Back in January, a Black hawk helicopter crashed on the campus of Texas A&M, this is a look at what we did and could have done better.
When word first arrived in the newsroom, a reporter was already on her way, questions immediately arose. Do we know this happened? Maybe it was just landing. Is this a prank? During the questioning, the first draft of the web story was being written.
Our assignments editor immediately got on the phone with DPS and confirmed that a Black hawk was down. Moments later we posted the web story on ABC40.com. In the following minute, the story was copied to KXXV.com. The KRHD Producer/Anchor then gave the web desk a sheet of paper with preliminary casualty numbers from the College Station Fire Chief. Web stories were subsequently updated. It quickly came to our attention that the ABC40 story needed to be cross applied to KXXV, so the KXXV story was put into draft mode and the KRHD story was cross assigned.
At this moment, the News Director ordered cut-ins to be done on both channels, and the web lost the upper hand. From this point on, information was bypassing the Desk and the Web desk, going straight to producers.
It is normally our protocol to take cellphone pictures of breaking news and send them back to the newsroom. We ran into several obstacles.
- The first reporter on the scene didn’t know how to send a picture via email on her phone.
- Reporters on the scene were instructed to send the pics to multiple places, to another phone and an email address …which is inherently a problem. During breaking news, cell circuits are often jammed. When you get a connection you should get your data out and move on. Sending to multiple places requires multiple transmissions, which we could not establish.
The first cut ins were run through the video encoder and quickly added to the website, even though they were just desk shots. The second cut ins featured phoners which were also added to the site.
After the second cut in, there was no information in the assignments file nor was any information available from producers. At the time, 3 producers were working for KXXV, 5,6 and 10 producers. KRHD had one producer, who was manning the phones. The desk continued gathering news for KXXV. Thus, any new information was not making into the flow of the newsroom. It stayed with the people on the phones until it was outlined in a script and ad libed on air.
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