KCRA Babylon City Market
Hashim Yousif and Nabil ALKudsi, owners of the Babylon City Market in Sacramento.
Went out first thing on Tuesday to shoot a story about the new Babylon City Market at 1745 Watt Avenue, which opened just a few weeks ago. Sacramento has a number of Eastern and Arabic markets, but this is the first one that is specifically an Iraqi market. I had received an e-mail from the wife of one of the owners telling me about the market and it sounded like a perfect news story, and especially one that I would like to both shoot and report myself.
I went to shoot a magazine story for our once-a-month half-hour program Common Ground, which would also be edited into a shorter-form news story for later in the month.
I got there a little after ten in the morning and stayed for a few hours, interviewing the two owners and many of their customers. And it couldn’t have been better! The people were all wonderful and outgoing, terrific speakers. The market is big, clean and beautiful. And they have a deli area with absolutely delicious hot food! A terrific shoot. I left with an hour and fifteen minutes of great material.
I returned to the station a bit after one in the afternoon and reported in to the assignment desk, thanking them for giving me the time to do the story and that I got great stuff that will make for a great Common Ground piece and a good regular news story for later in the week.
“Great. Actually, we’re going to use some of it tonight.”
“Oh yeah? Great.”
“Yes, we have you down for a package in the six. You can have the rest of the day to work on it.”
“Great.”
I said, “Great” but I was thinking, “Oh, I didn’t expect that. Okay. This is a good challenge.”
Loading all of the footage took a while. Dureing that time I started pounding out my intro and a few generic lines of script that I either would use or morph into something else. Then started going through the interviews, culling for bites. The Common Ground version will be from 3 to 4 minutes long. The news story had to be shorter than a minute and a half. The biggest challenge with all of this material was in keeping it down to a short length while still telling a complete story.
This story ran in the top of the second segment of the 6 O’Clock KCRA 3 Reports on Tuesday, July 19, 2011.
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