MONDAY
South Medford Dedication
South Medford High School moved from its old campus to its brand spanking new campus across town. I was on scene with a live remote hit in the 6:30 and was assigned to shoot a vosot for the 11. Good news: I really enjoy live remotes. Bad news: halfway through this live remote, technology failed and the station lost my video signal. It was all for naught.
However, I still turned the story for the 11. I also packaged a story about businesses around SOU's campus anticipation for the students to return for classes.

TUESDAY
I think I might be getting that Education beat I talked about earlier. I was assigned a story about Rogue Community College enrollment going up 10%, or 600 students, from this time last year. I went to an event and shot video for a package then headed back to report live from RCC in the 6:30.
I got a suggestion from my producer about writing packages: find a particular person or business that exemplifies your story and tell their story as an illustration of the main point. I used that in this package about enrollment going up in the down economy. RCC is mainly an adult learning facility and I talked with a 38 year old man who went back to school because he realized he needed more education. He was exactly the kind of student I was looking to talk to about the story.

WEDNESDAY
My work cell phone, which I lovingly call the BatPhone, woke me up at 8:15. A reporter had called in sick and I was asked to come in early to cover some stories.
Fortunately, I got a good story. Oregon's Governor, Ted Kulongoski, was in town to announce that electric vehicle recharging stations would be built in Medford, Ashland, Grants Pass, and 8 other locations along I-5 in an effort to "electrify" the entire freeway from Canada to Mexico.

THURSDAY
Called in early again today. But I got to cover a cool story about Medford Firefighter training. We were having trouble finding lead stories and joked that our lead story could be hunky firefighters. The firefighters training was pretty cool. Had I been in the right clothes, and had the temperature not been approaching 100˚, I might have given the exercises a shot. I wanted to make the story more important, so some digging helped me find that 54% of firefighters' deaths that come in the line of duty are the result of cardiac arrest. This training really strengthens the cardiovascular system and helps prevent those cardiac arrest situations. The two firefighters who contacted the station about the training told me that currently, Medford Fire only provides the training for new recruits, but they hope to expand it to all on-duty crews. They hoped that this story might be seen by city council members or people who have importance and show them how important this training was.
I was asked to do live remotes in the 5, 6, and 6:30 for this story. They all turned out great. The captain at the station offered to pull out the fire engine for our shot and made it look way cooler. For my vosot in the 6:30, I had my hit from inside the cherrypicker on the engine. Awesome!
Everyday I enjoy my job. Some days I love my job. This was one of those days.




FRIDAY
It was a bit of a slow news day, but we pulled something out. (Interesting to note: no matter how slow of a news day it is, there is still shows that need to be filled. There's no way to say, "Well nothing happened in the world today, so we'll be going off air at 11:26 instead of 11:30 tonight." But more on this later…)
Tove showed me that SOU had posted their crime statistics on their website. After looking over their numbers, the amount of crimes had decreased between 2007 and 2009. I made some calls and talked with SOU officials about why that might be. They said, generally, the attitude of the incoming class can have a great impact on the over all temperament of the student body. However, SOU took a proactive route by providing programming and education that aimed at making students more aware of what the college expected of them behaviorally.
Friday also featured a Zombie Walk through downtown Ashland. About 50 zombies walked through the downtown area to get people in the Halloween spirit and raise awareness for the community radio station. It turned out to be some pretty great video!