Chris Vlahos Blog 8

MY WEEK
This week I was on Spring Break, which allowed me to go home to Los Angeles and enjoy everything I love about LA. One of the many things I have come to like when I go home is being able to watch the local news. Since I started taking Broadcast classes last fall, I have started watching the news from a completely different perspective. When I’m in Columbia I try to watch the ten o’ clock KOMU newscast as often as possible, looking for things we talked about in class that week. It is quite a contrast watching local news in Columbia to news in LA.
Due to the fact LA is a big market, the news seems to be more about entertainment and less about the fundamentals of broadcast journalism. While home last week I saw an interview where the subject was turned so you could only see his profile. I saw another interview where a woman was talking to a reporter and the cameraman was standing across the street. Stations don’t avoid pans or zooms necessary or not in most cases. Usually when I watch the news in LA though, I watch CBS/KCAL because I interned there for the past two summers and know most of the people that work there. In order to “spice up” the newscast, CBS/KCAL has some of its anchors delivering parts of the newscast standing up next to television screens, or weather walls.
Most disturbing though was when I watched a local sports anchor deliver two separate sports casts and blatantly get two important and obvious things wrong. First he botched an upcoming match up in the Elite Eight and three days later he mispronounced Ichiro Suzuki’s name on air. Ichiro is the centerfielder for the Seattle Mariners, and probably the most well known Japanese baseball to ever play in the United States. As you can tell that bothered me because getting a fact or name wrong in sports casting is usually due to a lack of preparation.
JOURNALISM REFLECTION
Cnn.com did a great job with this headline because it immediately caught my eye, “3,000 killer bees sting man.” Being a journalist I couldn’t help but be curious and click the link. After watching the story while devastating, I though it was a good piece of journalism.
The reporter opens the package with close up video of a swarm of bees and audio of a man saying, “I just pulled them out of my mouth and pulled them out of my nose and kept my eye’s closed so that I wouldn’t be blind.” Then she states, “Red welts all over Jeff Moser’s body”, and the viewer sees the thousands of bee stings a man in Phoenix, Arizona endured while helping a friend move a shrub. This was a good job of referencing by the reporter and I thought she did a great job of humanizing the story and making the viewer feel Moser’s pain. One shot I really liked was when the reporter says, “His heart became weak” and the shot becomes blurry, as if someone is woozy or about to pass out. The story lent itself to strong, emotional sound bites, the best of which can be heard the
:42 second mark when Moser states why he didn’t want to die. Once the reporter finishes telling Jeff’s story she provides the audience with the data and facts about the types of injuries Jeff suffered and just how lucky he was to survive.
On the negative side, three shots after the first bite from Moser I felt the reporter used an unnecessary pan, I’ve watched the shot at least ten times and I’m not sure what they were trying to show. Bee’s maybe? I don’t know.



http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/03/30/killer.bee.attack.knxv