I visited CDN's studios in Santo Domingo this morning. CDN's motto is "the national leader in news." I don't have enough information to confirm or deny that, but I learned that CDN has exclusive rights to broadcast Major League Baseball and the Dominican Winter League games in the Dominican Republic.
I met Ambiorix Vidal, the sports producer of the network. He's very young (mid 20s, and I am very old) and a former ballplayer, and when he spoke to me of his station's mission for baseball broadcast he smiled from ear to ear. That's why I came here--to find others who understand why baseball is so beautiful.
The details of my interview with Sr. Vidal are coming up in a future article. He showed me around the CDN studios. Our tour took me back nearly 10 years, to my first year in college and my first professional aspirations in broadcast journalism.
I got to see CDN's main television sets. Studio A has setups for four desk sets, plus a green screen and a few panels for sports broadcasts. It's not the largest or most advanced set in Santo Domingo, but it has everything necessary to produce a news broadcast. They have HD cameras and their typical news broadcast uses a two-camera setup, different from the three-camera set up I was trained on back in the day.
There's also a studio for programs broadcast on CDN2, geared for women and children, and a separate studio for cooking shows. We got to watch a bit of a live cooking show broadcast in progress. We also saw the editing rooms, the control room, and the radio studios. CDN produces radio and El Caribe, a newspaper in Santo Domingo.
When I started college I was a broadcast major and I was hellbent on being the very best sports announcer there ever was. Deep down, I also wanted to be a news anchor. I met one of the anchors for CDN's news program and was reminded of why I never could have been an anchor. She was tall and gorgeous with flawless cheekbones. Now, I have some damn good bone structure too, but next to this Dominican beauty I felt like Frumpy McStumperson, all fat and squat and awkward. They don't put flops like that on the TV.
But then I remembered the real reasons why I got out of the broadcasting game. Things really haven't changed all that much in how news is produced. The major changes have to do with the switch to digital broadcasting and HD--soon to be 3D, which I'm sorry, is gimmicky as a mother and annoying for people who wear glasses to see. I HATE those tacky 3D glasses and using them every time I want to watch TV? The hell with that noise--and non-linear editing, i.e., editing via computer programs instead of physically manipulating the videotape. I started out right as the industry straddled the line between linear and non-linear editing and I was taught how to edit videotape as well as via computer programs, like Final Cut Pro.
All that means is that I could get back into the game after a few crash courses in shooting, editing, and producing video. The question is not if I could do it. The question is if I want to, and the answer is a big fat resounding NO.
Basically in broadcasting, a few people do all the work while everyone stands around watching you do it. In my production classes, I ran the board in the control room. I ran the sound board. I ran video tape. I was floor manager. I was on camera. I did everything while the other nosepickers stood around doing nothing. It was enough to throw my headset at them.
Plus half the classes were girls and you can guess their motivation for a BS in broadcast journalism: "I want to be on TV! Tee-hee!" After a while, the women who were serious about production defected. One really smart girl who had a lot on the ball and who produced solid news reports just up and left in the middle of the semester because she was tired of the bubbleheads who didn't actually do a damn thing but always were on camera because their only talent was to sit there and look pretty.
Those frustrations pushed me pretty close to the edge, but I eventually found that I enjoyed the writing side of things more than the production side. I gave script writing a try, both film and broadcast news, and I didn't care for it as much as I thought I would. By the time I was completely exhausted with broadcasting, I was offered some opportunities to write about sports on the internet--back when that was still a novel concept--and that took its own course.
I enjoy the interviewing process a lot. Sometimes I think having my own newsmagazine program a la Anderson Cooper, with interviews and stuff, would be great. I love learning new things about people, places, and events, and I love to hear the stories that come out of my questions. I get a deep sense of satisfaction from turning the interviews into articles which introduce previously untold stories. At the end of the day, I'm a much better writer than a speaker and I flourish when I write.
My visit to CDN was still a valuable and fun experience. I got to relive a time in my life that I rarely give any consideration to, and I got to see that I made the right choice after all. Those are the best moments.
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