{Motorcycle Gang Arrests, LIVE from Kingman}

My last day of reporting at NewsWatch ...

(I'm going out of order here as far as posting stories.)

I'm kind of floundering trying to come up with a good, one day turn ...

Calling to do a story on this guy who legally changed his name to Santa Claus ...

Mark walks up to me and says I need to be in Kingman for a 2PM presser.

Well, okay!

The best part ... we were going to go live from Kingman. We have the capability to go live

around the outside of our building, but we don't have a live truck. So, the only way to go live from location is via ichat (which is essentially Skype). I hadn't done it before, and neither had Mike, who went out there with me. So, we were both excited for a new experience. We flew to Kingman and made it there just in time. We shot the press conference, finishing up at 3PM.

We then had two hours before we were going live with the top story on the 5PM newscast.

The idea was to write a script and then upload and edit the video. Since I wasn't in the

newsroom where I could cut my voice track, I was going to do a live reader over the video.

None of us (Mike, me or the people in the newsroom) had ever tried to send cut video files

(FTPs) before. So, I wrote the script. Mike edited the video ...

And we couldn't figure out how to send it.

Time for a new plan.

The station got video and stills from the police that they edited together for video. Melanie

(the producer) and I talked over the phone to rewrite the script to fit the visuals they had.

Meanwhile, Mike worked to set up ichat but was having troubles getting a strong enough Internet connection. So, at 4:30PM we left the police station parking lot in search of a Starbucks

that I'm still convinced does not exist. We pulled into this mom and pop motel and begged

the owner to let us hook up to hers. She was in!

We were the top story of a 5PM newscast. At 4:45PM, we still didn't have the ichat up.

I called the special line and got ready to do a phoner. I was doing this from the parking

lot next door in order to get a phone signal. Mike was around the corner and out of my

sight. So, we ran back and forth a few times. Crazy!

They bumped us into the second block of the newscast to give us more time to figure out the ichat, and it worked. Mike was able to connect to it. (Cue singing angels.) I literally ran to the camera with ten seconds to spare before going LIVE!

It was insane. Mike and I were pumped full of adrenaline afterwards. His hands were shaking,

my heart was racing.

I was a little disappointed when I watched it back. I stumbled a couple times, my hair was a mess, that deep breath before the video started was not supposed to have been on camera, etc.

But it was still the most exciting day in reporting I've experienced yet, and I learned a lot from it. So ultimately, I wouldn't change a think about it.

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"Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly." -Robert Schuller