Saturday Night Fevercoming soon to a newsroom near you
I just got home from my first Saturday-night shift posting the Sunday paper on mydesert.com. It was fun stuff, and on my way home, it occurred to me that I may have to start bringing some disco-related elements into my Saturday-night work environment. That way, my night shifts would be truly symptomatic of the Saturday Night Fever, which btw has an epic soundtrack but is an awful movie, if you ask me.
But I digress. So swinging back to the topic of all things Desert Sun-related, it's probably worth noting that my first byline appeared in print and my first video appeared online Friday.
On Thursday, I went out to write about and shoot a bomb technicians' conference being held in La Quinta. For a print reporter who initially harbored childhood aspirations of working in TV news, going out to both write a print story and shoot a video is quite the experience. It's exhausting, frequently awkward, but totally awesome.
I wrote the print story all by myself like a big boy but enlisted the help of 3M (i.e., MultiMedia Matt) who edited the footage that I shot into a
video for mydesert.com.
Then today, the first video I went out to shoot became the second to appear on mydesert. This one, about a local teen who's going to compete in the national junior-high rodeo championships, supplements a sportswriter's print story, and I'm proud to report that I busted out my nascent Final Cut skills and did almost all the editing on the rodeo video myself. I left some things that I didn't know how to do for Matt to finish up, but I lined up all the clips and such myself.