medium where brevity is crucial.

It was off to a sound booth from there, where I did "voice-overs," reading my script in my best TV voice. After what seemed like a thousand times fumbling over my words, I finally had takes I was satisfied with.

Then it was back to the editing room, where John spliced together my voice-overs, the sound bites I liked and some other footage. He explained to me how to use what apparently is archaic equipment, but my head was spinning so much and my ears hurting from having to listen to myself over and over again, that I couldn't even begin to tell you what he was doing.

After about a half-hour, we finally had the finished product. I typed my script, complete with sound bite info, into a computer, and we were done: about six hours after we had started. The next day, Julie Seebold at KCRG watched the tape (apparently multiple times) and decided, despite its roughness, it was air worthy. I wrote an intro that anchors Bruce Aune and Beth Malicki read, and that was it.

My wife, Nicole, was especially excited to watch it on TV, though I was kind of embarrassed. Like I said, it's hard to hear yourself.

I came away from the experience with a new appreciation for what TV journos do. We newspaper types tend to poke fun at our television brethren. I want to thank John Sears for his patience and instruction. Can't wait to do my next one ... I think.