After watching Monday’s and Tuesday’s cool new segments, I felt a lot of pressure to get team Wednesday a cool segment too. Originally, my team and I came up with an “around the globe idea.” The title, that has changed at least eight times, is now officially “Cross Continental.” The concept was to focus on Covid-19 stories around the world. More specifically, we would pick one country at random and focus for a whole minute on the number of cases, distinct laws, and general situation in that given location. We would also take advantage of our international USC community and interview someone who either has ties to that country or lives there.
After our 8 a.m. pitch meeting, Rohit, my teammate, mentioned South Korea was having an election on Wednesday. Immediately, we all thought of our fellow USC classmate living there and reached out to him. At around 9 a.m., at our Zoom producer meeting, we realized the time difference is a factor we needed to take into consideration. For Alexander Song, our contact in South Korea, it was midnight. Getting a hold of him was hard, and we made the executive decision to float that story. Annaliese, my other teammate, was able to secure an interview in the afternoon with someone living in France. The time difference was nine hours; we were lucky to be able to get a hold of her.
Looking back to the beginning of the day, our new segment idea hasn’t changed very much. Even though we thought about completely switching our idea numerous times to focus on “lighter” or “happier” stories unrelated to the virus, we felt it was important to focus on what other countries around the world are doing as we are all in an unusual situation. With this in mind, what we might do differently the next time is bring in an invention angle. More specifically, we would like to take a look at people around the globe who have come up with a cool invention to help with the lack of supplies such as 3D printed ventilators. Something else to think about for next week is organization. If we plan to interview people around the world, we should research in advance and figure out a time for Tuesday or Wednesday to minimize any time difference concerns.