What Teams Mid-Missourians Like

At the University of Missouri, students from all over the state attend. Located in the heart of the state, it makes it less than a five hour drive from any part in Missouri. However, if you're here for only a week, it doesn't take long to figure out what area most people are from...St. Louis. It's especially evident right now...with the World Series going on and the St. Louis Cardinals playing.

That really shouldn't be surprising. After all, it's the largest metropolitan area in the state. One thing that is important to point out though...it is not the biggest city in the state. That belongs to Kansas City. According to City Population, Kansas City has 140,000 more people than the city of St. Louis does, but that's because St. Louis is mainly the suburbs in St. Louis County, not St. Louis City.  I get the sense that it's the kids from St. Louis County who are the ones filling the seats of many classrooms at Mizzou, more so than the ones from St. Louis County.

Sports are very popular in Columbia, Mo. Everyone obviously roots for Mizzou, but the professional teams are up for a little more debate. The key word though...is little. Is it just me, or do I see a Cardinal fan everywhere I turn? There are so many of them. They are everywhere, and it's just surprising to me that the town is so lopsided when Kansas City is just as close. Then again, you have to look at the two teams as well, the Cardinals and the Royals.

Beautiful Busch Stadium St. Louis, Mo.

The Royals have been the laughing stock of the American League Central since the division began. Meanwhile, the Cardinals are often one of the best teams in the National League. People in St. Louis or just outside of it obviously are going to root for the Cardinals, but people in mid- Missouri really have their pick. I guess that's why mid-Missouri is Cardinals territory and not Royals. Lets be honest, if you're not from the west side of the state, why would you be a Royals fan? They haven't been good since they beat the Cards in the controversial 1985 World Series.

Archived video of the Royals 1985 World Series Parade

But here's a question, why do I feel like there are more Chiefs fans in mid-Missouri than Cardinals fans? I think it's the exact same reason why there are more Cardinals fans than Royals fans. The Chiefs are usually better than the Rams. Heck, the Rams might not win a game this season. Obviously, St. Louis people will root for the Rams, and Kansas City people will root for the Chiefs, but mid-Missouri again has its pick. I think they usually pick the better of the two teams. So the question...does mid-Missouri have some of the smartest fans in the world, or are they just a bunch of bandwagon fans?

Please discuss below...or leave me a comment

More information I'm learning

For the WJ Chat, I also asked a question for the conversation. Take a look at the chat below as to how journalists from across the country answered it.

How I found out about Wordle

Tonight, I just sat it on a web journalist chat on Twitter. The chats go on every Wednesday at 7 p.m. CT. They involve web journalists from around the world who look at how online journalism works. The monitor brings up questions, and the people sitting in respond. I thought this would be a very informative thing for me to sit in on because I do not know a whole lot about social media, but as people always say, there is always time to learn.

The topic tonight seemed to be about word clouds. I got a bad vibe from the journalists weighing in on the website Wordle. It seemed like most of them didn't like it. This also...was the first question of the night. You'd figure that they'd throw up a couple of softballs first, but if they did, I couldn't even hit this one. I don't know what word clouds are. So being the young and brave reporter that I am...instead of faking it like I knew all about it, I decided to ask what it was. I got a lot of people to respond to me. The biggest concern among the journalists was that Wordle can be changed very easily, and it is a bit misleading. In other words, the clouds it creates might make some words look like they appear more often than they really do.

I went to the Wordle website, but I was never able to create one myself. I don't think my computer had the most up to date Java software. From the website though, it appears as though Wordle makes clouds out of the words you provide. Bigger clouds are made to words that appear more often on-line. The bigger the word, the more prevalent it is on-line. What's lost in this, I also could have figured out what Wordle was by looking at the tweets that followed mine. After answering the question, a bunch of different people responded to me. It seemed as if they were eager to help me out. Some of the conversation from my short chat is below. My next on-line goal...create a Wordle. Sounds like a good task.


What do you think about Wordle? Leave me a comment!

What Behind the Scenes Looks Like

So for the last couple of weeks, there's been a large amount of people at the station who've been working real hard to try and put this Homecoming show together. This morning, finishing off the show was a culmination of hard work but also the beginning of the Homecoming festivities in the city as Columbia gets ready for Saturday. The show was led by KOMU Reporter David Earl and Executive Producer Rod Petersen. They were in charge of setting up the different people to come into the station and make sure we had extra staff to coordinate all our different shots. For those of you who don't know a lot about broadcast, that takes a lot of work.



I usually have a role in the Friday morning show, but usually it isn't as big as the one I had today. The funny thing is, my role wasn't even that big this morning. On Friday mornings I web edit, but for this show, David wanted me do a behind the scenes look at how we did it. So I shot a lot of video on Friday morning before our show. We put a wireless mic on a couple of the different reporters who were working the show. That way, we could get sound from them candidly. That's what happened, and we were able to catch a lot of the reporters 'in the moment,' where it wasn't a formal interview, and I was really pleased with how the story turned out.

The favorite shots of my piece were when I took the camera outside the newsroom and into our live truck shed. I stuck a mic on one of our producers Samantha Kubota as she climbed a ladder. Needless to say, it was pretty funny because she couldn't find what she was looking for and thought that everybody was trying to pull a prank on her. She ended up saying, "I think I just stepped in bird poop," on camera. Do you think I used it in my piece? Of course I did. How could you not? That is TV at its finest!

Seth at his finest behind the scenes!

If you watched the morning show, you realized just how small of a part that piece was. If you think about it, our show is two and a half hours long. My story ran twice and total, it took up just more than three minutes. There was so much fresh content in our show, so many different Homecoming stories. Without everyone there, it wouldn't have been possible. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if we had to take out content in our shows simply because it's very easy to spend more time than planned on stories. There's a lot ad libbing when you have a show with no teleprompter! The more conversational shows like this are, the better they turn out.

Reporter Blake Hanson live and local as always.

 
All in all, I think the show was a pretty big success. Somebody came up to me later on in the day and said, "Good morning show." I told him thanks, but you should've been behind the scenes. It was pretty chaotic. The most important part is whether it looked good on air or not. In the end, that's all that matters. The effort that people like Earl and Petersen put in had to be an incredibly big amount, and if they hadn't set up all the things that they did, a complicated show like this could have turned out disastrous.

     

To see a behind the scenes look, watch the video above. 

My Late Sunday Night

What I watched and listened to while working on my website.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

  This is all in preparation for Frontline Executive Producer David Fanning's visit to the Journalism School...

  Should be an interesting lecture!

David Fanning's worked for Frontline since the very first show in 1983.