We have now made it through the first show of WVU News for this semester, and my first in-studio experience as the producer for this class. Last semester, I had the privilege of beginning my producing journey with Mountaineer Playbook. That experience changed a lot of what I believed about myself, my passions, and what I wanted to find myself doing after my final semester on campus comes to an end.
I’m glad I took the opportunity to continue learning about producing this semester by joining the WVU News team, but I had no idea how different each of these experiences would be. Through most of our production week, the things I had to do were not very different when it came to sitting in on writing conferences and getting through our Thursday production meeting.
The first big change for me is that I have an associate producer this semester! That means I had to be fully done with the script in time to send it to her to be edited. While this was different at first, I loved having someone else to double-check me before I submitted my final script to the professors. I’m happy to have Ava working alongside me this semester, and I am excited to see her start to experience the things that made me love this position last fall.
I think a big challenge for me this week – and one that I’ll have to work on for the foreseeable future – is writing for news. After every script-writing weekend, I have a meeting with Ava and our professors to go over every mistake I made. While my writing in the sports block wasn’t as bad, thanks to last year’s experience, I think I have a lot of stuff to work on. Last semester, the number of mistakes on each script was one of the main ways I tracked my own progress and getting that number lower was something I strived for. Even though I’ve started this semester with a higher number than I ended with, I can’t wait to see just how low I can get it.
Overall, I was very pleased with our first studio experience as a team. I had some issues on my own that I had to figure out, but I was surprised by how well our entire crew did. Despite a few technical hiccups, I think everyone did their part and tried their best to put on a good show.
Another part of Playbook that I loved was getting to watch anchors improve over the course of our five shows, and I think this new group will be amazing once they can work out the nerves. I think a big part of what can make me a successful producer is getting better at helping others. I’m excited to have more opportunities to help this crew improve over the next four shows.
Overall, I’m happy with how show #1 went. Going forward, I know I need to be better at helping everyone on-set become comfortable with the tricky technical issues. A big lesson from Playbook was that this semester will fly by before I even know it, so putting in the work now to make myself better and help others become better will make all the difference.