Switching roles proved to be fun

The tables were turned.
For more than 40 years, part of my job has involved interviewing people.
I’ve interviewed people about their political aspirations, about their hobbies, about their families, about their adventures and more. Folks have shared remarkable stories, and I’ve tried to do those stories justice in print, sharing them with our readers.
But now the tables were turned.
On Saturday, a crew from WIPB-TV was in Jay County. And they were the ones doing the interviewing.
WIPB-TV is the Muncie-based Public Broadcasting Station that’s under the umbrella of Ball State University. This year, the station is launching a new project; and Portland is, to put it in the terms of the computer world, “the Beta site.”
In other words, they’ve never done this before. And, to a certain extent, they’re figuring it out as they go along.
The concept is pretty simple. Rather than send a couple of reporters and camera operators to a nearby town and try to dig up some local stories, the community itself is invited to put together the raw material for a whole raft of stories.
That raw material can be anything from old photographs to digital images, from VHS tape of a community event to new video shot on one of five cameras the station made available to check out from the library.
Portland’s the Beta site, but watch for this project to grow. If you live in Dunkirk or Redkey or Pennville or any of the other towns in WIPB-TV’s broadcast reach, start thinking about stories you’d like to have included when the TV folks come knocking at your door.
In Dunkirk’s case, for instance, the community portrait could include the Gas Boom, the Glass Museum, the Dunkirk Foundation, Glass Days, efforts to win the Stellar Communities competition, Dunkirk High School, West Jay Middle School, city government, the Elks and Moose lodges, the American Legion Post and on and on.
You get the picture.
A similar list was generated in Portland, and I found myself committing to do two segments, one on The Commercial Review and one on the automotive pioneer Elwood Haynes, who was my great uncle.
Gathering the raw material wasn’t too hard.
Tim Rivers of the Elwood Haynes Museum in Kokomo had given me digitized files of a whole bunch of historic photos, and I was able to add to those. I also shot some video of the 1910 Haynes automobile on display at the Community Resource Center home of the Jay County Chamber of Commerce.
For the newspaper, it was a matter of having some old photos scanned in, shooting some video in the newsroom and the pressroom, and making some jpeg files of newspaper front pages.
But along with the raw material there were to be interviews.
The theory is that the producers at WIPB-TV will be able to edit comments made in interviews into some sort of narration to go with the still photos and amateur video to tell a story.
At least, that’s the theory. We won’t know until March how it turns out.
So it came to pass on Saturday, that I was the one in the hot seat, being interviewed as the cameras rolled.
I reported at the appointed time, dropped off my log sheets that explained the materials I’d put together on a couple of thumb drives. Then I had a “pre-interview” with a nice guy from the TV station. He asked questions, took some notes and tried to build sort of a skeletal framework for the interview itself.
Then it was on to the show. A corner of Goodrich Hall at Arts Place had been set aside for the occasion, so that the beautiful ceramic mural would show behind the interviewees as a backdrop.
Two cameras were running. I had a wire running up under my sweater to a lavalier microphone clipped to my shirt. I had to say my name and spell my name and explain who the heck I was.
Then the nice guy from the station prompted me with questions about the stories I wanted to tell.
Was it award-winning television? I doubt it. Was it painless? Absolutely.
And, actually, it was kind of fun.