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Wednesday 31 October 2012

Final 2 days of Granada: wrapped up!

The final two days of work experience at Granada were definitely mixed...

I'm going to wrap them both up as this is turning into a bit of a saga and putting me way behind in publishing other stuff i've been up to!

Thursday
I was humped by a staffordshire bull terrier. (He was so cute and crazy but wasn't put into the final edit which i still think is an outrage!)
It was really fun being out on the road all the way to westHoughton with Ralph who i salute for carrying me up a flight of stairs in a 3 storey town house and spending at least 2 hours picking on me and threatening to steal bits of titanium off my chair!

It was a bit awkward when we got back however...this truly was work experience within broadcast journalism (an ever changing industry) in 2012...
6 redundancies were announced that dinner time, so i felt really awkward being the work experience girl and completely baffled as to why the people who i'd seen were most busy had lost their jobs...
Apparently the format of local news is changing and instead of being a full on news programme, it's trying to be more short and snappy like a website. So skills to me at least, are appearing to be splattered out the door and then dust pan and brushed back up and handed out to a handful reporters who are expected to produce pieces of work that years of experience, skills and many hands have been used to produce. It doesn't seem fair to both sides, those that are keeping their jobs and those that are losing...and will the audience really benefit from this huge revamp?
It'll be interesting to see the effects when everything falls, emphasis on the word "falls" there, into action...

Friday
FINAL DAY...
I'll be honest, it felt weird. I'd been there less than a week and yet i'd worked everyone and the whole place out. The warm banter, the dynamics of everyone and the building frustration of how it's all about to change...with me, thrown into the middle of it all.
I didn't really have much to do in the morning, so I flicked through the papers and planned a few things for our disabled access story and then after lunch...
I was rescued from feeling a little lost and little low by the lovely Jo Blythe. To be honest, we did just chat and drink coffee a lot, but i learnt so much about the weather too! I'd never approached Fred for any work experience-related-type stuff as I'd assumed throughout the week that i should just stick with reporters. The guys in graphics even said to me, "Ye, you were monopolised on Monday by Matt O'donoghue!"Maybe it was a good thing? Either way, ever since I was little I've been interested in how we find out what the weathers like and how it all gets fed onto our TV screens...and on Friday afternoon I learnt just that! I listened in on the phone call from the met office, found out that Granada actually film weather reports for (memories fading now) about 3 regions and got to giggle in the studio at Jo accidentally saying the word "sex" instead of "sec"...how old am i?
Oh, come on. It is funny.
She did have to re-do the entire report because of my slight smirk...
ooo I also stopped in the corridor and got talking about how beautifully shot countryfile is...and all the while was thinking yep, my love of the outdoors and bizarre skills I have with the media will help me in many ways...not just as a journalist...
I watched Granada reports one final time in the gallery and probably made Rob Smith put on a few pounds as my miniature heroes were right next to his desk. Riggers said I'd been a "big presence" in the newsroom...funny that, I thought i was just a large annoyance...I headed to the car park, handed in my pass and headed off home from a week of ups downs and complete unexpected normalised madness at Granada.

So what now?
Am I going to rush off, get my diploma to be recognised as a journalist and begin a career in journalism?
No.
Am I going to take a "gap year"?
For crying out loud, no. I hate labels. I'm living life and I know that if i wanted and when i wanted I have the ability to become a journalist; observing and reporting....but for now, I want to do some doing. I want to travel, I want to meet people, I want to work with people. I want to work within outdoor adventure and build up my skiing skills to become an instructor and I just want to soak it all up, doing, not just observing. In the future I may roll to that and then to other things...but for now, what I'm doing, improving my own skills and meeting incredible people with amazing ideas that are similar to mine and pursuing them is what I want to do. I all to aware of the media and the power it has, that's why I'm staying alive and learning from it and using it in an ethical and healthy way to get to where I want to be and promote some of the new, innovative and exciting adventures i'm beginning to get up to. That's what I learnt about that week. I learnt about the sheer power  and respect the media has. It's all about talking and asking and communicating and being  a little bit cheeky in order to be the first to find out...well that's exactly the same way in which you go about becoming the "first one to do"...it's not an "ego" thing. It's a heart pounding, gut following, forget about what the world thinks and just do it thing. So that's what I'm going to do. Don't worry, I'm not going to disappear or go off the radar...the media is very similar to mother nature and they work best together.
Let's get these amazing adventures and discoveries of mine and the fantastic people around me on the map!

So...from now on, you'll find on this blog accounts of me getting out there and just well, going for it!
Not that I've not always done that anyway...

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