I’m beginning to wonder if every technical director at FOX 13 and WMC are on vacation this week.
Just about every night this week I’ve seen anchors come back from packaged pieces only to have their microphones not turned back up. It’s happened over and over again at 10 on WMC, FOX’s technical problems seem to be at their worst in the early shows.
This morning’s FOX news mid-day had several technical problems from mic’s not being turned up to stories that were apparently not ready when the anchor started introducing them.
You know the tape isn’t ready when an anchor begins something like “butterflies are beginning to float across the mid-south…we’ll have more on those butterflies in just a moment, but first in business news….”
I doubt the producer wanted the anchor to tease a butterfly story coming up later…the tape wasn’t ready. It’s not the anchor’s fault, the producer either waited too late to tell them “skip the butterfly story” or the producer wasn’t told the tape isn’t ready until it was too late to stop the anchor from reading the copy.
Technical problems happen. But when they happen as frequently as I’ve seen this week, you’ve got to wonder if the regular T.D. is on vacation, or they’re breaking in a new director.