Covering Schools Requires an Education

John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida

Hillsborough school district chef Ben Guggenmos shows Broward Elementary students how to build a dessert fruit pizza.

Part of the reason I moved to StateImpact Florida from a newspaper was the chance to learn some skills and try new things.

It turns out that producing radio news stories is much harder and a lot more work than I expected. You don’t show up sounding like NPR on your first day no matter how easy it sounds on the radio.

Between the equipment, techniques, editing and mixing, I’ve learned first-hand there are a lot of ways to ruin a story.

So I jumped when I saw a Hillsborough County schools press release about a new nutrition program. It’s fun and fluffy and not the world’s most important education story.

But I knew it would be a great chance to gather ambient sound, interview “characters” for the story and practice, practice practice for more important stories down the road.

Here’s the result (with a little mixing help from my colleagues). Be sure to read the following in your best radio voice to introduce the audio:

“If you’ve got school-aged kids, you know it can be hard to get them to eat enough fruits and vegetables. Now, some Hillsborough County students are taste testing new recipes designed to get them eating healthy.

StateImpact Florida’s John O’Connor tried to find out if the kids liked them.”