After a week and a half at Fox, I finally graduated from being an assistant to the Production Assistant and moved up in the world. Well not that far. For the next three weeks, I will get to shadow each of the three main franchise producers: health, business and entertainment. Instead of sitting at a computer all day, typing stuff for the PA’s, I will now be typing up stuff for the actual producer, ha. No, I’ll actually get to take what I learned from the past week and a half and see how news packages are really made.
Today was my first day with the health producer. I will admit, before today I was a little terrified of her. She is very intimidating, well at least I thought so. However, to my surprise she wasn’t bad at all. She was so helpful and really wanted to make sure I learned. When I first got there, she wanted me to get used to cutting and editing video. Fox uses a really straightforward software, so it took me hardly any time to learn it. So I searched through the archives all morning and put together a video for one of her news stories.
After working with the editing software, the health producer had me do some research for an interview tomorrow. She will be interviewing a world-renowned doctor for a health story. She also had me make a list of questions we could ask during the interview, look up statistics, and find background info on the doctor. She even told me I could sit in on the interview tomorrow! So exciting, although I honestly have no idea who this guy is. When it comes to medicine and science, I am clueless, ha.
Towards the end of the day, she said she didn’t really have much left for me do. Producers work early in the morning, so after lunch their days are pretty much over. To pass the time, the producer had me search the Internet to see what our competitors were putting out, as far as health news goes. She said if I came across anything interesting to let her know. So after some searching, I found a story that two of our competitors were doing that we didn’t have. I was so excited to pitch her an idea. I emailed her the link and she said, “Go for it!” GO FOR IT?! What in the world does that mean? I asked her, in the coolest way possible of course, “Excuse me?” She then replied, “You can do it. Go ahead and write a script for the story and find the footage.” Naturally, I started panicking. But then I realized, she probably would never use this, it was just a test; practice. So this brings us to the title of this entry, about apples. The story was about apples and how they are the most contaminated produce with pesticides. Well to make a long story short, I wrote a script and found some footage and sent to her. She said it was great and it was going up!! I almost fell over. An idea I had and a story I wrote went on the server!! I was so freaking excited. I am usually not a huge apple lover, but today they were my best friend!
I know I am probably getting ahead of myself and the rest of the days will not be anywhere as exciting as this, but it really showed me that I can do this. I may have a background in magazine and always thought I’d write for some teenybopper magazine, but I really can do news and broadcast. What I thought was going to be a horrible, boring, never ending day, turned into a day full of surprises and lots of learning!
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