As of today I’m once again an unemployed student. Aah, the bliss!

I woke up at 8 AM and got home at 6 PM. The broadcast was twenty minutes away when I saved my Avid project for the last time and transcoded it into the system. Sometimes schedules such as this mean that the subject’s been really hard. Sometimes it just means that the reporter hasn’t had a clue.

The whole thing was a bit of a shapeless blob. So Tekevä Foundation was five years old, but then what? The interviews weren’t difficult to get but the interviewees were. What’s more, I had to version a short comment for the 16.30 radio news, which meant putting off work on the television story.

So yes, it was pure SNAFU. But here I am alive and well, and a second dance mat just arrived. Life is good, after all.

Unbelievable as it may sound, I’ve no clear recollection of what I did last week. Thursday and Friday I can still remember, but what about the days before those? Gone with the wind, I reckon. Or maybe it was the intensive partying in mom’s mid-centennial party. Or both.

But let me tell you about the nicest piece of television reporting I’ve ever had the honour of participating in. The day was last Thursday and the assignment was to cover the then-upcoming Jyväskylä Summer Jazz 04 festival for telly. I called their office and got hooked up with two world-class Brazilian musicians.

Jarkko, who is an excellent cameraman, tagged along as I went to the conservatory to listen to the gentleman practice & compose. What heavenly music! I’m starting to think that almost any music sounds good live, if the people playing are professionals. You still won’t catch me dead with a recording of Mozart’s one or other, but live jazz does the trick for me.

Back at the office I laid down the base audio track and spliced the interviews on it. It was easy as ever, sounded good and looked good as well. Of course the news value was a tad doubtful but hey, I enjoyed doing it.

On Friday I did a bit on the planned memorial for the Konginkangas bus accident victims but there’s really nothing to say about it.

So there I was once again, standing in our lovely, open office. Mind you I’d already done some short gigs last Spring but in theory last Monday was my first day on the job.

I spent the first two days getting acquainted with the state of regional youth work and produced a story in which I said pretty much nothing. Well, nothing except that there are huge differences between different cities. So far, so good.

Wednesday was spent preparing a story of the state of regional football. When I write ’preparing’ I mean that I slacked off to home early in the afternoon because I went to see a game in the evening. I videoed the entire first half and interviewed a few audience members. Sifting through the footage took most of Thursday even though the story itself was really simple. Not much content there, though.

And then onto Friday. I arrived at work promptly at nine o’clock sharp and had just gotten my jacket off when boss told me to not bother undressing but rather grab a camera man and get going already. To make a short story even shorter, he’d thought the appointment was at 13.00, not 9.00. So in we went to Central Finland Health Care District.

The idea was to do a report on surgery queues. I had absolutely no time to prepare and to make things perfect I got some three hundred pages of fiscal reports and whatnots. We started worrying about footage on the way to the hospital, as it’s a real pain in the butt to shoot there – one has to get a permission from the hospital and each and every patient that is going to be recognizable which basically means that you can’t shoot shit. Suffice to say that at quarter past nine my spirits weren’t very high.

I was still feeling in the dumps when we headed back to headquarters four hours later. The people from Yle 24 called and asked to do an extra interview and grab some general footage for them too. I’d gotten long-winded answers from my interviewee, had minimal footage, wasn’t quite sure what to put in the story and was famished. A couple of hours later I’d finished the script and noticed that I’d left out the few things we would’ve had pictures on. But then… the magic of journalism happened.

When we started rummaging through the digitized footage on our Avid workstation, things suddenly started to make sense. When I talked of queues, we could use the shots from the parking space. When I talked of cutting down on the amount of days spent in aftercare, we could apply archive footage of empty hospital beds. When the interviewee talked about how much money they’d used to cut down the waiting times, we could punch in close-ups of the fiscal report and shots of people reading it. And best of all, the story seemed to make some sense. Perhaps not the biggest news event of the year, but a coherent piece anyway.

I got home after eight and a half hours. I wasn’t drowsy but rather awake. It felt good to have tackled such a difficult situation and to come out on the top. In word it made me feel like a proper reporter again.