2:30am

I hinted at it in my previous post, I am an intern. "Where at?" you ask? Well I'm glad you asked. I intern at KOCO. That's correct, 'That channel 5 news thingie place.'

I am a mass comm major at UCO and am following the path of broadcast, well it's really called professional media. I didn't think there was a degree that could make for a harder question to answer than graphic design, but there you go: Professional Media. Between the two questions "What's a graphic designer?" and "What's a professional media-er-er??" The former has become much easier for me to answer, so I'll just stick with broadcast.

Of course the internship is required for the degree, and I get to pay money to UCO so that I can work for free somewhere else. Nifty concept. I need to figure out how to charge people to be interns. But I digress. No, I'm not studying to be on-air talent, nor am I pursuing content creation (producer)... yet. At the beginning of the internship I learned and watched and got to see how the whole process went down.

Fortunately for me and my schedule it was easier to have me come in at 3:30pm and stay til 6:30pm or 10:30 pm. My time learning and watching spontaneously changed to running the teleprompter. One week my schedule said 'Prompter-tn' and then the next it said 'Prompter' -- funny the difference a missing '-tn' can make. So I started to run teleprompter for Paul Folger and Jessica Schambach or Morgan Chesky and Erielle Reshef. Let's not forget the sports guys either Bryan Keating and Carson Cunningham.

Interesting side-note: Damon Lane and Jonathan Conder don't actually read from a prompter, for 3:30-4:00 minutes they ad lib the heck out of weather! But I do get to push a button that lets them see themselves on the green screen so they know where they are pointing. I hold the power, but I don't abuse it. Weather's an important matter here in Oklahoma.

In week 8, I was presented with a surprise. Okay, not really a surprise. My supervisor gave me a heads up and asked if it was cool to schedule me for the morning shifts for a week so that I could get a feel for that show. And so it was, I was schedule Tuesday through Friday (July 4th Friday) for the 4am shift. Now I'm not like the rest of the world where I can just jump out of bed at 3:30am toss on some clothes and head out to work or whatever. I'm a slow riser, so I got up at 2:30am and I can sure tell you the world is sure different at that time of day. Traffic -- what a nightmare! There are no cars on the road, I had to go the proper speed limit! What's up with that?

The atmosphere was a little different for the most part, and the amount of work that goes into the morning shows was completely different. These guys put on a two and a half hour long newscast compared to the half hour hits in the evening. I didn't do much in the way of 'working' this go around. I got to sit with the camera person-- that's correct. Singular 'Person' as in one person. KOCO uses 5 cameras, but one person. Also, they aren't called a 'Cameraman' or 'Camera Person', rather the position is called 'Robotics'. I'm going to stop with the explanation there, cause I want your imagination to run wild.

Anyway, I got to meet Wendell Edwards and Brad Sowder. Katy Blakey was there, but I didn't actually meet her. Sorta meet Abigail Ogle and gave Dan Thomas and the Tuesday morning producer crew a nice scare my first morning there. Apparently banging on the door to the newsroom and asking to be let is is a big no-no, especially if they don't know you're suppose to be there. Whole other story right there, so moving on.

I sat in the studio for four days while the morning news team delivered Oklahoma the morning news and events that transpired the day before. Got to see the magic of weather on the green screen and just how crazy a person looks when walking back and forth in front of a giant bright green wall. Abigail Ogle was getting in some anchor practice this week, which put the engineering department in a bit of a bind. They had no one to cover teleprompter -- OH! But wait, they have an intern here those days! Eric to the rescue.

So for an hour or so each day I ran the teleprompter for Abbie... or is it Abby? Maybe Ms. Ogle. I've no idea really... but she knows I ran prompter for her. In any case, my week of 2:30am is done and over. I managed to meet some new people, learn a few more things, get some more experience (I ran cameras for 3 blocks on the Thursday show), and I managed to not mess anything up. All in all it was a good week, but I just can't do 2:30am... that's just inhumane. Really. Just ask my bloodshot, caffeine widened eyes.