I’m truly honored and excited to be covering the Presidential Inauguration in Washington D.C. I just received some sobering news from our Shaun Neville, the Special Projects Producer for Hearst-Argyle, which is our Washington bureau where we will be working out of.
“What I can share with you is that this is setting up to be a logistical nightmare. Secret Service announced perimeter restrictions yesterday and they are the most extreme ever implemented. Various bridges from Virginia and Maryland will be closed to traffic and Metro is expected to be jammed… Traffic is expected to be very heavy. I can tell you that folks here at the Bureau are adding 2-3 hours to their commuting time in fear that the crowd estimates of 1-3 million are accurate,” said Neville.
I personally am up to the challenge both mentally and physically. These trips require an incredible amount of stamina and I can sleep later. Many people don’t want to deal with the hassels but I thrive off of assignments like this. This is an important time for our nation and I’m determined to bring the best stories to you!
It was a fun Aloha Friday morning. The folks from Jamba Juice were outside our KITV studios today handing out free Acai smoothies. It was great! I remember one van with all of these kids coming out to get one each! It was like a clown car!
Great to also have comedian Bill Bellamy and Bill Maloney from Ohana Road showing off the new Mazda 6.
Sorry, for not keeping our Island Breakfast Blog “fresh.” I got to get on those anchors to blog more often. Since the transition to WordPress, I forgot my login but now I’m all set to blog.
A friend convinced me to go to the Sen. Barack Obama rally this past Friday. I’m not necessarily a supporter but I went for the historical significance of the event. Obama might also be the only viable presidential candidate I’ll see in my lifetime who was born and raised in Hawaii.
Here’s some pictures I took with my iPhone 3G:
Not bad for a 2MP camera phone with no autofocus or flash. I did crop the pictures, though.
It was a hot, yet windy, day at Keehi Lagoon. I got a nice suntan while waiting for the Obama family, who was 45 minutes late. I’m just glad his speech was fairly quick. I liked when he talked about getting some local food.
I did manage to record some video using my Canon digital camera. Unfortunately, I recorded the beginning, end and one awkward part in the middle when Obama talked about health care. But, I edited together what I had. I’m sure our live broadcast on KITV and kitv.com was much better. But, here’s my personal Obama rally video:
Clayton Wakida
KITV 4 Island Television News This Morning Producer
My props to head football coach Greg McMackin. I think he was a boxer in a former life. It’s always great seeing him and according to the coach, he’ll never forget the time when I was camping out in front of June Jones’ office waiting for his resignation. I blocked McMackin from entering a door with my foot so that we in the media could try to get an interview from him since he was a leading candidate. Anyway, I had no idea that when we did this boxing fitness segment with him that he’d hit so hard. The video says it all. My lipstick ended up on the punching bag.
Ryan Ozawa, our lost blogger, took a bad looking spill last Friday during a sports challenge against the U.H. Warriors. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but I know his ego was bruised. Dan was really worried one of the Warriors would get hurt. Instead, Ryan got a strawberry on his knee and we got jamba juice acai with granola on our clothes. It looked like vomit on my clothes. The same thing happened to me when I fell 2 years ago in a mini-decathlon against Olympian Bryan Clay. Now I’ve learned when challenging athletes, you can never win, so just take your time and don’t push yourself too hard.
Ho. We it was a rollercoaster of a ride on Tuesday.
We had David Farmer on. Yes I thought he was the running back from UH too at first. This David Farmer is the bankruptcy attorney for Aloha Airlines. He nearly broke down during an interview on KITV right after the demise of Aloha Airlines (Demise is this month’s hip word in Hawaii). One of our very cool coworkers set up a live interview with Farmer the next morning. He came in and during a live morning show interview proclaimed that 900 Aloha employees who work for the contract services division were also out of work. STOP THE PRESSES. The division was sold to Pacific Air Cargo. The deal would be finalized on Monday and now 900 MORE Aloha employees were out of jobs before anyone had a chance to sign on the dotted line. So instead of 2300 Aloha employees on the street … it was actually 3200 local residents. That wasn’t in the daily papers. No one had reported that! I miss the interview because I was preparing for another segment (we don’t wing it the entire time). Mahea told me just before the segment that had nothing to do with Aloha started. My mind was racing. It was 6:15 AM. We had to change everything. And change it we did. We blew out our regular Headlines at 6:30 segment which we do at the top each half hour and replaced with interview with Mr. Farmer. I watch and think … we are killing everybody. The papers, our morning show TV competitors, everyone! This is today’s big story and you heard it first right here on ‘KITV 4 Your Island Television News This Morning.”
Hours later when I return from the predictable story of how busy Hawaiian Airlines Cargo is now … Mahea breaks it to me. Farmer made a mistake. He was wrong about ? services. There jobs were safe and secure because the sale of Pacific Air was literally protected by the bankruptcy court. Farmer apologized. I don’t blame him. Anyone who’s watched me on the air knows I’ve made a mistake or two … or three. He was caught in an emotional situation on very little rest and was quoted the law. A … what I thought was a feather in the show’s cap … turned out to be a poke in the eye.
And off into the space that one goes.
I responded by waking up the next morning … going to work … and looking for another way to trump my competitors
A challenging morning today. At about 5:22 this A-M, we came out of the commercial break and Mahealani and I were going into a block of short news stories. Just before we went to video I saw … what appeared to be …. a naked woman walking behind the cameras. My eyes went small then wide as I was reading ” … here’s a look at some of the stories we’re following this morning.” When in fact my eyes were following something else. Mahea saw the look on my face and attempted to stop hereself from laughing out loud. The first story was gas prices. I survived. Then next was a bank robbery but Mahea waved it off. I jumped in and read that story but it sounded odd because I sounded really happy while I was reading it. I was actually trying not to laugh. Then Mahea read a story about Filipino war veterans trying to get benefits and she did laugh and apologize. We came out to a shot of Ben, Mahea and I and explained why Mahea and I lost our composure. We then asked one of the studio cameraman to take a shot of what we were talking about. She was a female body builder who was going to do an interview segment a little later in the show wearing nothing but a bikin. End of the story.
But wait.
There is more.
We checked the air check afterwards and when the cameraman took a shot of this woman he zoomed in on her buttocks as I was saying how distracting it all was. Just another day on the morning show.
Hello all. My name is Dan Meisenzahl and I am committed to becoming a regular bogger here on Island Breakfast Blog. It’s just a matter of getting into a habit. I have not fully embrace the information age that we are now all in. Of course I have the cell phone that takes pictures … though I only use it to actually call people. And am on the internet everyday, but that’s about the extent of it. I plan on using this site as a place to let people know about what’s going on behind the scenes. And I’ll start with this troubling little tale from Monday’s morning show newscast.We had the chorus from Aina Haina Elementary on. We’re talking 35 kids and at least that many parents, all crammed into our studio. Mahealani introduced the group and we started playing the music they were to sing to, but they could not hear it in the studio even though it was going out over the air. Mahea rushed back out and apologized for the technical difficulties and we went to commercial. I immediately fixed the problem by jiggling the chord on the speakers. And then we put the kids at the top of the next block where our morning headlines go. Two minutes later, Mahea was re-introducing them and they sang beautifully. After they were done, Ben and I were back on set and I started reading the morning headlines. Unfortunately, the teleprompter operator was on the wrong stories because of the confusion. I had a partial script and managed to get through the first story but I did not have the rest of the scripts because of the scramble. So I started to read slower and slower while praying at the same time that the prompter would soon be in the right place. And after aging two weeks in ten seconds, it did. Nothing like flirting with disaster on a Monday.
