Thank goodness for Wikipedia. It’s an essential resource when your TV station has made a commitment to devote much of its newscast to an unplanned, live event — yet your news team has run out of things to say about it. This was the corner into which an otherwise-respectable Atlanta TV station backed itself when, [...]
Archive for February, 2011
17 Feb
Slow news day
You probably already know this, but this point is worth restating. TV reporters aren’t necessarily welcomed wherever they go. Here’s an example from an encounter I had last month at the state capitol. It’s complete with a video re-enactment, embedded at the bottom of this post. First, let’s set the scene. I’m producing a story [...]
14 Feb
Photo withheld
This post has been updated and corrected to reflect the fact that WSB-TV also blurred the photo of Antonio Cardenas-Rico. I covered the stabbing deaths of two children Thursday, and immediately faced one of those journalistic conundrums. Perplexing as that was, it was compounded by the fact that my competitors handled it completely differently than [...]
5 Feb
No sale
Suspicious Package had a hiccup two weekends ago when I produced a piece that was long on earnest effort, but woefully short on humor. It was a solid concept, poorly executed: Give used-car salesman treatment to a TV live truck. Though some of my coworkers have tried to console me by suggesting the piece was [...]
2 Feb
Twenty Inch Nails
As a young man, I had a journalistic mean streak. When I produced stories that had touches of the absurd, I sometimes beat those absurd qualities with a sledgehammer. The results were occasionally entertaining (oh– plus informative. Can’t forget that). But the meanness ate away at my sense of fairness. It was disrespectful. It could [...]
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