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Oct302009
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Another First Day at Fox |
After serving as an intern at WVUE for two months, I went there today as a new employee. Friday evening will not be a regular shift for me but Janette wanted me to learn how things work between 10 and midnight because I will be alone in the newsroom next Monday night.Shortly after I arrived, Monica had me enter the reads where missing in the script. These are tags in the script telling the talent which anchor will read the following segment. The producers often enter these already but they are frequently missing.At 4:30 I helped Monica print the scripts. She sort of watched me do it to insure I had a grasp on it. At five I sat with her while she operated the teleprompter during the newscast. I scrolled the script during packages to get some practice but I still don’t quite have a feel for it. I tend to get ahead of those speaking.I don’t remember having a great deal to do after the five o’clock news. At nine we basically did the whole process again. At ten after the last broadcast of the night, the newsroom started to empty out and eventually it was just me and Claudia. Over the course of the evening she explained a number of things to me including the primary task of sitting in the newsroom overnight. There is an array of police scanners at the assignment desk and it’s the PAs job to monitor them for major incidents such as big fires and shootings. Should such a thing occur, we generally have to call one of the on-call photographers to go check it out. Things were reasonably quiet until 11:30 when there was a shooting on South Galvez. I had to wake up Donny to go check it out shortly before I Claudia and I left for the evening around midnight. Travis arrived for the overnight shift and I talked to him for a couple minutes before catching a cab home.