Giraffes, KOMU, the Missourian and Cramer

Economy videos from the Missourian are coming along...slowly, but surely. Two of the reporters (Kyle and a sweet girl whose name I can't remember) are still working on two videos each. "How to retire in this economy" and "How to say 'No' to your kid" are two the one girl is working on, with the second being one of a few videos geared towards parents on how to teach their teens various common-sense money tips/tricks in this economy. Other examples of videos to be done are "How to teach teens to budget" and "How you can help your kid graduate in this economy." Not necessarily the exact titles, but so far, those are the key ideas. Kyle is working on a "How to save on your utilities" story and another investment tips piece. All four of these will be shot by Spring Break (one week away, woohoo!) and edited sometime afterwards. Also, the "How to market yourself" video is still a work in progress.

As far as KOMU goes, yesterday was an interesting shift day. The TiVo and capturing tool on Avid were both not working, so no video could be posted to the web after the 6. Kind of frustrating. Scott Schaeffer tried super hard to trouble-shoot the problem with us, but no luck. Unless, something changed over the past 12 hours, there's no video up from yesterday evening's newscasts. Only text.

One thing I'm pleased with is that I've completed all of my media giraffe interviews! They're both quite interesting sources and I'm hoping to complete them over Spring Break or during that following week.

And finally, one great night of television: Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer...

Check out Newsy.com to see my story/analysis of the face-off. : )

Missourian Meeting

So, here's a brief update from the meeting at the Missourian today...

The three economy videos we talked about last week are still a work in progress. They are:

1. How to market yourself
2. What to do if you lose your job
3. How to retire in this economy

This week, three more video-based stories the Missourian reporters are pursuing are:

1. How to save on your monthly utility bills
2. How should you invest differently in this economy
3. Tips for how parents should teach their kids/teens to manage money. (We talked about this being two videos...maybe one focuses more on how parents can "say no to their kids and make it stick.")

There are also quite a few print stories the reporters have been working on. One on food and fuel prices will be on the Sunday cover of the Missourian, and there are several others that are in the early stages of reporting.

Also, Jen, if we can't seem to get KBIA in on this collaboration yet, the Missourian has a link on the bottom of their homepage that says "Audio." If we click here, there are a bunch of random KBIA pieces, including economy stories, and we can pull them to our site from there.

The Missourian is also in the process of designing a separate webpage called "Economy 101" for all of their economy stories, which we could attach a link to from our site. As far as I know from chatting with the reporters briefly, there is already an RSS feed in place for those stories to go to moneycommons.

Now I'm over here at KOMU, editing and publishing stories to the web...and of course, making sure we've tagged the previously completed economy stories with the "8 On Your Money" label. All is good so far!!!

Getting Organized

"Money money money mah-nay... MAH-nay!"

Have no clue who sings this song, but it's been running through my brain as I'm sitting here, staring at my old-school iBook G4 laptop, trying to think of what to post. I'll start with this past Thursday's Missourian meeting...

Basically, it seems like the economy beat reporters there are being proactive in creating meaningful content to add to their site and ours. This is awesome. The three stories they're working on this week are:

1. What to do if you lose your job
2. How to market yourself to get a job
3. How to recover in this economy

Also, I learned they're going to create a section in the paper and/or online called "Progress," which will be devoted to showing how Columbia will keep moving forward in this economic downturn. It will also help better illustrate the community's initiatives to bring money and people into Columbia. As far as I know, this will be coming out towards the end of March. So, as for the Missourian meeting, that's about it.

During my Thursday shift at KOMU, Liz and I focused on searching previous weeks' content in ACM to categorize stories under the "8 On Your Money" label. This was definitely a step forward as we now have more content to work from on moneycommons.com. Along with this, two examples of stories I helped edit and publish to the website were Paula Smith's on Columbia Regional Airport and Takeo's piece on Columbia Public Schools, which both aired on the 10.

I'll post another update on moneycommons.com progress sometime in the next few days...looking forward to begin working on the promotional side of things soon though!