REPORTER BLOG: Something is missing!

Whitney Hare

It’s amazing to see how a newscast comes together. It’s very clearly a team effort. But problems arise when one of the key players doesn’t show up to work. The stories. It seems like there has been a dwindling amount of news to cover in Athens, Ohio recently. It’s almost like the news knows the quarter is coming to an end and wants to make it a bit more challenging for us students.

So the real question is, what are we to do when there is no news???

Well for some reason, I’ve been forced to answer this question the past two times I’ve been a reporter. When scraping the bottom of the barrel and waiting on un-returned phone calls, you have to get out of the news mindset.

Last week, I was really looking forward to covering an education story, since I look up potential education stories every day for class. Federal Hocking was having play practice so I thought it would be nice to cover the fine arts. Of course we had to put some “news” into this story so the focus was going to be, how are the fine arts continuing during these hard economic times.

Well, this would have been a fabulous story, I’m sure of it…. If only someone would have called me back.

Once that story fell through, we moved on to a levy for the Health Department. They are always so helpful and willing to talk. So I went and did my interview, and soon realized that interview was all there was to get! There were no concerns about the levy passing so it would have been very difficult to find a person who had much to say about it or even knew about it. It wasn’t highly publicized, so there wasn’t much news.

On to story number three!

OU Idol was having their final event of the competition that night, so I finally had a story! It was a wonderful event supporting a great cause, but not really “newsy.” It was very much a feature, feel good story. Personally, I don’t think there’s enough of those stories out there. People want to feel good when they hear the news. They need the important stories obviously, but enough with the death and destruction! My story turned out great and I had a great time covering it.

So when the news stories decide to take the day off, why not focus on some happy news for a change and just let the stories have their vacation. Most stations say, the news never takes a day off, well here in Athens I beg to differ!