This past Wednesday was the last time my class and I filmed WVU News together, and as rewarding and fun it has been, I have to admit I am a little relieved! It has been such an honor to be one of the Social Square anchors for the Emmy award-winning newscast, and I've gained some incredible friends along the way while bettering my reporting skills and overall pushing myself through my most challenging class ever.
The road has been a long and painful one, but being able to travel it with this group of people has been one of the greatest adventures. They have all helped me grow and were there to pick me up when I wanted to bash my head into the computers in the edit lab.
Thankfully, next semester, most of us will be together again, working on a new project: a talkshow called Morgantown Today, all about the public affairs the city faces. We'll be working with the same professor again, but this time, we won't be creating packages (I'm still not sure whether that's a good or bad thing!).
To get to the point, I wanted to talk about my experience as a reporter and an anchor on WVU News in this post!
When I took my first intro to broadcast class in my sophomore year, the TA at the time was a reporter for WVU News. I wasn't too sure what it was, because until that point, I had been strictly print journalism. I remember she had my jaw on the floor when she told me she had to get her hair cut to a long bob.
But the more she talked about it, and the more I began to love broadcast, I realized it was inevitable. That would soon be me, complaining about having to get my hair cut (it's actually a little funny because I actually didn't have to get it cut that short after all!).
My next broadcast class, which is the prerequisite to WVU News, would take place during the fall semester of my junior year. WVU News is a capstone course, meaning it is supposed to have the amount of work you would put in at a real job, and only seniors could register. A lot of the students in that class would end up taking WVU News in the spring, so while I decided to become a TA, my previous classmates would come into the edit lab and complain about their packages, and how they were falling through the cracks. I was scared again.
But when it was time to register, I did.
On the first day, we spent nearly two hours going over the syllabus. We still had a few weeks before we actually had to start creating our packages, and to this day, I would say it was one of the most stressful times in the class. Some of my classmates and I were overwhelmed just by the thought of how much work it would be, and we were freaking ourselves out. But when we actually started creating them, it got a lot easier.
Over the course of six newscasts, my packages were in four shows, and another was named "Best of the Rest."
When you spend so much time together, complaining about the same class, you grow really close. Here is the first show I anchored, compared to Wednesday.
Now, we have "THE GIRLS (NEWS) ROOM" group chat and a Snapchat group that we talk to each other daily in!
I quickly learned that my hair would be the biggest struggle of the class. It does NOT like hairspray. I was constantly told to spray down the flyaways, but that would just make the ends look even worse! Here is my personal beauty team (my GA and my TA), and I just know they are secretly planning to shave my head in my sleep.
And although I never really stepped foot in the control room, it's nice to know I have the technical team to build me up and make me look good! Here is our assistant producer and executive producer (left and middle), and our director (right).
And I will end this post with a group shot. Thank you, WVU News, for one wild semester. I'm looking forward to my final one in January, with a lot of my fellow reporters, as we begin working on our next project: Morgantown Today!
Stay tuned!
xoxo, Madison