One of those occasions was this month when she went on her honeymoon. She's back, still happily married ('cause a week on a boat with someone can change one's view), and returns to work full-time Monday morning.
She actually returned last week but had training at the station Thursday and Friday. The station is training all of its newsroom employees to work solo as Multi-Media Journalists.
Using small JVC cameras that cost about $3,500 and record on SDHC memory cards, the station will have someone report, shoot and write a story, edit it on a Mac laptop with Final Cut Pro video editing software and upload the video back to the station — all by him or herself.
This is something that more stations, even in larger cities now, are trying as a way to cut costs without losing content. WUSA-TV in Washington, DC switched completely to one person news crews last year. WUSA's owner, Gannett, also owns WTSP here in Tampa Bay. That station has a few MMJs but still uses mostly two-person crews.
It's not new to me. All the stories I've posted here that I did for zootoo.com, I shot, wrote, narrated and edited myself with my own equipment. I also shot and edited all the pieces I reported between 2005 and 2009 for the Dodge Sports Report, a high school sports show that aired on the state-wide Sun Sports network here in Florida.
Before that I produced several short documentary films after I bought my first digital video camera in 2003. Let's not forget the one-man-banding, as we used to call it, I did in my first small market job from 1988-1991.
I was MMJ before MMJ was cool.
But, anyway, if you wondered what happened to Meredyth, nothing did. I mean nothing other than getting married, which I grant is a fair distance from nothing but I think you get what I meant. She shall return to her regularly scheduled program and I shall return to a normal sleep schedule.
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