-: Hello my name is Brandon Pope.
I'm an anchor reporter at WCIU TV in Chicago, Illinois.
A busy day for me would be being in studio
and presenting the news to viewers.
We have a run-down of stories I go through.
We have a meeting beforehand where we talk about
what stories we're gonna be talking about
throughout the day.
And then for a few hours I'm helping to write those stories,
put them in the best way possible
so that it's clear to the audience.
Then it's the whole trying to look good part,
trying to be presentable, making sure you're awake,
you have the energy, then presenting that news
clearly and precisely to the viewer.
After that, if it's a really busy day,
I'm headed out to a shoot.
I'm linking up with the photographer.
We're going to take calls, link up with a senator
or a law maker, or some news maker
and develop a story from there.
That would be a busy day.
Then getting back, getting all that sound together,
trying to write to those different bytes,
and creating a news package that we could air later on.
I'm a morning reporter so for me,
my day starts extremely early.
I spend most of the day before
trying to set things up in advance for the show itself.
Going into the day, I try to have
an idea of what I'm gonna be doing.
You can't always predict the news in advance
and things are gonna happen overnight.
Sometimes that's your story.
The first thing I do when I wake up is I actually email
my producers and we have that conversation.
What should we be talking about today
when it comes to my portion of the news?
That whole process, probably about two hours there,
I go live at 6:00 in the morning
so I gotta make sure I'm getting out to my live location.
That can hurt time management. (laughs)
You have to really have a good sense of that
because you might be live in the city.
You might be live in the edge of the county.
You might be live in a whole different county.
So it can go from being an eight minute drive down the road
to a one hour, two hour drive. (laughs)