Thursday, June 5, 2008

Flooded. producing. tornadoes.

I'm on the 2-week producing rotation. It's such great practice rewriting wire copy on a time crunch. I can feel my writing improve each day. I get to produce three web updates each day and help write stories mainly for the midday newscast, but usually bumps for the later ones. Today tornadoes and storms hammered our viewing area. Serious damage, flooding. Great viewer photos. It's still hard for me to comprehend the reality of tornadoes here! I'm sure I'll see one myself by the end of the summer. Even though I was a producer today, Dexter sent me out to cover heavy flooding in Canton (just a vo/sot). Unbelievable flooding...it looked like lakes on farmland. I interviewed a woman who had to forge two feet of water to get to me on the road from her house. Once I had it back and edited, I ended up sticking around to help answer phones because viewers were going crazy. I love talking, well..listening to all these calls. It's intriguing. People were calling about power outages or if they'd seen a tornado or funnel clouds or complaining because the meteorologist wouldn't "shut his mouth." It was great. Having fun and feeling a little more like I belong.
P.S. Election coverage was fun, too! Got to interview the Gov. and phoner with former Sen. George McGovern election night and previous week got footage of Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. I feel like here I'm right in the middle of national news.

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