9/30/2009 4:38:09 PM
The story behind the Peas
Author: ianyee
I know all you guys wanna hear about what the Black Eyed Peas were like... Were they friendly? Was Fergie hot? Does will.i.am look fit enough to have given Perez Hilton that beating (which either way, he deserved)?
But since this is a blog, which means I can be all personal and self-indulgent, I am instead going to rant about how stressful that assignment turned out to be.
First, a disclaimer. I love my job. The fact that I get to cover events featuring celebs like the Peas gives me great satisfaction, but that doesn't mean crap don't happen in our line of work. Lotsa things can go wrong when you're a journalist with a tight deadline, and there's usually a fair bit of drama behind the story, like the story behind the story.
So here it is.
Being the responsible journalist I am (*coughs*), I went for the Black Eyed Peas press conference at Hilton KL around 3:30pm, 30 minutes early, even though from my experience, they never start on time.
Journalists waiting for the Black Eyed Peas' press conference to start.
My last minute instructions before leaving the office were to send in two stories for the following day's news - one immediately after the press conference, and another after the concert later that night. Apart from the two news stories, I also had to write a feature story for StarTwo by the following evening. Fair enough.
Then things started to go wrong. The press conference started TWO HOURS late. During the entire time I waited, I had to keep Twittering from my iPhone (check out the Tweets at twitter.com/thestar_rage), so that our followers would be the first to see pictures from the conference.
One of the pictures we Twittered live from twitter.com/thestar_rage
By the time the press conference was over, it was too late to send in a story, so I went straight through rush hour traffic to get to the Sunway Surf Beach for the concert.
Once I got there and surveyed the concert, I sent in my first story of the press conference with a bit of information about the crowd at the event.
That was when I knew I was in trouble. I send in my news stories using my iPhone, and because I Twittered for almost two hours before the press conference, I was running out of batteries! Great. I still had another news story to send in on the concert, and there’s no room for error on this, because it was pencilled in for tomorrow’s paper.
Stressed out as I was (I stress easily), I did have some fun standing right in front of the stage when the Peas did their first two numbers. But after that, I had to leave the crowd to start working on my concert story.
We had the best spot in the whole venue!
Fergilicious Fergie
I finished the story while sitting on this trampoline away from the crowd (it was a bit annoying cos some chick kept jumping around on it). It was like, "phew... now I can just send the story and enjoy the last two songs of the concert".
But somehow, my 3G connection failed! Just two hours ago, I sent the first story without a glitch, and now, with my batteries almost dead, I couldn’t get a strong enough connection to send out even a text email.
Eventually, my phone shut down, and that’s when I panicked. I decided the only thing left to do was sprint all the way to my car, which was parked a 15-minute walk away at Sunway Hotel, drive back to the office and file the story there.
I applied my long-distance walking technique, y’know, the one where you have to move your bum side-to-side; and got to the basement carpark at around midnight, at which point I started to wonder if it would be too late for me to get back to the office, because there was definitely going to be traffic.
And then I had my lightbulb moment. I saw a power socket next to the car park elevators, and remembered that I packed my phone charger! So I sat there in the basement car park, charged my phone, ignored the weird stares the throngs of people leaving the concert were giving me, and finally, emailed in my story. It was hot, it was stuffy, my legs were burning, and it wasn’t the most dignified position to be in; but boy did I feel relieved.
A couple of guys even laughed at me, straight in my face! But I guess it really was funny, so I just laughed along and told them it was an emergency. I guess I was too relieved to feel angry.
But there you have it. The news story you read about the concert might look short and simple, but it sure wasn’t smooth sailing for me to get it done. And now you know the story behind the story.
Leave a comment
1) Author: jrhogan Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:16:54 PMGlad you had a great time at the BEP concert! I totally missed this due to work.
Regards,
David
Malaysia Asia
