Breaking News Thursday

Thursday is, without a doubt, breaking news day.  First balloon boy and now the Fort Hood Massacre.  Producing and watching the show yesterday felt like a whirlwind.  After 2 pm, new details kept coming in and that meant stories had to be updated or rewritten altogether.  There were so many times I thought I was losing it, but my teammates and the anchors and WSEs really came through to bring the show together.

When I watched the show in the studio, there were quite a few visual errors- wrong video, missing scripts, etc.  My stomach was turning as we ran through what we could and then went through the show with even more issues.  When I left the studio I was sweating and I felt ill.  That show was not at all my caliber of work, I kept thinking.  I can do better than that.

I let it bother me all night, but when I woke up this morning and started reading through the new information about the disaster, I had an epiphany of sorts.  Videos may have rolled at the wrong time and the show may not have looked perfect, but it sounded pretty darn good.  I think we brought our viewers a lot of content.  We gave them the Fort Hood story from all different angles.  Our viewers heard reaction from Obama, a Muslim group and a post-traumatic stress disorder expert in addition to a detailed account of the story and a suspect profile.  Not only that, but we broke into our newscast TWICE with breaking updates saying the killer was still alive and another soldier had died.

Stepping away from Fort Hood we gave the USC community information about a great new free shuttle to L.A. Live and had a live shot and a live tease.  Both of which looked amazing!

I guess the conclusion I’ve come to after almost 24 hours is that breaking news isn’t perfect.  Our job as a news organization is, if nothing else, to keep our viewers informed.  We did that yesterday. 

Yesterday, 12 people died at Fort Hood.  A missing script shouldn’t be the end of my world.