Archives for August 2005

I’ve been watching hours of coverage of Hurricane Katrina and I’ve seen dozens of reporters acting foolish on live or taped tv in 100 mph winds. Did you see the one with Brian Andrews from WWL? He was the one running out into the high winds as his photog rolled. He crouched behind a mailbox like he was on the frontlines in Iraq. And then, just after he signed off with CNN, the wind knocked him on his face.

I’ve heard people and tv critics criticize these reporters as showboating. I’ve heard anchors say “once somebody gets their head cut off on live tv by a piece of debris, these types of liveshots will stop.”

You know what? They’re wrong. The cold fact is there will always be a reporter willing and ready to go into the storm and there will always be a public wanting to watch. If anything is going to change, it’s going to get only more exciting.

Those kids on jackass (MTV show) would love to jump on a private plane to jump in front of an approaching storm. They’d be jumping from the rooftops into the storm surge or skateboarding atop the Superdome.

And the sad truth is people would watch. And if people would watch, some network may try to get even more daring with it’s people.

The best interview I’ve seen so far was by the WKRG reporter who found a man who lost his wife in the storm. It’s been on CNN and FOX tonight. The storm victim cried as he described not being able to hold onto his wife and her telling him to take care of the kids. The reporter, I think it was Jennifer Mayerle, wiped away her own tears.

The national news folks who’ve descended on the Gulf Coast need a quick lesson in pronunciation. I don’t know if I’ve heard any of them (besides TWC folks) pronounce Biloxi correctly.

Bil-OHK-si is the way I’ve heard them say it over and over again.

I watched a bit of coverage from WDSU in New Orleans this morning but their signal clogged up probably due to bandwith issues. WKRG still has the best coverage I’ve seen.

Also, I wonder how many of these reporters who are standing against the strong winds figure they’ll be famous for their coverage. Maybe 20 years ago, but there must be 200 reporters on the coast all doing the same thing. These live shots will be on resume tapes sent coast to coast in the next few weeks.

So far I don’t know if any of the Memphis stations sent a reporter to the coast.

I know they have little choice right now, but can you imagine a worse place to be than the Superdome tonight? I know it’s better than being hit by a 25 foot storm surge, but that has to be a pretty miserable place.

I’ve been watching WKRN’s coverage along with CNN, FOX, MSNBC and The Weather Channel tonight. I’ve never really watched much of Chris Matthews but my impression tonight is that he’s trying really hard to impress viewers with his wisdom. Geraldo does it too. So I chose to watch some of Larry King’s coverage and I have to admit, he’s a darned good interviewer.

Not only were his questions of the New Orleans mayor very good, but they were short. “When’s it going to hit?”, “Do you have all of your officers working tonight?”, “Is the Superdome safe?”, “What about the hotels?”.

Ted Koppel does this too. Listening to Larry King tonight reminded me of listening to George Lapides interviewing someone. George has a keen understanding of who he’s talking to and asks great questions. But what I’ve always liked about a George Lapides interview is that he asks short questions that usually draw lengthy and informative responses.

Too many times, reporters (and I’m usually guilty of this) set up questions by stating facts to let the interviewee know we’re pretty smart. We explain our question before we ask it. Good interviewers just ask the darned question. More often than not they get the best answers.

This one looks like the big one. The experts on TWC say Katrina will be at least as bad as Camille. I remember my mom talking about Camille when I was a kid and seeing some of the trees that were lost hundreds of miles from the gulf coast.

I’m watching WKRG’s live coverage via the internet at www.wkrg.com and once again they are doing an excellent job of getting information out about this storm. This is a good example of when a local television news department is essential to the community. WKRG does a terrific job.

I’ll likely be up most of the night watching this coverage and will probably be headed down to the coast myself once things clear up and church groups begin helping people.

For those without a subscription to Shoptalk:

TV air jobs no breeze to get or keep

I’ll be going to Nashville Monday for a look at WKRN’s video journalist project. For those following the progress on Neil Orne’s blog or on Todd Dunn’s blog things seem to be going well at the ABC affiliate. The station recently announced it was purchasing 14 new news vehicles to equip all of it’s one-man crews a way to cover the news each day. I’ll be very interested to see how the vj experiment is going.

We went to the DeSoto Central/Southaven high school game tonight. Few people gave Central much of a chance after moving up from 1A to 4A and playing 5A Southaven in the first game of the year.

There had been talk that things could get ugly between these two teams since many of the players have been squaring off on the field since peewee league. The first half was scoreless. A great defensive stand on the goal line ended with a Southaven fumble on 4th down.

Southaven scored first and then Central scored a touchdown and kicked the extra point to take a 7-6 lead into the last 5 minutes of the game. The Jaguars took control of the ball with 2 minutes left and tried to run out the clock, but a tailback got loose and ran it in from about 45 yards away to make it 14-6. The Jags held on to beat cross-town rival Southaven in one of the best high school games I’ve ever seen.

There were no incidents on the field and after the game every player lined up to shake hands.

It was a fun night at the stadium. I’m glad it’s football time again.

Raycom, owners of WMC-TV5 in Memphis and WAFF-48 in Huntsville has picked up 15 tv stations owned by the Liberty Corporation. (press release link).

Peggy mentioned the merge today and says it might help whenever there’s news in Jonesboro that Memphis wants to cover. But I think the biggest winner in all of this may be WAFF.

Liberty owned WSFA-TV12 in Montgomery, Alabama, a dominant #1 NBC affiliate for as long as anyone can remember. Montgomery being the state capitol of Alabama, there will be many instances of when this partnership will prove priceless for the Channel 48 in Huntsville.

If I were the beneficiary of having a partnership with a station several hours away in the state capitol, I’d have some sort of agreement with the sister station to provide state capitol stories from the dedicated WSFA reporter covering state business.

Send them a microphone flag and make them a regular part of the newscast. I’d even call them “Channel 48’s state capitol reporter”. I’d put their bio on the website, invite them to town for meetings with the local delegation. I’d have a promo on the air next week that says “WAFF is the ONLY STATION IN THE VALLEY with a reporter covering state government.”

I’d do everything I could to make them appear to be full-time employees of WAFF.

It wouldn’t be like that cheesy way WREG has it’s anchors tossing to CBS network reporters either. If you’ve seen them you know what I mean: “Newschannel 3’s Julie Chen has the story” or “Newschannel 3’s Bob Schieffer has details.”. I never understood why they thought viewers would buy the idea that WREG had actually hired Bob Schieffer or Richard Schlesinger to report for a Memphis tv station. I didn’t do it one day and got an earful from an executive producer instructing me to introduce them as our own.

This merge will be good for many of the Raycom stations, but WAFF can really take advantage of having a sister station in the state capitol.

I was unpacking a box and ran across this photo today. This was from several years ago when Ray Romano and Kevin James came to Tunica for a show. I had interviewed Ray via satellite a couple of weeks earlier and asked him about his love of golf. I told him if he wanted to play when he was in town to let me know and I’d arrange a tee-time. To my surprise he told me to book it.

So one Saturday morning, Ray Romano, Kevin James of “King of Queens”, the pr guy from the casino, and I all played golf. This was the day the weekend reporter called in sick and I was called in. I had to leave the golf course with these guys and go to work. But we got in a couple of holes and I actually won $2 from Kevin.