Mr. B's Domain – The Log - Archive

September 01, 2009

First Day at Fox

Dad dropped me off at Fox 8 at around 10:30 this morning, half an house before I was supposed to report. Travis, one of the PA’s, let me in and showed me the ropes for a while, mostly the ENPS newsroom workflow software they use and how to interact with it. One of the jobs interns sometimes do is enter information from faxes, e-mails and press releases into the event calendar. Certain items are pulled from the calendar and use for story ideas. I was shown the software during my station tour but I didn’t use it myself. That afternoon we got a handful of calls about the John McDonogh High School principle repeatedly canceling band practice. I didn’t pay the first call much thought but we received calls from a few parents and MS. DeCorte apparently made an inquiry and received a less than informative response.Later on I accompanied reporter Jennifer Hale and a camera man to get a brief interview with congressman Joseph Cao who was spending the afternoon touring points of interest related to the homeless problem in New Orleans. We were waiting at the abandoned St. Augustine High School which was to be one of his stops. We never did see him and ended up returning to the station empty handed, as the reporter also got a de facto interview cancellation on another unrelated story.After returning to the station I didn’t have much of anything to do, although just before five, the lady that operates the teleprompter and apparently works on the scripts invited me to help her out a bit and I went with her as she distributed copies of the scripts to the producers upstairs and the anchors in the studio. I was able to introduce myself to Nancy Parker and Jennifer Van Vrancken. I left not long after five but I got to sit at the teleprompter controls for the first few minutes in the studio. I was surprised to see the cameras are controlled remotely upstairs rather than having operators behind them. The only people actually in the studio are the anchors and teleprompter operator.Dad picked me up from the station just after five. I didn’t do much in the evening. I had a bit of a headache and laid down for a while and eventually went to sleep for the night.

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