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Newscast #1 - Sydney Wentz - Spring 2024

Sydney

I have wanted to be a journalist for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories of standing in Time Square outside of Good Morning America with my grandma and knowing that is where I wanted to be one day. What I did not expect was the journey behind the scenes my time at WVU would take me on. I am very excited and grateful for the opportunity to be co-producing WVU News this semester and understand what an undertaking it is to uphold the reputation of this award-winning newscast.

I feel that I have a unique perspective in WVU News because this is my second time taking the class. Having been in the shoes of the reporters before, I feel I will have a unique perspective in giving them feedback and guidance. I am excited to connect with my classmates and to help them grow under my leadership. For the first time in a pitch meeting, I thought the reporters did an excellent job and that they all found strong stories in their beats. I think this first pitch meeting definitely had some lessons for everyone in their different positions. I hope the reporters learn the importance of starting early on filming for stories because the farther ahead they are, the easier it is for them to complete their stories. This results in them earning a higher production value!

Action

Sitting in on the writing conferences provided a lot of important insight to me in giving feedback and understanding the difference between good work and great work. I find Professor Dahlia’s ability to give constructive criticism very impressive. Her attention to detail, even in the smallest of things, makes me grateful for the opportunity to learn under her and Professor Marra this semester. I hope to take the lessons I learn from them into a production job following my graduation in May. 

Producers

The most wonderful part of this whole production week was getting to work with my co-producer, Haley. We have developed such a fast friendship and a wonderful working relationship. In addition, we have established a well-organized system of dividing and conquering our work. For this show, I produced the A block and Haley produced the B block. Because I was in charge of A block, I took on copy-editing each script as it was submitted, so if that reporter made show, we would be able to plug their script into the final document with ease and know that it was already edited and perfected for the script. Haley took on providing feedback to assist Professor Dahlia and Marra in assigning grades.

makeup

We did hit a bump in the road when we had some mistakes in the formatting and execution of the feedback sheets but we were able to take the corrections and quickly bounce back. Now that we have a perfected format, we will follow it for the remainder of the shows. However, this mistake was overshadowed by the execution of our script. We were very happy with our small number of errors in our script and rundown, and are looking to improve even more in the coming shows!

Following our first taping, I am very pleased! I think everyone on set and in the control room had good communication and we worked well together. We did an excellent job at navigating unique camera changes and fast-moving CGs. I feel that Haley and I work well together and balance each other out. We have gotten so close over this first show and I look forward to growing our friendship and leaning on each other through out the semester. Now we move on to Show 2 and it is only up
from here!

studio

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