Hi Everyone,
I wanted to give you an update on how I’m doing and what’s coming up in my life. It may have been a while since we’ve last talked, or maybe not. I’ve spent the past two years at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario for Radio Broadcasting. It’s been an exhilarating program offering a lot of hands on experience in the studio and on the air. It has given me a lot of opportunities including one I’m really excited to tell you about. I’ve been working at the Corus Radio London cluster for the past year and a half mostly working at AM980. One of the exciting things I get to do there is produce and co-host “Saturday Mornings with Cheryl Weedmark.” Cheryl is a household name in London. She was a host on the A-Channel Mornings for 10 years in London. She has made the move to talk radio and this gave me an opportunity to work with her. It’s been a wonderful experience and one that will continue to grow. All of these things, including my time spent at myFM before college have prepared me for and lead to what is going to be an incredible couple of weeks ahead of me.
I’m privileged enough to be going to Vancouver for a week to be covering the Olympics. What’s become more than a sporting event will bring over 80 nations, more than 5500 athletes, and the hopes of our own country to the ice, snow, and mountains of BC. I’ve been invited by a company called VeriCorder. VeriCorder is a company out of Kelowna started by a former CBC journalist who had had enough with lugging his bulky recording kits around and wanted to develop a platform in which he didn’t need all the gear and could still get his job done quickly. Several years later came the iPhone and not much later, VeriCorder started development of their applications. They make iPhone and iPod Touch applications designed for mobile journalists and media personnel to capture, edit, and send media from the iPhone back to the newsroom. I met Gary, the CEO when he came to Fanshawe interested in integrating the software into Fanshawe’s newsroom.
Several months later, they asked me and another student from Fanshawe (I’ve attached a photo of us) if we were interested in what they were calling the MOJO Revolution Project. (MOJO is short for Mobile Journalism.) This experiment would be all inclusive, they would fly us to Vancouver, give us a place to stay, feed us, provide us with a media pass, and in return we would capture one of the world’s biggest events proving how powerful their applications are. It didn’t take much convincing to get me on board.
That’s what my next two weeks are going to be about! I’m leaving this Wednesday, February 10th and will be there for the opening ceremonies and the first week of the games. I’m incredibly excited about this once in a lifetime experience. I wanted to take this chance to thank you. You have contributed greatly to my development and success and I appreciate all you have done. If you are interested in following my journey, I’ll be capturing it all and would love to share it with you. I’ll be sharing via Twitter, Facebook and countless other mediums, but the best place to find it all is at nickwynja.ca. I would love to hear from you about how you are doing, what you’re most looking forward to at the Olympics, what events you are going to be watching, and who your favourites athletes are. Talk to you soon.
Cheers,
Nick Wynja