Pre-Thanksgiving

Well, We are at the week before Thanksgiving but there is no rest for the weary... yet.
Monday: Today I came into the office a bit early to get some work done on a paper I had due for a class, but I ended up working on updating blog bios and working with our expert bloggers and trying to smooth out some kinks. Mondays have also become my day of brainstorming what slideshows or photo galleries I am going to tackle for the week. This week, I decided to keep working on this idea about newcomer spouses and a piece on the Kennedys. I also prepared a piece for the upcoming two days before thanksgiving.
Tuesday: Terry Michael Day! Today was simply a lecture by Terry about campaigns and the message that people must use. He talked about primary campaigns and the message that people must use to define their candidates. It reminded me of a West Wing episode. After class, I went downstairs and chatted with the NJ family. I worked some more on this piece we began about the spouses of Congressional newcomers. We found some interesting women and men. One guy, Marco Rubio, married a Florida Dolphins cheerleader.
Wednesday: Things are going pretty smoothly at NJ and Wednesday was no exception. I started on my Kennedys piece and I also learned a new way to present photos. It is called photo peach and it animates the photos by adding movement to the clips. It makes it pretty ineresting because then it is not just a slideshow, but you can still put in the captions that you want underneath the photos. THen you simply take the embed code that is provided and past that iframe into the body of the story. It was actually the perfect solution to some of the multimedia problems I had been having with our new gallery.
Thursday: Terry Michael Day! We continued our discussion about general election campaigns on Thursday and talked about what the role of conventions are. He said we use them to define our candidates and then direct a message. I again thought back to the West Wing because in the 7th season one of the complaints Joshua Lyman makes is that he did not have a full convention for his candidate to define himself. It is amazing how much that show is accurate for television... that rarely happens. I headed by down to NJ and I spent the day finishing up my Kennedy series and getting ready to put together my Thanksgiving slide show. I am really lucky because besides helping out with photos and things of that nature, I get the chance to do my own projects and the sky is pretty much the limit. I guess they figured they would rather have to reel me in then force me to do things.
Friday: Last day at work before a week-long hiatus while I go home for Thanksgiving. Today in the newsroom we did one of our first television spots with the new camera equipment in the office. Our editor Ron Fournier was on Andrea Mitchell's show and he did really well. It reminded me of the times on OU NIghtly, however this was a more efficient system than what we have at OU NIghtly. I finished the Thanksgiving slide show and that was pretty much all I took care of that day. I was excited to get out of there and head home to Oklahoma.
We will see how the break goes!