Monday, a 6 a.m. wake up call set beginning of a big adventure for four UNLV journalism students; Reid Geary, Ariel Gove, Sandra Hernandez, and me, Denitsa Yotova, also known as the A Team.
We left our living quarters at 8:30 a.m. and took a public bus to Market Street in downtown Denver.
As soon as we reached our destination the four of us marched down to the first of three security checkpoints. Its location was so far out from the Pepsi Center, the heart of the convention, we could not even see it.
Oh well, all of this was expected.
Yet there we were, four UNLV students sweating from the hot Denver sun and the pressure of the heavy equipment on our backs, walking side by side with hundreds of media representatives to our very first national convention.
We did not waste a minute, and went straight inside the arena of the Pepsi Center where we saw many media celebrities such as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and CBS’ Katie Couric, and were lucky to hear the five-time Grammy award winner John Legend sing live in rehearsal.
At this point we split up into two teams with two different goals: Ariel and Sandra recording broadcast quality stories and Reid and I streaming live video from cell phones on the run.
This was just the beginning of a long, but amazing day. Reid and I made our first attempt to connect with our audience and share our experience via live streaming video thanks to Nokia’s new cell phone, the N95.
At first it sounded easy enough; press the button and start streaming video. For the most part, when we were simply narrating the story with the phone, it all went well, but we ended up having a handful of sound issues when using external microphones during actual interviews.
While trying to be as professional as possible in the eyes of the people we were interviewing, behind the camera one of us was always pulling on cables and trying to make those microphones do their job so the audience on the other end could hear the conversation.
Needless to say, we tried our hardest, but we ended up learning a few lessons; carry extra batteries, do a sound check before streaming live at any time, ensure no cables are loose, and of course, turn the device on.
Yet the most important point was that regardless of the fact the N95 is not a film camera, it had similar functions to it and therefore we needed to treat it like one at all times.
With all of this excitement, our first day at the convention came to an end pretty quickly and despite the technical difficulties we experienced, we will continue to work on improving the quality of this brand new form of journalism so we can live up to our audience’s expectations in the upcoming days.
Denitsa Yotova 