Sometimes, we get so ahead of ourselves while working, we lose track of time. That’s exactly what happened when I decided to attempt a “day in the life” perspective of my working day here at KNOM. It was already 9:44am before I had my cartoon-y “Oh shucks!” moment when I realized I hadn’t recorded so much of what happened already that day. Below you’ll find a kind of timeline of my working day on Tuesday, January 24th, 2017. And above, you can listen to it!
A Tuesday in January
6:00am – Wake up early, make coffee (with a packet of hot cocoa mix in it, otherwise it would be undrinkable to me, I believe that’s what a mocha is???) and make a quesadilla with Swiss cheese, leftover yellow rice, and ham. I also snack on a bowl of Special K after it gets really soggy, because I hate chewing crispy cereal.
7:00am – Get to work early in order to prep before our second Retreat to Kotzebue on Thursday and Friday.
7:30am-8:30am – Organize my email inbox! Now that I’m getting a lot of email replies for a show KNOM is considering rebooting, I have to add more organization to my once-sparse work email inbox.
8:30am – Work more on parsing down audio for my latest Dearest Alaska. The subject matter this time? I shadowed a design session led by Ranger Zaragoza on a game app the National Park Service is making in collaboration with the ideas of local sixth graders. There is so much great audio that it’s hard to whittle the episode down to under ten minutes – a great problem to deal with. I also rerecorded my intro and outro scripts (as seen in the header picture!).
9:44am – Oops! Forgot to start recording the audio blog portion for this week!
10:00am – News team meeting. The production team meets up with the newsies every Tuesday to discuss training and other news related items. Each meeting, we discuss a question of the day. Today’s prompt: a household-related mishap we’ve experienced in the past (or recently for that matter!). We also talked about our upcoming retreat, a new method of recording Marine Weather for our listeners, and also debriefed how we felt about our first coverage of race season for the Kuskokwim 300.
10:30am – Production team meeting. We discussed our ongoing projects, and how travel to villages will work with race season coming up – all hands are needed on deck, but news, soft or hard, never stops!
11:00am-ish – I remember I need to write something accompanying the audio blog and open WordPress. (How meta!)
12:00pm-2:00pm – An extended lunch break to cover the time I spent coming in early and for staying late tonight to cover the Nome Joint Utility Board Meeting. I also went to the library to check out some books on Alaska Native culture to help with my “Native Culture” spot category and, in general, my job and life here!
2:00pm – Voice-track training with Laura to prep for our retreat on Thursday and Friday.
3:00-6:00pm – My on-air deejay shift. On a usual day: at 3:30pm I do a special program called “Tracks from the Stacks” where I select a vinyl record or CD from upstairs and play three tracks back to back. It’s nice because the music is usually not in our regular rotation. At 4:00pm is my themed request show “The Needle Drop.” The 5:00pm hour is dedicated to music deejaying, as well as reading hotlines and community announcements.
However, today was not a usual today, and I actually did two “Tracks from the Stacks” in a row, followed by a mix of “Karen’s biggest KNOM music library hits,” as we had to do an update to the system that made our deejaying software unavailable for a few minutes. It was the first time I played from my laptop, and the entire time, I was terrified a pop-up ad was going to start playing! In true radio fashion, we always have to improvise within our day. For Wednesday, I’ll do the “Needle Drop” theme I planned for today: “Bands with silly names.” (I’m looking at you, 10cc, Three Dog Night, and Toad the Wet Sprocket!)
7:00pm-9:00pm – I observe and take notes for the Nome Joint Utility Board meeting to write a story for noon on Wednesday. I originally went into the meeting expecting the lede (or leading item) of the story to be a recent pipe burst, but a lot of interesting discussion took place around labor contract negotiations. You never know what’s going to happen with news. You can read the story I wrote here.
9:00pm – Done for the day! I usually just get in early the next morning to write the news piece, so at this moment, I am unwinding from the day with my fellow volunteers. I walked into the volunteer house and soon after, our outreach coordinator, Margaret, brought us snacks leftover from a game night, and I treated myself to something like a second dinner. Yum!
Thanks for joining me today; we’ll be back with more voices and more perspectives next week!
