All the pieces fit!

This have really started to come together for me this week, it’s funny how sometimes all the right pieces just seem to fall into place! First, I wanted to talk about the world of internships. For awhile now, say a couple of months, I have been stressing about finding an internship around the Lawrence county area for this summer. I was concerned that I might have to end up driving the hour commute to Pittsburgh everyday if I wanted true broadcast experience. A week before spring break however, I get a call from the executive producer of WKBN in nearby Youngstown, Ohio asking if I could come in for an interview! I was ecstatic about this opportunity and couldn’t stop thinking about it all break. Finally, we returned to school after break and I went in for an interview on Friday afternoon. The interview was scheduled at 4 p.m., but I was kind of nervous and got lost on my way to the station and ended up getting there 20 minuets late! I thought for sure my opportunity had gone out the window because I was already late on day one, but the producer I met with was really easy going and understanding so that put me at ease. During the interview, I thought back to an important topic we discussed in Capstone class, how to self yourself as a professional. I thought of all the things I have done related to broadcasting and public relations and explained my love of the field. Eventually, after taking a tour of the station and talking a bit about the internship itself, the producer offered me the job! I feel this will be a great opportunity for me to learn more about the field of broadcasting and, most importantly, get the professional experience I will need to land a job after I graduate!

Now with my internship lined up for the summer, it was time to focus on a more immediate issue. I have been pondering for a few weeks now about a research project I wanted to do for my PR research class. Finally, I decided that it would be a great idea to work within my major field of broadcasting and also be able to apply my skills in public relations. I came up with the plan to focus on Westminster College Network and discover what type of problems they have reaching viewers. I talked with my Capstone professor and also my fellow classmates to determine that the main problem WCN has is its image. I feel that not a lot of students on campus know exactly what WCN is and if they do, they do not watch it very often. The next step in my research project was to create a survey to distribute randomly across campus. The questions are geared to determine the target audience for the network and find out exactly why people are not watching. When I have the surveys returned to me I will be able to pinpoint the issue and therefore be able to implement a plan. This is where my pr project ties in with Capstone. We are also required to do a senior project for Capstone which reflects our knowledge of the field of broadcasting. I decided that it would be a good idea to go the route of actually following thru with my research and helping WCN solve their identity crisis. I will mainly focus on promoting the station on campus in various ways and benchmarking my success as time goes by.

Drink Up, Broadcasters!

This week, the career center hosted a panel of web-based journalists who spoke about their jobs and the future of broadcasting. It was very interesting to hear how they started out in the field at television stations and newspaper offices and ended up where they are today leading the future with technology. One speaker from the Pittsburgh WQED station, made an analogy that really caught my attention. He said that the media is currently going through a “milkman” transition. Think back a few decades, milkmen used to visit the doors of almost every home in America, providing milk to the families weekly. Eventually, the availability of refrigerators and the building of giant supermarkets weeded off the profession of delivering milk because it was now available whenever you needed it. In broadcasting, the “milkmen” are essentially the print journalist and the availability of computers in every American home, and the coming of the “super web” is weeding out the concepts of how we originally received news on a daily basis. Broadcasters now have to branch out and distinguish themselves in order to make a living. Instead of just writing an article and having it published in the daily paper, print journalists are now posting those articles on their papers website with video, graphics and sound. Instead of just producing a package for the evening news, video journalists are now constantly covering news and posting it on their websites to rival the constant media overflow consumers are being flooded with. Anyone with internet can now log onto popular news sites like CNN.com, nytimes.com or usatoday.com instead of having to wait for the 6 or 11 o clock news to know what is going on around them. I am as guilty of clicking to the web for news as anyone else, its convenience and constantly updated sources keep me coming back for more. I think the future of broadcasting is a very interesting and exciting concept, just imagine how different the future could even be from today. What will the web bring us next, and will it consume our lives and how we receive news even more than today? As young journalists, we need to keep on our toes and be ready for anything. More than ever, we need to distinguish ourselves from the media pack and start developing our web savvy selves!