The University of Blog

We’re working on finalizing our project. With this comes focus groups. Last Monday we conducted one focus group of five people and another with three people this Monday. This was really helpful to be able to get a lot of feedback for our show. In our first focus group, we learned that they liked the chat, but viewed the chat window as too small. We also received valuable feedback about the time of the show. We also received ideas about topics that they would be interested in including population growth in the city, queer issues and eminent domain. The focus group was extremely valuable to be able to see how people interact with and use the show.
We’ve also been preparing for our presentation and paper. And since I made this blog post a bit late for the deadline, I can say that the presentation went very well. We were able to offer suggestions for future semesters including developing an interactive website. It is a big undertaking to be able to develop and keep an audience. These are some great takeaways for next semester.

This semester has flown by. Intersection has flown by. The last show I produced was on local foods. We had some great guests talk about how to make local choices, even when it’s cold outside. Crops still grow! It helped that they were passionate and dynamic. I really enjoyed listening to and producing this show. Janet even said that she hoped the show would be on the main station. Eventually, it would be great to get the live program on the main channel. Many people have heard the rebroadcast, but few of those people will then join the conversation when it is live. We know that they aren’t doing it because people aren’t in the chatroom and this is problematic. This will be a great challenge for next semester’s group.

We have been working on getting two focus groups planned to sample the show and offer us their feedback. This will be helpful to be able to get show ideas from them as well as see what they think of the show and if this format is something that they’d use. We have our first one booked and we plan to get our next one booked for the following Monday.

Also, this week we met with Michael Skoler to talk aobut the show and listen to his feedback. He offered us some suggestions on where we should take the show from here which we will present during our final presentation. It’s good to be getting things done, but I will miss working on the show.

This week was a pretty good episode of Intersection. It challenged us because Reuben will be gone for the next couple of weeks. Janet served as the host and Lindsey and I produced the show solo. Janet was not as familiar with the teleprompter so she worked with a script, which worked out pretty well. She also did a great job hosting the show and directing the conversation. It was good to have a producing team in Lindsey and me.

I worked on producing a local food show for after Thanksgiving. The challenge with this is a distinct news peg. The farmers market is continuing throughout December. Also, the show will come right after December. And it isn’t very controversial. However, local foods as a concept is not too controversial. I think it could still be a good show despite the lack of controversy.

Lindsey and I have also talked about finding numbers for the show. We want to organize a focus group and will get the names of KBIA listeners soon. This will help give us insight into how people are viewing the show. We would also like to schedule a meeting with Michael Skoler, who has a lot of experience with public radio shows like Intersection. That will greatly help with helping the show for next semester.

This Monday we had our show on Human Trafficking that I helped produce. I was really nervous about this show because it is a really hard topic to discuss, but I knew what points that I wanted to really highlight. One of them was identifying the issue in Missouri and identifying that the issue does exist here. Another was to discuss why the issue exists in general (from a cultural perspective) and what can be done to stop it. I felt that the show was highly successful. We were able to pint out the points that we wanted to in the short timeframe that we had. There is so much surrounding human trafficking, that it helped to know what I wanted out of the discussion. Even then, there are some issues that I wanted to touch on that we didn’t have enough time for. We did have two call ins and several people in the discussion board. Good for us!
The next show that I’m going to start on is local foods. This issue seems fairly straightforward, but I want to see the intersection of the issues. Also,  we want to start having happy hours at Uprise and plan for those to be the first few Mondays in December. That should be another way that we can engage and create an audience.

Our topic on Monday was Columbia’s One Read book, “The Air We Breathe” by Andrea Barrett. In studio guests included Brad Lookingbill of Columbia College, Darwin and Axie Hindman and Lisa Saffran director of MU’s Masters in Public Health Program. It was a great discussion and Reuben said that he had a lot of fun hosting it. You can tell when the host enjoys the topic and it was enjoyable to have Darwin and Axie Hindman as guests. That was pretty cool to have the major and his wife as our guests. I took photos during the taping as well so we have photos to use for the website, which has finally been updated with our staff bios. We really need to get the archived shows on there so we can point to what the show looks like to our future guests.

This Monday’s show is on Human Trafficking. I had a real world view of what producing a show is really like. One of my guests for that show backed down, but he is still able to call in. This will help with the show for sure, but we only have two guests. I had a lead on another guest, who I have been calling and emailing without response. It’s annoying for sure, but even with two guests and several call-ins, it will provide for a good show.

This week I produced a show on cycling in Columbia.  Our guests included Ian Cheny of PedNet, Detective Jeff Westbrook with  the Columbia Police Department and Michelle Windmoeller, who is an avid city cyclist. It was a pretty good show and we had one caller and nine people in the chatroom, which was the most participation that we’ve ever had. Producing a show was pretty cool. I was in the driver’s seat, feeding the questions to Reuben. I could see when he was struggling for a new question, and since I had researched the topic I knew what would be good. 

 The next show I’m working on is Human Trafficking. This should be a pretty powerful show. The trouble I’m running into is deepening the conversation beyond just the awareness aspect. Yes, awareness to the issue is vital, but that’s only half the show. The other half is WHY it’s important. WHY should people care beyond the fact that it’s morally wrong? I’ve completed the show preinterviews and have the guests. Now I need to go back and re-interview a couple of them to get to the real issues. 

Also, we’ve talked a lot about audience development. For this, we will have a couple of happy hours at Uprise Bakery, invite our friends and push the show onto our friends and their friends. The hope is that it will spread by word of mouth. We’ll see.

In class we presented our progress with somewhat disappointing results. No one called in for our first show, which is no fun, but building an audience takes time. This week we did a show job landscape in Missouri. We had a couple of people in the chatroom engaging each other. Even though one woman turned out to be a guest’s mother from Lexington, SC, it was still good that people are using the chat function. Before and after the taping, I took some photos to add to the facebook fan page. We’ll be taking more photos for promotional purposes and eventually do some backstage video as well.

I was working on producing Monday’s show on biking in Columbia. This includes gathering all the pre interviews and research I’ve done for Reuben to have. We put them in a paper folder so that he can reference it if he needs to. It was hard to get more information from a previous pre interview because I wasn’t getting a call back, even though I thought that he had confirmed. Eventually I called him enough that I was able to get through. Hopefully Reuben will feel prepared with the info I gave him. I also booked two guests for a show on human trafficking. So it’s been a paticularly busy week producing, but I’m glad that I’ve done this class for capstone rather than just volunteering my time. I feel like so far, I’ve gotten a lot out of it.

We had our first show this Monday. Needless to say, there are many holes that we still need to fill in. Our discussion was valuable. Reuben worked well with the teleprompter and the questions that we provided. He kept the discussion flowing well. A few bugaboos: One of our guests was late and we had to integrate her. Our major issue was with the broadcast. We had some turnover with our staff leaving our New Media Producer position unfilled. Lindsey and I filled in, but unfortunately the video didn’t go through. This meant that the people in the chatroom couldn’t participate. The broadcast over KBIA 2 worked well. Also, the video we captured was also nice. Thus, Lindsey and I learned how to do the New Media Producer’s job including setting up the connection in the server room. This will help as we fill in until we get another producer to do the job.

Next week we will talk about jobs in Mid-Missouri. Also, I’ve started making connections for a show on Human Trafficking. We are pretty good on show topics. Later in November we will do shows on cameras downtown as well as perhaps eating local during the winter. So far so good though. We had a good first show and we will continue to have good shows, but the biggest challenge will be audience participation. How are we going to get people to participate when we are starting essentially at ground zero? No calls and no people entered the chat. This will be the biggest challenge, which I will do my part by emailing people connected to each show.

We’re so close. Finally! This week we had a couple of tech rehearsals to make sure everything will work properly. I answered some calls and transferred them. We worked on our in-studio communication including what information Reuben would need to know about the callers. Currently, we don’t have the call screening software so we’re doing it via google chat. Reuben worked on his teleprompter skills, and we saw what the set would look like… hopefully we’re getting new chairs.

It’s amazing the amount of people it takes to get it all right. There was a sound expert as well as a broadcast expert so everyone would be getting what they needed for both radio and television. Since it’s going to be broadcast on television as well as over the radio, it’s essential to have the best product possible. I have yet to see what the online community discussion chat is like, but that should be interesting as well.

I have all of the biking show booked. Our show on the 19th fell though so we regrouped yesterday to plan a new show – this time it will be on job growth in mid – Missouri. It’s an engaging topic, so I’m pleased with the results… even if it seems a bit broad right now, we do have some good panelists.  We’ll see how Monday goes!

We have some shows booked. It helps working as a team because we can all fill in the gaps and divide and conquer. My task was to get a show on biking. I have gotten the guests narrowed down and confirmed and have preinterviewed two of them. The show will be on October 26th. Now my attention needs to be on crafting that show (how to phrase questions, in what order, what to give Reuben the host, show packet), and coming up with a new show. I’ve started to make contacts for a show on Human Trafficking. However, our concern is to really make a good conversation about that. This means to not just raise awareness on the topic, but to describe how this affects the community members of mid-missouri.

We are a week away from our first show. Our first show will be to define who is the uninsured in Missouri. This should kick us off nicely because it’s a topic that should define what our shows are like from here on out. We met with the Missouri Association for Community Action, which is an anti poverty organziation. They gave us some great statistics on what poverty looks like in Missouri which will be good for future show topics. It’s also a good connection for us to have because they will be able to find us people who have been directly affected by policies, etc. It’s all about Intersection right now.