Can You Handle The Pressure?

On Saturday Feb 10th, I Shadowed an Elvis (instant replay) Operator at the Utah Jazz game at the Energy Solutions arena (used to be the delta center) I have always wanted to watch from behind the scenes, and I finally got my chance. It was an eye-opening experience. My head was spinning with all of the information I was trying to absorb. It was quite a trip. I don't think I will ever be able to watch a Jazz came the same way ever again. It was amazing to watch the Director, Travis Henderson. He was cool under fire and has such passion for the game. Even with everything that was going on, he still had time to say "Wow!" or "Oh Man!" when Memo hit a big shot or someone had a hard foul. If I can be half that good in my career, I will be happy. It was kind of depressing to come back to my control room with my 3 interns and see just how much I still have to learn. I hope to go back soon and learn more about Directing live television.

Sensationalsim At It's Finest

Seeing as it's been almost a year since I started this blog, I thought I might try this whole thing again. I guess it takes a state/national tragedy to spur me into writing more. What will prolly be known as the "Trolley Square Shootings" happened last night, and Brandi and I had just sat down to watch "Heroes". What happened has awful, but working in television I immediately began following the networks to see how each of the 4 were framing the story.It was interesting to see who of the big 4 stations decided to preempt their programming. Fox Did not Preempt "24" but everyone else broke into their shows to give us live shots of the news orgy that was Trolley square that night. Gosh it was insane. KSL alone had 4 crews there, and yet they only devoted their block A of the 10:oo news to the story. I think KUTV devoted almost their Entire newscast to it. I thought KTVX was particularly sensationalistic in their interviewing the witnesses. What bothered me the most was that none of the media outlets had a clue about what was going on, and virtually all of them ran wild with speculation. "I hate to speculate but.." "I certainly have no evidence to back this up, but..." It was ridiculous. In spite of the horror of what happened, I still had to laugh when Sandra Yi (Reporter for KSL) Walked right into the shot of some KUTV videographer, who did his best to get her out of the shot. I wonder how many reporters ended up inadvertently in another networks shot in the chaos. Anyway, It's A fine line between giving a story the coverage it deserves and crossing that line into sensationalism, and I think some of the networks crossed that line that night.