Week Two at WOIO Channel 19 Action News

My second week of project allowed me to sort of settle into a rhythm of coming in during the early afternoon and sticking around for the evening news broadcasts. WOIO is unique in that it is the only news station to broadcast a 4 o’clock news in its viewing area, so I’m pretty lucky in that I get to see 3 broadcasts at work from 4 to 6:30. In the beginning of the week – including my sponsor Sharon Reed – who are all incredibly nice, helpful, and willing to help me with whatever I need. One anchor, Denise Dufala, was joking around with the producers and me on Monday and then she showed us the proper form of how to throw a discus. It was great, the producers wanted to take a video of it to put on Facebook but she wasn’t going to do it again.

Tuesday I was able to go down to the Q with Sports Director Tony Zarrella and he showed me the media room and all of the special amenities that those in the press get behind the scenes there. We had a lot of down time between his segments for the 4, 5 and 6 o’clock news, so we talked about what I could do as an intern to make my project truly meaningful, and so we decided that I would work on a substantial story that would air on the Sports Extra show on WUAB. He’s going to allow me to really come up with the concept, and then he’ll help me write it, edit it, produce it, the whole nine yards. We both think it’s going to be great resume material.

Wednesday was sort of an exciting day at the news because of the house explosion. It was a story they interrupted normal programming for in the morning at probably 8:45am, when they only had one anchor in the building because their morning show was over. I didn’t go into the station until 11:30 that morning, but I was later told that the 12 o’clock news was put together in under an hour because there was still so much flooding in from ground zero of the explosion.

To sort of wrap things up for the week, I sat in the camera bay on Monday and then again on Friday. The in-studio cameras are all operated electronically by a joystick and a touch-screen computer monitor. Since I had observed her on Monday, Danielle let me go on headset with her on Friday and let me set up some of the cameras for the next segments during the commercial breaks. Then, towards the end of the broadcast, she even let me do a “push” (zoom in on an anchor when they’re talking. WOIO does it because they are “action news”) on one of the anchors.

With all of that, it was certainly an “action news” packed week and I look forward to working with Tony Zarrella this coming week to put our story on the air.

-Myles