• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Tech Meltdown on CBS Evening News tonight

They should have a half-hour's worth of "wire copy" on the set, on paper for Katie to read every night. That way, even if they have a control room meltdown and need to move her to The Early Show set with one camera and one mic, they can still put together a full newscast - albeit one where you get really tired of watching Katie talk.

Even in radio news, I use cuts from our network providers, but have plenty of wire copy for a five minute newscast in the event that automation fails on me. Therefore I will only sound stupid for five or ten seconds. If the cuts don't run, I still have a bit of blurb in front of me.

Note to CBS: be more prepared.

EDIT: did I hear someone in the control room saying "what're we gonna do?" after Katie signed off?
 
That's the first thing I thought of when I read about this... no wire copy or fill stories at hand?

When I first got into radio, the boss was old school... you were required to have the hourly AP national summary in the control room just in case the network "went dead" and you also were to have an instrumental album cued up and ready to go when running anything live like a ball game in case there was a problem with the phone line.
Too bad Katie never worked for him.
 
I saw this and was astounded that CBS didn't have some kind of bail-out plan in place.

First, why did they just keep showing the studio? Do they not have access to a shot of New York.. or Washington.. some kind of towercam shot? Seriously, I've seen NBC show Times Square as a time-filler. How can CBS not have something similar ready to go at a moment's notice?

Second, how can CBS not have some kind of redundant system in place for video - particularly for a packaged piece that runs 2 minutes or so?

I dare say that most local news operations in the country would have handled this better than CBS News did.
This disaster just shows what a total mess CBS News is these days.
 
They probably didn't plan this but think of all the publicity this caused. Ya never know.....
 
tested said:
I saw this and was astounded that CBS didn't have some kind of bail-out plan in place.

First, why did they just keep showing the studio? Do they not have access to a shot of New York.. or Washington.. some kind of towercam shot? Seriously, I've seen NBC show Times Square as a time-filler. How can CBS not have something similar ready to go at a moment's notice?

Second, how can CBS not have some kind of redundant system in place for video - particularly for a packaged piece that runs 2 minutes or so?

I dare say that most local news operations in the country would have handled this better than CBS News did.
This disaster just shows what a total mess CBS News is these days.
Click to expand...

Actually, no they do not have access to a shot of New York. A friend of mine works for WCBS, he says he can't believe it but CBS has no "tower-cams" or "building cams" in NYC. WCBS uses a live shot of the city on all of their weathercasts, but it comes from one of the Metro-Traffic cameras. Someone in master control has to call Metro to get a shot whenever they want to use it, takes several minutes. So CBS network and WCBS don't have quick, easy access to a generic live city shot.
 
They could at least mount a camera at the Rock on 56th street...good grief. ::)
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom