randomz-tephiee

News Day.

I've been very slack with my blog - I admit but it's because I had 2 presentations and one News Day last week and so I used the weekend to just unwind from all the events of the week.



Recap of last week:



Monday: Public holiday. Did no uni related work.



Tuesday: Was in the library working on my Contemporary Cultures presentation (Wednesday).



Wednesday: Contemporary Cultures presentation.



Before I went to sleep all I could think about was News Day. I was so nervous. I tried to speak to my friends who had done it today but still it didn't give me much comfort as I lay in bed thinking of the possible things News Day will require me to do.



Thursday: NEWSDAY!!!



I woke up fresh and hopeful for whatever I have to do in News Day. I got up early, got ready and realized in the shower that I had bright red nail polish on! I had recently applied it (Monday) so I was very hesitant to remove them (after all they're still new). But I remembered the email from Jenna about how to prepare for News Day. She wanted us to look "professional." And without knowing much about what she meant there, I trusted her enough to remove the nail colour (which later in my blog you will see how helpful this is).



I got to UTS Bon Marche at 7.40am. Overly excited, nervous and anxious I stood on Harris Street until 8am.



When I got into the building, making my way onto level 5, I was relatively calm as I heard other people feeling the same as me. I signed in and sat on one of the couches in front of the J room waiting. When Jenna started instructing people to cover certain stories, my nervousness picked up again. It felt so real - like in news rooms you see in movies when the editor comes in and just starts shooting stories to journalists and they scramble as much info as they can into their notebooks. That was me.



Jenna instructed 5 people to cover the Lakemba by-elections. At first I was afraid to be sent out there. I preferred to stay within the City but this goes to show that I need to be open to possibilities. I’ve learnt here that if you limit your “path” then that will ultimately limit your goal and your achievements. So with that in mind, a group of us (Lucie Robson, Jillesa Stephens, Amy Huynh, Spencer Austad and I) went to cover the Lakemba By-elections.



To begin our journey it would have been good to know what is actually going on in Lakemba. So we all scrambled into the J room, hopped onto a computer and tried to find as much info as we can on the by-elections. We managed to find the contact details of the 5 candidates Jenna wanted us to interview for tv, radio and print and all within 6 hours (yeah sure, this is possible!) But I’ve learnt here that we shouldn’t be too down on ourselves – esp. if we haven’t experienced it before. Think with an open mind – anything is possible! Hehe..

So we hopped onto a train to Campsie where the local council is. When we got there we walked down to the Council office. We briefly discussed how we were going to introduce ourselves and that was “we are journalists from Reportage and currently covering the by-elections. Could we arrange an interview with the Major.” Well, may be not exactly those words but something to that effect.

And at this point we were introduced to every journalist’s sworn enemy: the PA!

She strutted out of the elevator with the look on her face: pff..student journalists, you will never get through to the Major. I’m not going to let you through.

Obviously this was all masked underneath her smile and the tone in her voice when saying: “I will try to get back to you through email because the Mayor is actually out of the office at the moment.”

I felt we hit a dead end with the Mayor (Labor candidate). And I thought to myself: ‘great, we get to Campsie and the first person we want to interview is not cooperating. How will the other candidates help?’

At this point you appreciate working in a team because the others in the group can help motivate and encourage you to press on.

So we walked out of the Council office only with a ‘we’ll get back to you’ response. But we made the most out of it by taking some tv footage of the Council office.

Next: the Liberal candidate. He was approachable and immediately gave us an interview time at 1pm at his office.

But after hanging up we realized we didn’t know where his office could be so we decided to find the local library and use the computer, internet there to search for his address.

Strolling down the streets of Campsie and in the heat was not so fun. But I was thinking ‘thank goodness I was wearing comfy shoes!’ I had a feeling we would be walking quite a lot.

So we reached an internet café (didn’t have a clue where the library could be) and searched the address up. While some of us were looking for the Liberal’s address (ended up calling the Liberal again to confirm the address), others contacted the Greens, I called up the Christian Democratic Party.

This was an interesting conversation. The first guy was unavailable to talk, he advised me to talk to the other CDP candidate. So I called the second guy and he seemed nice on the phone – well at least he didn’t hang up or anything.

In this phonecall, which was about 11 mins (I’M SO GLAD I’M ON A MONTHLY CAP!) consisted something like this: (please bear in mind when reading the following that the CDP has an accent and over the phone it was very difficult to understand)

• Me: Hi, my name is Stephanie. I’m a journalist from Reportage. I’m covering a story on the Lakemba by-elections and was wondering if I could organize an interview with you?

• CDP: Who are you and where are you from?

• Me: Stephanie, journalist from Reportage covering a story on the Lakemba by-elections. We want to interview you through tv, print, radio.

• CDP: sorry which publication? Channel 9?

• Me: No, we are from R-E-P-O-R-T-A-G-E. It’s an online publication.

• CDP: what’s the website?

• Me: (website? Crap, I don’t even know the website address! I was scrambling to make something up, as advised by team members. Lesson: always look up your publication’s website and make sure it is running!) Hmm.. it’s www.reportage.com.au

• CDP: sorry could you spell that for me.

• Me: spelling it out….

• CDP: it doesn’t work. Your website is not right. Let me check the address again.

• Me: **impatient** Look is it possible to do the interview or not?

• CDP: the thing is I’m not in my office right now. I’m at home.

• Me: where is your home?

• CDP: I live in Milperra. It’s far from Campsie.

• Me: Well can we meet somewhere?

• CDP: I’m actually out of town at the moment. I’m in the Central Coast.

• Me: (Jillesa telling me to ask the guy this) If you are campaigning for the Lakemba seat, how come you’re not in the area?

• CDP: **coughs, laughs** I’m actually campaigning here. Look I can meet you at 713 Canterbury Road, Belmore, the location of the polling, at 1pm.

• Me: You just said that you’re in the Central Coast how can you get to Belmore before 2pm, my deadline? **questioning his credibility**

• CDP: Look, I will see what I can do. I will try to get to there at 1pm.

• Me: Well you call me if you get there. **slightly upset with him for covering up his location – deterring me from the interview and then making it out as if he is available to do it.**

At this point I was mad! I wasted credit on him, my ears were burning red because of the long talk on the phone, he lied about his whereabouts and still pressured me to do the interview knowing that it was impossible to do.

Anyways, we headed to Lakemba. When we got there we took some footage of the streets and decided to find the Liberal guy’s office. We walked the streets to find the shopping mall because apparently that is where the Liberal candidate’s office was.

We roamed up and down the main street but couldn’t find any mall. We asked a shop keeper and she said: ‘shopping no more. Burnt down.’ As she was saying this she was using her hands to further support her words and we discovered that a few shops down the shopping mall was burnt.

And with that sight I was even more upset and thinking: ‘okay, now what?’

We kept walking and decided to split up. Jillesa and Amy (radio) took one street and Lucie, Spencer and I took another.

We first approached a grocery shop where the man there said that he would be able to talk after he unloaded the fruit. So we waited 10 mins for him. And when we came back, he wasn’t there. The shopkeeper ordered us to come into the shop and speak to her about our story. At first Spencer didn’t want to talk to her because he knew she wouldn’t help but Lucie and I just wanted to explain ourselves and then just leave.

So the shopkeeper something like the guy is busy. I can’t do the interview because my sister-in-law ran for the elections and didn’t win. So I don’t want to say anything.

I was like ‘okayyyy….interesting.’ Moving on… as we stood on the footpath and trying to do vox pops, you could feel that people in the area don’t want to speak or they have nothing to say. Some in the area didn’t even know that there was an election campaign going on while others just didn’t want to speak.

Interestingly, a lady walked past and asked ‘are you doing a story on domestic violence?’

I was like ‘wwwhhhaaaaa?? Where did Jenna send us to?’

Another interesting “character” in our vox pops was a lady who came up to the camera and said: ‘I’m not a citizen of this country. I’m not allowed to vote.”

By this time after standing around looking for the Liberal’s office, we found it and did the interview with him. He was very nice to us. He said a lot of good things that we could use in our tv package. I guess I learnt here that if you watch a lot tv news when you get to do a tv story it becomes easy for you to do. You just implement what they do.

A strike of genius thinking came from Spencer by this time. He said ‘why don’t we call back the Mayor and tell him that we got the interview with the Liberal candidate, we are giving you the last chance to speak otherwise we will submit the story without the Mayor.’

As we waited for the response we did more vox pops.

The thing that caught my attention, and I will probably never forget is when we did a vox pop with a lady wearing a headscarf. Mid through the interview in the background you can see 2 Western appearance ladies in a car saying racist things about the lady we were interviewing. Unfortunately it was caught on camera because even though Spencer tried to steer the camera away you could still see it in the background. And we still used the interview because the lady had very interesting points to make about the elections. Surprisingly, she was the only one throughout all our vox pops who knew what was going on and listed which other areas were up for by-elections.

As we were finished up our vox pops and moved on to do the PTC, which was definitely hard for me because this was only my second time doing it. But after several takes we managed to get them done.

By this time the PA of the Mayor had gotten back to us and said that there was a ‘sudden opening and you can come and interview the Mayor at 3.30pm.’

And we were like ‘YES! We got him!’ So we went back to the Mayor’s office and did the interview with him. He was very apologetic to us about not being able to do the interview earlier because apparently he was out door knocking and handing out pamphlets to the community. He was speaking like as though he was trying to convince us that he truly was unable to see us earlier. I was like ‘look, you don’t need to convince me.’

And after this we headed back to uni to do the editing, which we didn’t do until the next day, as there was trouble with the computers.

When I got home, all tired, I checked my email and saw there was an email from Jenna at 1pm. Subject titled: Ask Stephanie Tanubrata to call Allan ….

I was nervous and scared. I opened the email and it said that I had to call that CDP candidate again.

I was scared because I thought I might have done something wrong. I looked at the time it was 10.30pm. It was late. But I knew I couldn’t sleep unless I called the guy to find out what was going on.

So I dialed his number at 10.30pm. Fortunately he only wanted to apologise for not being able to do the interview but instead had called “my editor” from Reportage (I actually don’t have one) and wanted my email address to send off some information about the CDP policies.

He was nice but I felt little “too nice” when the conversation went on to ask things like ‘what nationality are you? How do you pronounce your last name?’ At this point I didn’t recall any tips or lessons from Jenna about how to answers these sorts of questions. So I was a little weary about it.

Anyways from this whole News Day experience I learnt:

• It is hard to co-ordinate the positioning of your vox pop talent on screen, which you will notice in our tv package. Because some people were already reluctant to speak on camera and so at times they stand where it is difficult to shift around. Luckily at times (most actually) Spencer kind of “tackled” them into the interview by not letting them pass without saying anything.

• You need to be open with all kinds of possibilities. And be prepared to work around them. Like the Mayor not speaking at first but through the tactical play the group we got him to speak.

• People are at times ignorant with current issues. It makes it additional responsibility for the journalist to present news in a clear, simple and understandable manner. Like this Lakemba by-elections story, not many people knew and so couldn’t comment.

• You need to be persistent with journalism and never give up. Look at it from the perspective that people in power need you as journalists. We shouldn’t be afraid to speak to them just because they have the authority or power or title. But we as journalists have the authority to speak to them because they need us to speak on behalf of the them to the public. We are the middle ground and I think that once we know that we do have the right to speak to these people, journalism becomes much more easier.

• Be ready to have credit on your phone.

• Great fun to see the extent people would go to esp. when in politics. It’s about power and recognition. The CDP candidate “was willing to come all the way down from Central Coast” to do the interview with us. And also the Mayor trying to convince us that he was so busy he couldn’t do the interview earlier because he was out door knocking.

• Through News Day I really got the opportunity to use all the skills I learnt from J1 and J2. It was all put into practice. It puts journalism into context. I guess I see now which journalism shoe suits me, which is tv.

• I loved working in a team! The fact that we could encourage and support each other. Better than doing it alone.

• Though we had technical problems (I didn’t turn on the mic for one of the interviews) and the equipment problems (the computer didn’t recognize that there was a camera plugged to it) we managed to get past it.

• Luckily I removed my nail polish colour otherwise I would have looked like a loser interviewing the Mayor and Liberal candidate with bright red nail colour.

Yes, that’s it. My thoughts on News Day. I loved the experience!

posted by tephiee @ 5:43 PM