Day Eight was a very interesting day, with a bunch of mixed activities. First, I realized I didn’t have any food left in the apartment but woke up very hungry. So, we decided to get a little group together and find a café. After asking for recommendations in the WhatsApp, Ash, E, Jaylen and I headed for Lemon Jelly. I got orange juice, and a Ciabatta with cheese, egg, bacon, and tomato on it. It was delicious.
After that we made our way to our first class activity for the day, which was RTE. We did several things while we were here. First, we toured the television studio and control room. The control room was very cool, with many screens for the desk, packages, and different camera angles. The control room had about 7 or 8 positions to run the newsroom, which seems pretty adequate. The audio room is separate from the rest of the control room, which is pretty standard to American newsrooms. Moving over to the actual studio, it had 7 cameras to interchange between during the program. They told us that cameras 3 and 5 are typically the busiest cameras. And something to note about these cameras is that they are all automated. Instead of having people man these cameras, someone controls them all with a remote setup, which is really cool.
The studio uses a virtual video background, and doesn’t have any sort of green screen there.
After getting the tour, we stayed and watched them broadcast the RTE 1:00 news. This was so cool to watch, as I haven’t even been to any professional studio tours in the United States. As a former member of NewsNight, this is more advanced technology than what I’m used to. It’s a lot of moving parts and still busy to the news I’m used to, but it had differences, especially in the programming. They had a lot of stories about Donald Trump, and even one involving Kim Kardashian, but most of them were Irish issues that ranged from politics, the economy, healthcare, etc. It was all very interesting. After that we did a brief tour of the radio station, which was located in the same building. They had nice equipment, and from the sounds of it is primarily used for news and talk shows.
The next segment of our RTE tour was listening to guest speakers discuss their roles with RTE. The first was Brian Downing, who currently oversees RTE’s Election coverage. He wanted to communicate how one of RTE’s primary missions is to do unbiased reporting, only acknowledging the facts, and not taking sides on any issues. He told us that RTE reporters have to specifically push back against incorrect facts, otherwise they could take responsibility for incorrect information being shared. The second lecturer was Brian O’Donovan. He currently takes on industrial, tech, and trade stories, but he used to be the Washington correspondent for RTE. He was the Washington correspondent during three of the years of President Trump’s first term, and one of the years of President Biden’s presidency. As the correspondent, he thought it was quite interesting how far leaning some of the well known United States broadcasters are, considering RTE remains a neutral broadcaster. He also thought it was a lot more difficult getting to interview United States politicians than ones in Ireland. He specifically told us that the Prime Minister of Ireland is actually quite easy to get access to in comparison. That ended our time at RTE. We had a very interesting shift later, as we would do a class on Irish dancing. It’s hard to describe all we did, so I will just say this. I wasn’t really looking forward to it, but it was more fun than I expected. It also made me sweat like a pig. So, after the dancing class was done, we went to Irish McDonald’s to grab a bite to eat and see if it was better than American McDonalds. I got a special limited time meal. A McSpicy chicken sandwich with Franks Red Hot sauce on it.
It was alright. Nothing tasted really different. It was just a standard McDonald’s experience to end off the day.