Three Posts in One

I got my inspiration for my first election day story by watching Monday Night Football. I saw A LOT of commercials for county executive candidates during the game and I noticed Bill Magnarelli had quite a few that targeted Mahoney's lack of experience. So interviewed Magnarelli and Bill Ryan about his campaign ads. Manarelli got really defense about it, and went on a two minute rant about how he's more experienced and because he's got more experience he is hands down the best candidate. He even said the experience of the two candidates should be the determining factor in the election. Bill Ryan agreed on that same point.

My second election day story just kind of happened. I was originally going to go to the Democratic Party at night for most likely what was going to be Magnarelli's concession speech. On the way back to South Campus, I spotted a man with a Magnarelli sign standing at the corner of Stafford and Comstock. I saw him in the morning and the afternoon and thought this guy must have great endurance. Turned out he wasn't there all day, but three hours total. That's a lot for a guy who's 76 and it was about 35 degrees out all day. I interviewed him about his efforts. His name was Skip Mattson and Skip was a very politically knowledgeable guy. He talked to me for ten minutes about a wide range of local to national political issues. It was his first year supporting a candidate in this manor. A chair on Magnarelli's campaign board asked him if he would volunteer his time during rush hour on Election Day.

Today I was a producer for Team C or the 4:05 broadcast. My anchor was good old A.J. Donatoni, and my reporters were Gino Wang and Ranbir Boyal. Together we put forth a strong effort, despite near disasters finding stories. I was happy that I put together a rundown that consisted of no copy stories. In radio, I feel like listeners aren't tuning in to hear the anchors voice. So I try to get as many of the words of people who are actually involved in making the news we are reporting onto the air. The only drawback of my no-copy rundown is all my stories were essentially local stories except for A.J.'s phoner to an Ithaca professor about the economy going down the tubes.