TELEVISION
I worked at KOMU 8 News, an NBC affiliate, for four years in nearly every position possible. I started for a year as a Production Assistant, learning to capture and edit video using Avid NewsCutter, and later Adobe Premiere Pro. I then moved on to work as a Digital Producer, managing the Twitter and Facebook accounts, writing breaking news stories and helping with other digital work as a it came up, such as Facebook Live Streaming. I finally began working as a News Producer the summer after my Sophomore year at MU. You can check out some of my work as a producer and as a field producer and digital reporter below.
PRODUCING
I've worked at KOMU 8 News, an NBC-affiliate television station, for nearly four years, and some of my best work was while I was a news producer with them. Within my first week of producing, I was in charge of three shows every Saturday (we are pretty short staffed over the summer). I started producing before diving deeper into reporting, so I ended up learning a lot in this role about how to tell stories audiences want to hear.
Head Coach fired
While working over Thanksgiving break, MU Football's head coach was fired after his last game of the season. I was lucky enough to be working with a sports reporter who was expecting the upset, so she put together a whole package before the news was official. With plenty of content, I chose to have two sports reporters in my A block, along with an ad libbed chat at the end of it to talk about the future of Mizzou football.
Nobel Prize coverage
In my first semester of producing, a Mizzou professor won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. We sent a reporter to Stockholm to cover the celebrations, and I produced the 5 p.m. newscast the day of the ceremony. I coordinated five reporters, with four of them appearing in the A block, two of them live. This was still in my earlier producing days, but it was my first chance to focus an entire A block on one main story.
A focus on local issues
This 9 p.m. show focused on several key issues that were very important to the community at the time, so I created an A block with a good amount of movement with the anchors to try to keep up with the gravity of the stories. The first is an update in the case of a missing woman, who, as of March 2020, had still not been found. The second half of the block is focused on gun violence, since five people were killed in homicides in September, doubling Columbia's count for the year.
DIGITAL SUPER BOWL
COVERAGE
The Chiefs finally made it to the Super Bowl! I had the pleasure of heading to Kansas City Power & Light to the biggest Chiefs watch party. My coworkers Nathalie Jones and Austin Walker went live, and I helped them shoot video and photos for digital. We certainly had some sounds issues, being in the media area the massive speakers were level with us, and we didn't have fancy equipment that could help block it out. We tried to go to a different area to go live, but once the game ended, cell reception and crowd control became difficult. But we were able to capture much of the atmosphere of the Kansas City fans excited at the game!