Last day on the Hill
Tuesday was a busy day for the OPUBCO crew on Capitol Hill.
Jones, Horton and I finished trouble-shooting our gear, tweaking the settings and going through test drives of the new Washington DC video set. Jones and I wrote training documents for our boys Chris Casteel and Mark Green.
Would you believe you can’t find a printer in DC? Two Fedex/Kinkos did not have printers for our thumbdrives to print the documents. It’s always the little things that are the most frustrating setbacks.
We joined Ed Kelley for a tour of the Washington Post Interactive. I met up with old friend Matt Havercamp at WPI as we picked their brains about newspaper video. More on this visit in a future blog.
Back at the National Press Building, both Mark and Chris taped debriefs for this weekend with Ed. Both seemed comfortable running through the processes of setting up the set and going on camera.
Oklahoma weather in Washington
I took a tour of the Belo operation in Washington DC today. I was joined by Ed Kelley, David Jones, Scott Horton, Chris Casteel and Mark Greene from OPUBCO. Our mission was to look at what Belo is doing with their bureau from the Capitol.
We didn’t expect the surprise.
And we didn’t expect the gorgeous weather: 70s and perfect.
Upon arriving in a mostly empty building (it’s Presiden’ts Day and DC takes this day seriously), we were pulled aside and told the Belo staff at the DC bureau were just informed on Friday of staff cuts. The Belo bureau in DC is a combined print, online and broadcast team. I got the impression they had more synergies in the past than the present. And the staff cuts would only further that gap.
Ed and I spoke more today about how large operations like Belo and the Atlanta Journal Constitution are going more towards silo’d efforts, where departments focus on their core compentencies instead of collaboration.
Should be interesting to see how it shakes out.
It was also interesting to see the weather take a left turn, for the clouds to roll in and the skies to open. The temp dropped about 20 degrees and it started pouring. Welcome back winter.
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Flip the switch, hit record
Late Sunday night we recorded a quick video from the Washington DC set. We will meet with Ed Kelley, Mark Greene and Chris Casteel on Monday to go over format, answer questions and finish plugging things together. Maybe hit a Radio Shack.
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