Third Week (June 16- June 20)

During this week, work wasn't especially exciting. I continued to work on my research project for my boss and spent a lot of time doing that. One of the aspects I like most about working on the research project is that I get the chance to see some of the news related television shows CBS produces. Rather than having to sit and read articles off the AP wire about hard news, my boss asked me to watch videos and take note of the quality of the report. I think it's a nice break to just see how things are approached in different angles for different crowds. For example, "The Early Show" is the morning news program CBS airs every weekday morning. They have a target audience mainly of women who are stay-at-home moms. Many of their stories relate back to raising children, or beauty related material, while other shows, like "48 Hours" are more gender neutral.

I think it's important as a reporter, especially when working in TV, to really grasp who is going to be viewing your work. If you miss your target audience then your whole piece could be awful. I don't think this is something that gets stressed very often, but I am beginning to see the growing importance of it.

On another note, I saw how the newsroom reacts to a somewhat odd crisis when the story of the Pregnancy Pact in Gloucester, Mass. broke this week. Everyday there were new stories about the 17 girls who had become pregnant in the last school year. I think it's funny that one story about a baby boom get spun off every day into different aspects-- how to prevent your teen from getting pregnant, the impact of celebrity culture, what went wrong... Even more interesting is that every day this would be one of the top stories. It made me think that if you have a story that's interesting or shocking enough, you can pretty much beat it to death and people will still read it.

Well like I said earlier, it was a pretty slow third week, but I still feel I learned a lot through my various observations.