A hot time in the city tonight....
The other night I wrote how slow the evening was. In true news fashion, July 4th was anything but slow.
To start the day off, we had thunderstorms in the area with the possibility of tornados. Whenever a tornado warning goes out, we go on the air.
Before we actually hit air, one of the responsibilities of the director at WUSA is to make sure we have captioning. So, while on the phone with our captioning company, we're rounding up the crew, informing Master Control that we'll be going live and we have to do this literally within a minute if not sooner.
We actually did hit the air pretty quick with our coverage, but it takes a bit of time for captioning to come on line. In order to serve our hearing impaired audience, we put up a lower third graphic on the screen informing them what areas are posted in the tornado warnings. Once captioning kicks in, we can take the lower third off.
While doing all this, we still have to prepare for our broadcasts, but with the warnings, there's not much you can do to the rundown of a newscast. It's going to change by the second.
Case in point, during the 5pm broadcast, Jennifer Ryan asked Tony Pann if anymore warnings were going to be issued and just as she asked, a new tornado warning came on. This meant we had to stay with Tony longer to explain the new warning. In giving Tony extra time, that meant changes had to be made to the rundown of the newscast. Those changes basically meant stories were going to be dropped.
At any rate, during Jeff Napshin's live shot; he was in the right place at the right time as the police on the National Mall were warning people to take shelter from the thunderstorms. It made for good TV, but more importantly it put the viewer in the middle of the action as it happened. This is something you will NEVER get from the internet, from the newspaper or from the national news cable networks. Local stations excel in the live and late breaking news stories like no other medium.
That brings me to the 11pm broadcast. Nancy Yamada was on the scene of the fireworks display in Vienna, Virginia. She and her crew had exclusive video of the fireworks mishap that injured some of the crowd and the aftermath of the fireworks show that went haywire.
Nancy and her crew literally worked right up until the last second to get 9News Now viewers the latest information on the story in Vienna.
In between broadcasts, I helped out with answering phones at the assignment desk and took a call from officials in Stafford, Virginia. The area experienced a major water main break there. Hundreds of customers would have little or no water pressure for awhile. That became our second story of the 11pm broadcast.
After our broadcast was over, I then took information from Nancy Yamada and Doug Buchanan so I could post their stories on our website. Since their stories didn't run back to back and since we had a minor technical issue with Nancy's story, I had to re-edit the video for the web so it would appear seamless.
Finally, I'm writing this blog and will leave probably right around 1:30 in the morning.
As a director, you're expected to multi-task in the control room. That's a given. However, that multi-tasking doesn't stop when you leave the control room. Nowadays, you're expected to do much more in order to get not only the newscast on the air, but content on our website!
Truth be told, it's still fun for me to do! If there's one thing I've learned in this industry, it's that you have to love working in it and that hasn't changed one bit for me!
To start the day off, we had thunderstorms in the area with the possibility of tornados. Whenever a tornado warning goes out, we go on the air.
Before we actually hit air, one of the responsibilities of the director at WUSA is to make sure we have captioning. So, while on the phone with our captioning company, we're rounding up the crew, informing Master Control that we'll be going live and we have to do this literally within a minute if not sooner.
We actually did hit the air pretty quick with our coverage, but it takes a bit of time for captioning to come on line. In order to serve our hearing impaired audience, we put up a lower third graphic on the screen informing them what areas are posted in the tornado warnings. Once captioning kicks in, we can take the lower third off.
While doing all this, we still have to prepare for our broadcasts, but with the warnings, there's not much you can do to the rundown of a newscast. It's going to change by the second.
Case in point, during the 5pm broadcast, Jennifer Ryan asked Tony Pann if anymore warnings were going to be issued and just as she asked, a new tornado warning came on. This meant we had to stay with Tony longer to explain the new warning. In giving Tony extra time, that meant changes had to be made to the rundown of the newscast. Those changes basically meant stories were going to be dropped.
At any rate, during Jeff Napshin's live shot; he was in the right place at the right time as the police on the National Mall were warning people to take shelter from the thunderstorms. It made for good TV, but more importantly it put the viewer in the middle of the action as it happened. This is something you will NEVER get from the internet, from the newspaper or from the national news cable networks. Local stations excel in the live and late breaking news stories like no other medium.
That brings me to the 11pm broadcast. Nancy Yamada was on the scene of the fireworks display in Vienna, Virginia. She and her crew had exclusive video of the fireworks mishap that injured some of the crowd and the aftermath of the fireworks show that went haywire.
Nancy and her crew literally worked right up until the last second to get 9News Now viewers the latest information on the story in Vienna.
In between broadcasts, I helped out with answering phones at the assignment desk and took a call from officials in Stafford, Virginia. The area experienced a major water main break there. Hundreds of customers would have little or no water pressure for awhile. That became our second story of the 11pm broadcast.
After our broadcast was over, I then took information from Nancy Yamada and Doug Buchanan so I could post their stories on our website. Since their stories didn't run back to back and since we had a minor technical issue with Nancy's story, I had to re-edit the video for the web so it would appear seamless.
Finally, I'm writing this blog and will leave probably right around 1:30 in the morning.
As a director, you're expected to multi-task in the control room. That's a given. However, that multi-tasking doesn't stop when you leave the control room. Nowadays, you're expected to do much more in order to get not only the newscast on the air, but content on our website!
Truth be told, it's still fun for me to do! If there's one thing I've learned in this industry, it's that you have to love working in it and that hasn't changed one bit for me!
posted by Scott Rubens at
1:13 AM
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