Adapting to Changes

It seems that in addition to writing about directing a newscast, I'm also writing about other positions that I work in.

In my last blog, I had mentioned that I was working with the remotes at 5pm.

One of the remotes involved Katie Couric telling viewers what was coming up on the CBS Evening News.

In coordinating this remote, it requires our control room to be on the phone with the CBS control room. They usually call us, but in today's case, I called them because we were only two minutes out to Katie.

It turns out the CBS producers were busy changing their rundown for the Evening News. Toni, the producer in New York was actually glad that I had called since things in New York were changing rapidly.

There really wasn't enough time to get the new information to our anchors, so we had to float or move Katie's live shot with us.

I informed our 5pm producer of the need to move Katie's live shot and he did so without a hitch. During the break, I gave our producer the new story information and we went to Katie right out of the break.

At 6pm, we almost had to move Phyllis Armstrong's live shot...in fact, we did.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, she was in Ocean City covering the tragedy with the dead bodies found there.

She had not fed in her story at the top of the newscast and she was the second event in our newscast. This meant the control room had to ready to either go to Phyllis or go to the next event after Phyllis.

Our 6pm producer went ahead and floated Phyllis' live shot, but luckily we received her story in time and we were actually able to go to her in her proper slot in the rundown.

Being adaptable in a live newscast situation is one of the foremost abilities that a control room crew has to possess. In our case, we have some of the best people in the business to handle the late breaking changes!