Newscast #5- Meg Weissend- Fall 2018

And that’s a wrap! We filmed our last show. I am overwhelmingly proud of the team, and I am so proud of our newscasts. I am also very proud of myself. I worked so hard for the executive producer position, and I spent every week doing the best I could to create shows that live up to the highly acclaimed, Emmy award winning title. This last newscast I was extremely independent, structuring and casting the show and writing the script entirely on my own. 

Monday, November 5th, the team was instructed to send their beat reports to me via email. Since a lot of the class went home to vote, we figured submitting story ideas over email would be more efficient. I went through each beat report, and picked out the top stories for each reporter to focus on. I then recorded the ideas and discussed them over the phone with Professor Dahlia.

Wednesday, the reporters held their conferences on FaceTime with Professor Dahlia. I communicated with the class throughout the day and helped them before and after their individual conferences. This was a brand-new process, and it went surprisingly well. Most packages had a minimal amount of changes from her.

On Thursday, November 8th, I stayed up to wait for final packages to upload to Vimeo for critiques. Since Professor Dahlia wanted me to be on my own this week, I did the critiques by myself, and sent them to one of the assistant producers to look over. We discussed who made show and created our last rundown for the semester.

The next morning, I went to the Media Innovation Center to film Studio B. Since it was our last Studio B shoot, it went smoothly. After that I announced who made show and sent everyone their individual critiques. I finished most of the script that day, and sent it to the assistant producer for a second pair of eyes before turning it in. We just touched it up a little on Saturday, and turned the final script in on Sunday. I was really proud of the script.

On Monday, those who made show or BOR came to the edit lab and fixed their packages before uploading them one last time. Our table read went well, and I was excited after the rehearsal because I knew it would be a pretty good show.

Wednesday, November 14th, we filmed our last show of the semester. It was bittersweet, and I found myself more critical during filming because I wanted our last one to be the best one. Tour groups, an entire elementary school class and a bunch of journalism students came to watch the show live. Although I was still shaking from adrenaline, I wasn’t as nervous this past newscast. I have a vision for how the show should look, and when the anchors do well, it makes me calm down a whole lot.

I am going to really miss being the executive producer. I learned so much, and I am so thankful I chose the right major… and discovered I wanted to produce a while ago. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.