Job Shadows: The First One!

Here's the first job shadow report I've received; they will each be posted as I receive 'em.  Take a look and see what you can learn from everyone's visits. There's a lot of good stuff here to help you decide what you want to do with your lives; what you need to be doing to get there; and what to expect when you do get there.

Please give each one of these a quick read, will you?

*****

For years I dreamt of being a sports anchor, but after my job shadow on July 19, 2014 with Jamie Kuras at WILX News 10 I may have just changed my mind.

Kuras began his day at 3 p.m., which is the same time I arrived at the studio. Kuras schedule that day was to produce his three sports shows along with get highlight footage from both the Lansing Lugnuts game and Lansing United first playoff game.

Kuras sent one of his team members to cover Lansing United, leaving him with still a full plate to accomplish during his 3-11 shift.

Kuras produces his own sports show, which Monday through Saturday is a five-minute time slot, but Sunday nights he has 15 minutes. WILX is an NBC and FOX channel, so Kuras preps for two different shows within the same night.

Kuras is required to take care of every detail of his show, that goes from writing his script, picking out what he wants to cover for that night, edit all his own film, add his captions, and surprisingly also type in the closed-captioning for any of the interviews he uses in his highlight reel. The amount of work his was required to do himself without any assistance made my head spin, although Kuras referred to it as the “easy part.”

I watched Kuras produce the show he was going to air live at 6 p.m.. He was struggling to find enough to talk about within his five minutes, although he ended up not finishing the set that he had planned during his five minutes on air.

Kuras showed me the different soft wares they use, such as iNews and the different video hubs from FOX and NBC, which is a source of downloadable footage used for highlights, saving newscasters a large amount of time.

Watching Kuras I did learn a lot of about film editing, such as the levels you need everything to be if you plan on talking over them, and how if there is a film break you place a b-roll footage over it so you do not see the break in the press conference. Also, I watched him place in all his captions and create his slugs, which he said he always struggles with.

Other than watching the day-to-day process, Kuras told me a little bit about himself and how he dreamt of being a sportscaster. After graduating from Eastern Michigan, he packed up and headed to Las Vegas to live with a buddy who just bought a house there.

Kuras transferred to the Las Vegas Buffalo Wild Wings, something we had in common. Kuras got a job doing production at a new company working there for two and half years, but then decided he wanted to do some anchoring. His news team in Vegas helped him put together a portfolio, which he sent out to different news stations.

A station in Texas was the first to respond, so he packed up his things and headed for the Lone Star state. There Kuras was a news anchor, which he hated. He hated doing the hard news, but many anchors told him it was his way to the sports industry so he took the hit.

The day the contract in Texas was up, Kuras packed up and headed back to his home state of Michigan.

 Kuras is now the sports anchor at WILX, which he says he loves his job. You could tell he loved the power of getting to control what goes into the five minutes, as he kept saying “well it is my show, so I talk about what I want to talk about,” as he joked about not covering the WNBA All-Star game that were happening that evening.

Watching Kuras put in hours of work into a five minute show followed by watching the live taping of the show was pretty amazing. I have never seen a live newscast, nor truly realized how much work goes in to such a small amount of airtime.

After shadowing Kuras, I have very mixed feelings of whether or not I want to do sports broadcasting/journalism, which I would say is a very good thing that I realized that now rather than during an internship or even worse, after graduation.