Nov 11, 2009 1:25 PM Whenever I come into work and find the morning reporter fronting a story from the previous day, a little alert pops up in my head saying we need some NEW news today.
This morning for example, Courtney Dempsey was reporting on the Synagogue in Carmichael which was defaced with swastikas and other anti Semitic images. While it is a worthy story to cover, it happened the other day. We need fresh content for the morning.
Immediately I get into breaker mode where anything goes. I am on the hunt for a new story, preferable a breaker, anything to get Court onto a fresh story.
As I go about my morning routine, a scanner blasts out, “Units respond to a hay fire, possibly a barn threatened.” I have to find out where this is happening.
A few more call outs over the scanner reveal its burning in Farmington south east of Stockton. That’s a hike from Sacramento!
But in the back of my mind I know how this will play out. Hay fires tend to burn for a long time, sometimes for days on end. Fire crews initially respond with full force, but once they get on scene they most likely find the hay burring in an isolated area and are continent to let the blaze burn itself out. There is enough hay and fuel to keep the blaze alive for several days.
We send Court knowing it will take hours to get there, but on the assumption the fire could potentially still be lit. Bets are thrown around the newsroom whether the gamble will pay off. I, at first, was skeptical that there wouldn’t be a scene. But Brent, the News Director, was glowing with his usual optimism.
After an hour and a half from dispatching Court, she chirps me over the Nextel, “Hey Dawg, we have smoke and flames.”
I yell into Brent’s office, “You were right!” Nov 4, 2009 1:57 PM Every day the Governor's press office puts out an itinerary of the events Arnold will be attending. Today he was scheduled to be in Stockton at 10am to parade a new electric car manufacturing facility. Knowing this we send Courtney Dempsey down to Stockton all the way from Davis to cover.
Immediately I start making phone calls to set up her live shot, demonstrating the e-cars and previewing the Governors arrival. As soon as she is done with her first hit on Goodday, Court calls and tells me Arnold won’t be there until 4pm. 4pm, are you kidding me?
The man is known to be late to his own events, but a six hour delay is crazy talk. Now we have to redirect Court and have her change her angle.
Soon after the first delay from Arnold, I get an email from his press office stating he will be holding a media briefing on the infamous Water Bill that was passed early this morning at 10am.
Wow, who do we have to send? In the back of my mind we have another press conference being put on by the Office of the Inspector General regarding the Phillip Garrido (Jaycee Dugards abductor) investigation. We can’t miss this one either.
While consulting with my desk manager Kellee, she notices that both events are at the same time and in the same place! Someone messed up.
After a few phone calls it’s revealed that Arnold’s event on the Water Bill will be at 10am in room 1190 at the Capitol, and the Garrido presser in the same location at 11:30am. Great, we plan accordingly to cover both.
Everything is falling into place, until Ralph the photographer calls up informing me the Water Bill announcement has been pushed back to 11am and will be in an entirely different room within the Capitol. AND, Garrido has been postponed to 2pm.
I throw up my hands in defeat and just walk away. I will find a way to make it work after I go and bang my head into the wall.
Oct 27, 2009 10:51 AM While lying in bed this morning at 3:30 a.m., I started my usual tossing and turning. This habit comes in anticipation of a 4:30 a.m. wake up call. Suddenly I hear a faint howling rumbling up through my window and realize right away it’s no dog when my shutters flash open and crash against the wall. It’s the WIND! As fast as my shutters flew open I realize what I am in store for at work, The Wind Beat. I am struck with visions of sparking power lines dancing on the street and massive oaks crashing to the ground. I get into work, scanners are all ready blaring and Brent, my news director, says, “Find me some trees!” Right away I dispatch Nick Janes and Scott Zentner to Davis near Highway 113 and Russell Blvd. We've got a BINGO! Zentner chirps me on the Nextel saying he has a huge tree on the ground blocking traffic. “That’s fantastic,” I say, “When can we see live pictures?” He responds, “I will see what we can do, there are trees all over the place preventing us from getting a signal.” Nooooo!!!! We give him some time to trouble shoot, and an hour later, Brent and I see a great looking tree down. Luckily, the tree landed right between two parked cars without causing any damage or injury – a great looking live shot. It’s rare when we are in weather chasing mode that we catch a lucky break. Lots of times there are reports of trees down, only to find it's a branch in the road. Today we got our golden goose right off the bat. Sep 14, 2009 11:37 AM Yesterday afternoon two veteran sky divers lost their lives after their parachutes failed while performing a mid-air routine. Both divers had countless jumps under their belts and were considered veterans of the sport, but luck, it seems, caught up with them.
It’s a sad story that had the whole newsroom buzzing with opinion. Many had sympathy for the pair who died doing what they loved. Others felt sorry for the loss of life but had little pity for people making a conscious choice to jump out of a flying plane. A co-worker who had contemplated a jump themselves said, “That’s it, I am never going skydiving!”
Let’s face it, there are risks involved with everything in life, from driving in a car, to walking across the street, but obviously some acts are more risky than others. Having never had the desire to sky dive I can't tell you what the mind set is, although I can imagine it’s a rush that can become addictive.
Everyone is entitled to their own kicks, some dangerous some not. I personally love power walking! Aug 25, 2009 9:42 AM Yesterday Rocklin Police experienced a situation I had never heard of before, but have seen many times. At 3pm a Berkeley man walked out of his barricaded hotel room at the Park hotel in Rocklin after a 43 hour standoff. I have covered countless standoff situations in the past but have never heard of any of them lasting Three days. Under normal circumstances, standoffs are known to last hours on end without a lot of action, but are usually concluded promptly, either by force or by choice.
Saturday August 22nd officers received a call from Berkley Police advising a welfare check for an individual they knew to be staying at the Park hotel. When Rocklin PD roll up they learned that the man had a gun and was threatening to use it on himself. Immediately the entire floor of the hotel was evacuated and teams of officers were called out. Negotiators made contact with the man, but made no progress in getting him to surrender himself or his gun.
By this time it’s early Sunday morning, police conclude that the man inside is of no harm to anyone, but him self. They decide to back off. But you can’t just leave a disturbed man with a gun in a hotel, people lives could be in danger. Rocklin police choose to leave a few officers in front of his door just to be safe. The scene got quiet enough, police allowed people previously evacuated back into their rooms to retrieve there belongs. The hotel even remained open to the public.
Now it’s Monday, around noon. A call comes into the newsroom that there has been a standoff for the past three days. No way, that’s impossible! How could there have been a standoff for the last three days with out us knowing?
We call Rocklin Police and leave a message, and don’t get a call back until later that day. Sure enough, they confirm that a three day stand off just concluded safely. They guy finally picked up the phone and called saying he was ready to come out.
A Lieutenant for Rocklin Police told me he hadn’t seen a standoff go that long during his entire career.
I wonder if he was able to get room service?
Aug 17, 2009 1:27 PM This morning was busy. Scanners were frantic with breakers going off all the way from Modesto to Cool, and we chased them all. Yet, some of the stories we chased turned out to be a whole lot of nothing.
Around 5am I was perusing the California Highway Patrol incident page online, I spotted a potential headline. The incident read MC vs bear, I had to double take. There it was on the screen, a motorcyclist hit a bear, and of all places the CHP put the location at Sierra College Blvd up in Rocklin. What the heck is a bear doing roaming around the streets of Placer County?
Turns out the CHP made a mistake. The real location was off highway 193 in Cool, a ways east of Auburn. Cool is a deep drive from Sacramento, but a bear involved in a traffic accident doesn’t happen all the time. The bear isn’t as road prone as Bambi. So we decide to roll, knowing it would take a good hour or more to get there, hoping we would get the story and good video.
As it turns out the bear was killed and we missed the scene. By the time we got all the way up there Caltrans had removed the poor guy from the road and cleared the accident. 100 mile round trip for nada, our first strike.
As our reporter team of Dave McCain and Nick Janes began the journey back to Sacramento from Cool, my news director Brent and I hear a call out over the scanners of a fire in the PGA store within the airport terminal. Any time there is an incident happening at the airport, we take notice.
This is perfect, Dave and Nick have nothing, we will send them to the fire. I get on my Nextel two way phone and chirp them. “We got a breaker at the airport, start getting there!” Just as they pull up to the airport I call Sacramento Fire dispatch for and update, the dispatcher says, “Smell of smoke only, units called off.” Strike two.
Now the crew is heading back here to the station. We have to think of something for them to do. That’s when Crystal, who sits on the desk too, hears a vehicle into apartment complex. Sounds serious right? Initially you think of a car slamming into an apartment complex.
But in the back of our minds we have heard these kinds of call outs before. “Car into a commercial structure,” or “Vehicle into a residence,” aren’t uncommon phrases heard on the scanners. Yet the reality is nine times out of ten, the car merely bumps a building or, the car scraps a garage door. So, with great hesitation we send Dave and Nick to the apartment complex.
And with no surprise I get word it was simply a car that hit a parking cover. We got fooled again, strike three.
I joke with Nick after I give him the news, “Couldn’t catch a break today huh?”
It was just one of those days, a complete strike out. Aug 10, 2009 4:06 PM This afternoon an unfortunate few got stuck on the intense "Invertigo" roller coaster Great America. The ride is a trip. It takes you up a steep slope then lets you hang out for a bit, and then it drops you! The extreme nature of this ride is beside the point to my story. I am just a roller coaster junkie. If you have 32 people stuck on top of a roller coaster in the blazing summer heat, there are going to be some great pictures. Lucky for us our sister station KPIX, in San Francisco has a helicopter in their arsenal that was sent right away. We have a direct link KPIX so as soon as their chopper or "bird" is over the scene at Great America we have the potential in getting the signal right away. But there is one problem today, there is no one in transmission to route the signal. So, I jump into action. I have a rough idea of what goes on back there, but by no means am I a master. Sometimes we do newsroom shots in front of the control board in transmission, but if you don’t know what it looks like, picture the scene from Star Wars as Death Star workers begin the count down sequence in destroying Leah's home planet via its super laser. Those guys pushing and pulling levers with flashing lights looking like they are doing something important. Our transmission room looks similar, but is fully functional. It has numerous recording decks and multiple miniature monitors. When I got back there, I stared blankly at the equipment trying to remember what Jon, the transmission guy, explained to me before. After a minute of watching black and white static, I remember and start punching buttons. After calling KPIX I route vt121 and vtr 22 to icr7, and hit record, we are rolling! I tip my hat to Jon and the others working hard back there doing three things at once while at the same time having the desk shout request. My head would blow up if I was back there on a regular basis. Aug 5, 2009 1:12 PM Minus the cape, Bill Clinton flew into North Korea yesterday and managed to produce full pardons for two Current TV reporters. This morning Clinton, Sacramento native Laura Ling, and Euna Lee returned to California after a five-month-long ordeal in North Korea looking a bit frail, but no worse for the wear. Any time a story of this magnitude strikes the airwaves, TV channels go full out. Whether you liked it or not, early morning television stations across the county had extensive non-stop coverage. Here at KOVR/KMAX we stayed on air through commercial breaks to show the plane coming into the airport, the plane landing, the plane rolling into the hanger, and finally the reporters getting off the plane. It can seem a bit redundant. Now the phones start ringing. “Why are you showing this?” “Is there other news?” “Why do I care?” At 6 a.m., even the news director calls in making sure things are running smoothly. If she is calling before the sun is out, there is something major going down. Frantic, I try to answer phone calls while at the same time focusing on feeds and getting new information to producers. Because the flight lands in Burbank (Southern California), we don’t have any of our own crews there; but that doesn’t mean we aren’t covered. Oh no, we have plenty of content. CNN had three live feeds coming in from both the tarmac and the hanger. KCBS, a fellow CBS affiliate, had their helicopter hovering over the airport broadcasting the landing. We took “generic” live reports from both the CNN KCBS reporters. A lot was being juggled; producers took live pictures from the air and ground in a kind chaotic symphony. Back to why we covered the pardoned journalist so heavily this morning, the negotiations to bring these women back to the U.S. were beyond recovering two journalists who may or may not have broken North Korean law, the issue was extremely bigger than that. It was a foreign relations chess move. Plus, Laura Ling graduated from Del Campo High, an international story with a local connection. Coverage will be big! As the character Pappy O'Daniel from the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" said: "We ain't one-at-a-timin' here. We're MASS communicating." Aug 4, 2009 10:44 AM “Hey, Mitch I need a satellite window!!!!” This morning I had to do something I hadn’t done in a while, call CBS network in New York and book a satellite window for a crew I had out in Colfax. They were there doing a live segment for Good Day Sacramento, something about driving through a pond (it's Good Day; I don’t ask questions.) Colfax, for those who don’t know, is north of Auburn off of I-80 going towards Lake Tahoe. The terrain in Colfax is not too hospitable for our regular microwave live trucks. Wait what, a microwave truck? No we aren’t talking about mobile microwave ovens here for popping popcorn, these trucks use microwave signals to transmit audio and video. When you see news trucks out in public with tall silver masts pointing straight up in the air, those my friends are live trucks. But when a story or a live shot is in a mountainous environment like Colfax microwave trucks are obsolete. Microwave trucks shoot signals to receive towers scattered around Northern California. If there is any kind of physical obstruction between the two, from trees, power lines, buildings, mountains etc., the shot won't work. The second option is our satellite truck. This truck is fitted with a large dish that shoots a digital signal up into SPACE -- it’s the final frontier! A satellite orbiting the Earth picks up the signal and then bounces it back to our station. As long as there is not a direct object above the dish, a successful live shot is almost always guaranteed. If you ever see a reporter on the front lines of a distant fire or a Colfax resident trying to drive his truck across a pond, chances are you are watching via a satellite truck. Jul 22, 2009 1:12 PM It seems that we have been going through a green renaissance during the past few years. Al Gore has become an Inconvenient Truth, and the unattractive powerless Prius has already gone through three different models. Sitting here on the desk I have even noticed an increase in green story coverage.
While watching Good Day Sacramento this morning, I noticed Marianne doing a live shot at the Downtown Sacramento train station. It caught my attention right away. She was dwarfed by this gigantic passenger engine.
I have always had a fascination with trains -- big, powerful, engineering marvels chugging down the tracks. Unfortunately, they burned so dirty that huge plumes of black smoke became synonymous with trains. Now, Amtrak is introducing its first ever green locomotive, via Marianne. After reworking the engine, this train now produces 50% less emission than your run of the mill choo choo.
Wow, that’s pretty cool!
More and more companies are going green. Every other commercial on TV has a company explaining how they are doing their part in making the world a better place. While not very modest, these companies are moving in the right direction. It has become common practice for big businesses to go environmental.
Maybe it’s my inner hippie, but why not showcase and inform people of greener living? It certainly doesn’t hurt anyone.
I think after work I may purchase some Birkenstocks and skip on down to the recycling center.
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