Thanksgiving Day Football

The cities of Easton and Phillipsburg are connected by more than just two bridges that span the Delaware River.

A Thanksgiving day football game has brought the two towns together for the last 102 years.

ESPN has broadcasted the game twice, once in 1988 and the other in 2006 to celebrate the 100th year anniversary of the game.

Entering the game, the Easton Red Rovers lead the overall series 56-40-5.

The 2008 edition of the Battle for College Hill took place in Lafayette's Fisher Field with the winner receiving the Forks of the Delaware Trophy. Easton entered the game heavy underdogs since they missed the Pennsylvania State Playoffs and Phillipsburg is considered one of the top programs in the state of New Jersey.





After the game, Easton's Kyle Harbridge was named the MVP after rushing for 109 yards and two touchdowns.

Live From Cortland

Back in September, Pennslyvania enacted a statewide smoking ban that affected 14 of the state schools as well. The official ban started on September 11, 2008.

Student smokers from those schools were unhappy, especially since there were now no easily accessible places to smoke from inside the campuses.

For my final project, I wanted to practice going live on all of the pieces I had done in the class during the semester. The segment you will see below is the package I did about smoking in New York State back in September where I traveled to SUNY Cortland and interviewed students there about smoking on their campus. Also included is the live-shot I did on the package several months later.

Local High School Uses The Community For Class

From December 4th, 2008

My final project happened by accident. While heading downtown to cover a completely different story which never took shape, I passed Clinton Square. Not only did I see the huge Christmas Tree lit up on an overcast day, there were a group of about 40 teenagers skating on the ice rink that sits next to the tree.

When I went inside, I found out that while this group was leaving, another group of students would be coming later that day. I figured maybe it would be a local elementary school on a field trip, but when I came back at 2:15, I learned differently.

East Syracuse-Minoa High School brought a physical education class to the ice rink. The high school as two sections of the class that uses resources throughout the community for physical activity as an alternative to staying at the school. This quarter is ice skating, but throughout the course of the year, the school goes hiking, bowling, golfing, canoeing and hiking for their eighty-minute class period.

If you look below you'll see that the students enjoyed their time in downtown Syracuse.

Final project- Let's talk about recycling

I've always wondered what happens to the cans and bottles that I throw into those fancy looking recycle bins, so for my final story my partner Fei and I decided to take an inside look of a local recycling plant. The owner of the plant Mark Naef was a great guy and explained to us how recycling works and other issues regarding the environment, and then we visited the factories and watched how all the recycling machines and conveyer belts work. Finally, Fei and I went downtown and asked random people what they felt about the availability of recycle bins downtown. 

When I was putting my package together, I tried to put a "timeliness" element in it. Last time Jameson did it by pointing out that he has an allergy to animals with fur, and that was when the Obamas started searching for a pet for their family. This time I tried to achieve it by tying my story with this year's election. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as I had hoped, but oh well c'est la vie. Here is the story:

Semester Snapshot

December 7, 2008 - After an entire semester developing my skills as a broadcast reporter, I still find my passion in producing newscasts and to that end I took the opportunity as a final project to take all of my packages from the past few months and created a mini newscast to give everyone a sense of what happened and what I hope to do in the future while also giving myself some more practice and experience in creating a quality product.

In the following you will see the majority of my stories profiled senior citizens and politics with one story, my trip to a corn maze, that broke the mold. In making my own beat this semester I found out for myself why the senior citizen vote and opinion is so strong first hand. I saw that at whatever event available, they came out and made sure their voices were heard. I witnessed how their issues become so important to policymakers and learned a thing or two about why I should care.

This semester was filled with challenges but I have come out of it with an even deeper passion for the news and find myself lucky to be involved with such an important field of work.

The effect of the poor U.S. economy on Black Friday and the holiday shopping season

Wednesday, December 3, 2008



The day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday in the retail industry, signifies the start of the holiday shopping season, and is usually one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Steep discounts and door-buster deals mean consumers flock to stores to start their holiday shopping and spend, spend, spend.

Black Friday is named for retailer’s profits. It’s the day when, traditionally, retailer’s books go from red, meaning a deficit, to black, meaning profit.

Ra-Lin Discount owner Allan Poushter said this year, Black Friday didn’t put the store’s accounting books in the black, but he said it made them much closer to being profitable.

With the failing U.S. economy, predictions for Black Friday profits nationwide were grim. Financial analysts thought fewer consumers would shop and those who did would spend less money than in years previous. Nationwide, this year's Black Friday was not as profitable as it has been in the past.

Poushter said that wasn’t the case for Ra-Lin.

“This was our best Black Friday ever,” Poushter said. “Definitely better than last year.”

Poushter said this year’s sales were ten to 20 percent better than last year’s for Black Friday, and Ra-Lin employee Keith Mann said the advertisements for steeply discounted electronics drew a record number of shoppers for the day.

"They were lined up to get into the television department,” Mann said. “It's a pretty big department, and pretty ample space back there. But they were lined up around the jewelry counter, coming down the aisle, to get into the television department."

Black Friday’s success aside, the economic recession is expected to mean less profit for the rest of the shopping season.

But, Poushter remains optimistic, predicting this season’s profits to be the same if not better than last year’s. Poushter said the national economy does not affect his central New York business.

“I think most people in Upstate New York still have their jobs,” Poushter said. “Also, there was none of these funny mortgages going on up around here. The prices never went up that high for us to come back down, so we have a little more stable economy here.”

Poushter said the analysts who predicted poor Black Friday sales performances and even poorer holiday shopping season profits did so with states like California and Florida in mind—states he said are the reason for the bad U.S. economy statistics.

Poushter said with the economy in Syracuse which he said he believes to be stable remaining unaffected by the national statistics, holiday shopping at Ra-Lin should also remain stable.

However, with fewer shopping days this season because of the late date of Thanksgiving, Poushter admits each day’s sales count more for making this season profitable than in the past.
Mann said he notices the effect the economy is having on daily business.

“Look at it here today,” Mann said. “It’s slow here today.”

But Poushter said Ra-Lin’s customers are last minute shoppers, waiting for further slashing of prices in the days leading up to Christmas. Poushter said he is confident that sales on those days will make up for lost sales on slow days.

Poushter admits that the economy has had some negative affect on his business before the holiday shopping season, and will probably negatively influence profits in the coming year. But he said he is confident that this holiday shopping season will be one of the store’s best ever.

Keith Mann discusses his feelings about the Wal-Mart trampling this Black Friday as a retail industry employee:

About this package (sorry about the novel):
Throughout this semester, I have been working to improve my performance in live situations. I took this opportunity to do a look-live donut on this story to get more practice being live in the field. I did the look-live portion with the intention that it should look like I was doing a live donut for the 11:00 news because that is how my schedule worked out when putting the package together.

In some ways, the live donut worked for this story. One thing I really liked is that I said which neighborhood Ra-Lin is in. I know it is a very small detail, but I like it, in part because I am proud that I was actually able to figure it out, and in part because I think that small detail really drove home the point that this was a local perspective specific to my Syracuse audience. Also, I think my performance was smooth and professional, and I like my physical appearance. For the most part, I don’t look too rattled by my mistakes, which is a pretty big improvement over my past performances.

However, I think I adopted an inappropriate demeanor for this live shot--in class, Professor Nicholson pointed out that it looked like someone in my family had died--and I’m not sure the set-up worked as well, in retrospect, as I thought it did in the field. One key element of the story that is important to understand when looking at the donut is that a dozen cars were ticketed for illegal parking because the lot was full, and the owners of Ra-Lin were planning to pay for all the tickets.

I guess I thought an anchor intro could explain that part of the story, but, in retrospect, that’s not really what my story is about. The anchor intro should be what is new. In this case, the anchor intro should have been new figures about the failing economy and new predictions about bad sales figures for this holiday shopping season. The full parking lot anecdote and lead-in to my story did not really work.

I really needed customer reactions to make this a solid story. I intended the story to be about whether people were going to spend as much money as last year in this current recession. I ended up having a story about what a store owner thinks people will do based on what they did Black Friday. Without the customer reaction, the story is really one sided, and not entirely credible. I’m sure that Poushter does believe Ra-Lin will do well this holiday shopping season, but I have no way to verify his statements about sales figures that he used to back up his assertions. Customer reactions don’t need me to be quite as incredulous when using them in a story.

Unfortunately, the customers while I was at the store were very uncomfortable with my even being there. No one agreed to be interviewed. With the extended deadline, I planned to return the next day when different customers were there, get customer reactions, finish putting my story together, and do a live donut based on my finished story. However, because of the way my schedule worked out (it took me a lot longer than I had anticipated finishing an exam for one of my classes) I did not get back to the store the next day until after it had closed. I therefore had no customer reactions and had to go with the incomplete story I got the previous day.

After not being able to get any customer reactions at Ra-Lin, I had thought about going to any other business (maybe the parking lot at the mall) and getting reactions from any consumer about what the economy meant for their holiday shopping. At the time, I decided against doing that because the story I had was very specific to Ra-Lin. But, in retrospect, I should have done that and reworked my story, because any consumer reaction is better than no reaction at all.

Because of the extended deadline for this project, I was able to really pay attention to detail in putting together b-roll. For past stories, I have neglected sequencing in favor of getting a story done by deadline. With this story, I was able to choose and arrange clips in a way that made my story visually interesting, even without an audio track. I notice there are some jump cuts and some of the timing seems a little off for parts of the piece, but overall I like that I was able to get back to basics and put together meaningful video in addition to the audio aspect for this package.

For this story, I took the opportunity to try a longer format piece. I am often very frustrated by how time constraints really limit the amount and quality of information I put in a story. I know that with practice I will get good enough to figure out how to put together a quality story regardless of how short it is, but for now, I wanted to see what would happen with a longer story. Turns out, it’s pretty much the same. I still feel like there is more that I would like to have said.

I think Parkinson's Law applies to some extent—the amount of work to do will expand to fill the time in which it can be done. For this package, the story expanded to fill the longer space without any astronomical improvement in quality of information. Lesson learned. I’ll just have to suck it up and practice putting together quality short-format stories.

LeMoyne receives $50 million endowment

For my final project, I took the route of doing a traditional news story, albeit it was a bit outdated by the time I presented it in class on Friday, December 5. My story focused on what LeMoyne College is doing with the $50 million it received just before Thanksgiving in the form of an endowment. I stumbled upon this story just before leaving for Thanksgiving, but I was unable to set an interview up until after the break, but I covered it from the angle of what the school specifically wants to do with the money (or what it is limited to in the terms of the endowment), and what this means for the school going forward.

It is reportedly one of the largest monetary grants to a Jesuit college in history, and was donated by the late Robert and Catherine McDevitt of Binghamton, NY. Joe Della Posta, the communications director, provided me with all the information I needed to know about the gift and about what the school is doing about it. I talked to him and several students, only one of whom I used for the final cut, Colleen Pinckney. You can click below to view the story.

Crosstown Classic: CBA 50, Nottingham 44

December 4, 2008 - My final project took me to Nottingham High School for high school basketball.  Christian Brothers Academy made the long, four minute (without traffic) trip to the 'Ham for a non-conference boys basketball battle.  There's no atmosphere quite like high school basketball, especially when you have a 6-6 center (who happens to be an offensive lineman on the football team) on one side and athletic guards on the other.  The game itself was close for a while, but CBA too over in the second half with two solid post performances by that center, Michael Goodman and the new guy, Greg Thompson.  

Below is is the post game LIVE wrap from the school with highlights and an exclusive interview with 24th-year CBA Head Coach Buddy Wleklinski.  An interesting note about Coach Wleklinski (real name, John): in Jim Boeheim fashion, CBA dedicated its home court to the current basketball head coach and Athletic Director before the second home game of the year, last Friday.

  

Recycling: the process and the problem

For my final story, first I thought I would only do a process story with great videos and natural sounds; only focusing on how does it really take to manage a recycling plant and what are the things that are involved in it. However, after talking to Mark Naef, owner of Naef Recycling, I wanted to add another angle to it, which is, why don’t people recycle. In order to prove and see if it was really true I went downtown and talked to local people about this problem.

December 5, 2008 - It’s a long but simple process to recycle at Naef Recycling. Mark Naef, the owner said that he has a dual stream recycling, which is where “paper goes into one bin and plastics, metals glass goes into another bin,” said Naef.

Every morning from 5 or 6, the haulers come to dump the waist in 4 different bays, where it goes up to the conveyors for people to sort them.

“We get about 160 tons of materials everyday,” said Naef.

Recycling is something that everyone should be doing but without enough recycling bins, it limits people’s opportunities to recycle.

Ron Quinn of Syracuse said that he is sometimes frustrated when throwing out bottles and cans.

“I don’t see recycling bins, I only see regular trash bins…There should be a green and brown one right?” said Quinn.

On the other hand, some part of Central New York is different. Jane Labrizzi of Liverpool said, “I live in Liverpool and we are lucky we have such good facilities. It makes it very easy [to recycle].”

But, downtown Syracuse is not doing so well.  “Maybe there’s something new [recycling bins] but for a long time there hasn’t been much downtown,” said Labrizzi.

If you want to hear more of what people had to say about recycling downtown, watch the following.

Twin Sisters honored for their blood donation- 40+ gallons world

For my final story, I covered the Red Cross' 10th annual Real Heroes Breakfast at the OnCenter in Syracuse. My story is about Mary and Margaret O'Brien, twin sisters from Syracuse, who were honored for giving enough blood to help everyone who attended the event Wednesday morning, December 3rd, 2008.

Lights on the Lake

12-5-08 I got the idea for my final project from Gino's last story/blog about the Christmas tree in Clinton Square. He mentioned this year energy efficient lights would be used to decorate, I immediately thought of another area attraction that uses a lot of lights, Lights on the Lake, and wondered if it would be making the switch. It turns out that they are. Professor Nicholson challenged me to challenge the concept that "green is good", so I went into the piece with the idea that I would challenge it by taking the angle that it is really expensive. I met with Onondaga Lake Park superintendent, Dale Grinolds, and after the initial "green is good" speech he told me exactly what I expected, LED bulbs (the more efficient bulbs) are about four times more expensive than older C-7 or C-9 bulbs (regular ones you'd have on your tree). But then he told me another reason they are switching that makes a lot of sense: they look better. So that is the angle I went with, green isn't just good for the environment, its easy on the eyes too.



There's another change on the way that visitors probably won't be as happy with ...

A Thrifty Holiday Season: One Way You Could Save Money and Go Green

(AP/Photo)

December 3, 2008- With the holidays around the corner I decided to do a timely story. With the recent trend to go thrifty this holiday season, why not be green? Due to economic conditions Christmas budgets may be tighter this season. According to a report by the American Christmas Tree Association, purchasing an artificial tree this holiday will be saving you money in the long term and helping the environment.

Based on a ten year analysis the association reports, "the purchase of a single, pre-lit artificial Christmas tree costs seventy percent less than the purchase of ten real Christmas trees during the same ten year period." That means that buying real Christmas trees will end up costing more than three times as much as one artificial tree.

While interviewing buyers at a local tree farm, I found some didn't believe they could be saving money by buying artificial. Others preferred buying real trees despite the savings because it was a long family tradition. Amanda Henkle, Syracuse resident, preferred artificial trees adding, "you can buy the evergreen room fresheners." Steve and Lucy Nami, also Syracuse residents, said they have had real trees twenty-nine years out of the thrifty-nine years they have been married. The Namis proclaimed, "it's hard to pass up the real smell of an evergreen."

The study also claims the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to buy an artificial tree rather than drive around looking for the perfect real one. Dan Martini however, who has run his Christmas Tree Farm in Syracuse for about twelve years, says the plastic involved in manufacturing and the disposal of plastic trees is much worse for the environment.

While the debate continues the numbers are indisputable. If you want to save a tree this season by going green, while keeping more green in your pocket over the long run, then purchasing a pre-lit artificial is the way to go.

Savings for the Holiday

Syracuse Woman Stabbed to Death

Syracuse Police have identified the city's latest homcide victim. We go live to the crime scene to NCC News Reporter Chris McGrath who has the details.

HS Boys BBall: CBA at Nottingham

Recap/Highlights:



CBA Coach - Buddy Wleklinski




Final Thoughts on the Final Project:

The goal of my final project was design it specifically for the internet. It's a simple recap of a high school basketball game with a couple small twists.

I wanted the recap to be as quick and to the point as possible. As Chris Sheridan told us when he spoke in class, the videos that have the best "play to completion rate" are the very short ones and the very long ones. Based on that idea, I kept the recap brief - only about a minute.

I also didn't necessarily want the interview with Coach Wleklinski incorporated into my recap because I wanted the viewer to have the choice watch that separately if he wanted.

With that in mind, I planned the layout of the post ahead of time. I knew Coach Wleklinski's interview would go right below my recap. So, at the end of my recap, I mentioned the interview and pointed down to where the video would be.

These are relatively small things, but they are the difference between a video made for TV and a video made for the internet.