Oops.
Tonight, in the middle of the newscast, Melissa and I told our friendly Montana viewers that "we had breaking news." There had been an earthquake measuring nearly 4.0 on the Richter Scale "just minutes ago." We went "live" to our reporter Andrew "for the latest" on this "breaking news story." Andrew tells us the quake was felt "over a wide region of southwest Montana" and that it just occurred."
This was all fine and dandy....except that we were wrong.
Very, very wrong.
There was a quake but it was nearly 12 hours earlier. A viewer called in and said "uh, you guys have it wrong."
We felt stupid. I won't get into the details but I will say that while we were wrong, it was a legitimate mistake. We don't have a big staff and all of the initial information led us to go ahead with the "breaking news story." If we had a few more people working for us, it might have gone differently.
So tonight was fairly embarrassing. Oh and let's not forget my cell phone started to ring as I'm telling Montana viewers about this quake. We work in a small space and my cell phone could easily be heard on the air. After the show I get a message from Kathryn stating, "I just realized you're probably doing the news right now. I hope I'm not interrupting some breaking news story or something like that."
I laughed out loud.
So to summarize we lied to the viewers tonight and they were treated to a cell phone rendition of the Gilligan's Island theme. Woohoo!
Linco
2 comments:
yay! i was on the news! kind of.
so... how exactly does a mistake like that come about? where did you get your earthquake facts from?
um ... what kat said.
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