The University of Blog

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.