Radiolab

I have a new favorite radio show, thanks to Scott Brauer, a member of APAD. It's called Radiolab and it's gotten me thinking about storytelling. Their stories are delivered via quirky editing and a style that seems to be deliberately unpolished at times while delightfully refined at others. They tackle exceedingly broad subjects such as laughter or mortality, and in an hour-long show somehow leave you pretty satisfied with the coverage.

As for how this applies to me and my budding career? Well, my aural skills definitely need improvement and this show has definitely got me thinking.

While I don't have a new pic to post with this, I found an old one of Oswald Cobblepot's first trip to the vet a few months back.


Do yourself a favor and check out this show. If not for me, the for little Oswald.

Every 15 Minutes

Pasco senior Ashton Bott finishes off her transformation into a walking dead as part of the Every 15 Minutes program, which seeks to raise awareness for drunk driving-related fatalities.

The "every 15 minutes" part refers to an old stat that claimed one death from alcohol-related accidents every 15 minutes. The rate has dropped since the program started, thanks to numerous programs aimed at getting heads pulled out of asses.

I shot some video for this and planned on editing it, having thought out a tight edit during and after shooting. Unfortunately, a last-minute A1 story came up and I had to pass the footage along to be edited. What I had envisioned as a quick 1:30 about the event clocked in at a flabby 4:09.

Now, I'm not talking shit about the coworker who edited it. I dumped it on her toward the end of her shift and it's much faster to edit loose than tight. There's that famous Mark Twain quote: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Well, that rings true for these multimedia pieces too, and with our current drive for quantity of videos over quality, it's tough to find the time to edit properly. Week before last, we slammed our interactive media department with four videos in one day. My fear is that by the time we get our video priorities in order, a good percentage of our readers will avoid our videos out of conditioning.

My hope is that things will settle down before that happens and we are given the time to produce some quality storytelling.

True. I got pulled away from editing the Every 15 Minutes video to go hang out in a bar and shoot some Cougar fans watch the Tar Heels smother WSU. I got an hour of overtime to hang out with a pretty fun bunch and catch the first half of a bitter Sweet 16 game. And sure, I'm pretty happy with the frame I got of a 1993 WSU alum leading the crowd in the fight song:

But I would've happily traded that to edit my own video—even from a less-than-stellar event. Why? Because every time I slog through my own footage, I learn a little more about what I need to do next time, and while we're in this orgy of video production, I want to use the lack of demand for quality to work out the kinks so when the quantity/quality formula is reciprocated, my pants are snug around my waist and not wrapped around my ankles.

Crashes and Cars and Jesse Jackson, Oh My!

That's probably the worst play on the Wizard of Oz line for a headline ever, but I'm staying late after work to uphold my blog updating promise.

So sue me.

Here's the aftermath of a semi rolling into a bank. The driver didn't set the parking brake on his rig while he grabbed a bite next door and a gust of wind pushed it across the street. No one was hurt, but the driver was embarrassed. "They probably thought I was robbing the bank," he said. He declined to give me his name, acknowledged that we'd be able to get it from the police anyways and asked that we didn't print his name.

We printed his full name, age and where he's from. I won't do that here.

Happy, Randell?

That was before heading out to the highway to shoot an illustrative piece about a section of Highway 240 between Kennewick and Richland, which, according to a DOT survey records the highest average speeds of any 60 mph highways in Washington—an unimpressive 63.2 mph average. Granted, more than 1,500 were clocked at 90 mph or faster, but c'mon, Washingtonians...63.2 average? That better factor in a couple traffic jams or something.

Anyways, I tried out a zoom burst for a story that I didn't think needed a photo, and actually, it didn't even run next to the story. This ran on A1, while the story ran on B1, and there was no teaser for the actual story next to my photo. It did run 2.5 columns, though, so I'm not really complaining.

Finally, the Rev. Jesse  Jackson stopped by the local WSU satellite campus to wrap up his two-day Tri-Cities tour. If you're interested, you can read about why he was visiting here and here. They served food that appeared semi-appetizing and Jackson had kind of a free form ramble. He seemed most enthused about answering students' questions, but unfortunately had a plane to catch and only had time to answer a couple.

Special Olympics

Usually, I'm not a fan of camera awareness, but I dig this frame for some reason. It's from a story I shot a few weeks ago about a group of special olympians who bounced back from a nasty bus wreck to compete a month later. I did a video/photo multimedia mutant for this and was relatively happy with it, as well.

Durr.

Well. That was kind of a silly way to update my blog, but what's done is done.

If you want to be as good as I am at photoshop, check this out: http://tinyurl.com/3c4w3h

VA Roundtable

Monty Hays of Kennewick, who suffered hearing loss in Vietnam, cups his ears to help him hear panel members sharing stories of their dealings with the Veterans Affairs system at Worksource in Kennewick. Hays says that he has been repeatedly denied benefits by the VA. "I'm scared to even file a claim anymore," he says.

Some Color

The first shot is from a tasting event sponsored by the chamber of commerce that featured local restaurants, wineries and breweries. The second is from a circus-themed bowling party for Junior Achievement.