Gripes of a Lifer

Hey, I'm all for steady employment but to be honest, I've been at El Ocho for about a decade longer than I planned to. How that happened is a long story, one involving children, crabgrass and a wife's steady paycheck. But who am I kidding? I love it here! And as long as The Suits let me cover the news sans meat-stick, I'll gladly hang out (until I hit the lottery/get a book deal/witness The Rapture.) Still, even we lifers gotta wonder if we've stuck around too long. Thus, I give you...

THE TOP 10 SIGNS YOU'VE WORKED IN YOUR CURRENT MARKET TOO LONG...

10) You know the competition's live trucks by their in-house nicknames.

9) You remember taking that manager lady out on her first story - when she was an intern.

8) You've got six generations of logowear hanging in your closet and you don't wear any of it.

7) By the time you learn the new reporter's name, it's time for his going away party.

6) You give directions based on decade old crime scenes.

5) Former colleagues keep up with their old station by following your blog.

4) You remember when this place had a travel budget.

3) All the local sheriffs know your name, but they still forget it whenever the hot new weather chick shows up on scene.

2) You've seen scores of coworkers come and go - and you actually miss a few of them!

AND THE NUMBER ONE SIGN YOU'VE WORKED IN YOUR CURRENT MARKET TOO LONG...

1) You write about it on the internet.

Ever have one of those shoots...

...where you just wanted to hand out paper bags for everyone to breathe into?

...where you were haunted by vivid flashbacks of your less than illustrious commercial production career?

...where you really began to regret all that fun you had skipping class in high school?

...where you had to physically fight the urge to set the camera down, run run the room, climb the nearest utility pole and start bellowing nonsensical Doors lyrics?

...where you found yourself wondering if it was finally time to launch that pro bowling career?

...where you decided it would be more fun to be tazed in the crotch by an over-caffeinated SWAT cop than continue this little production?

...where you realized it's these kind of exasperating assignments that will finally convince you to start writing that book?

...where you yearned for the monastic existence, comparative glamor and hip wardrobe of a lighthouse keeper?

...where for the first time since the Reagan Administration, you actually prayed for spot news?

Well, I have - and judging from the above photographic evidence - I'm not as good as hiding my thoughts about it as I used to be.

One in Every Herd...

I cannot begin to explain why this young fawn decided to move in with a herd of neighborhood cows, can't fathom why someone would actually call a TV station to report it, can't come up with a good reason why I pounded a half gallon of Guatemala's finest coffee on my way out there. All I can really tell you is that the Ginns family of Stokes County are indeed lovely people, that it somehow pleased the News Gods for me to be there and that a forty-three year old television news photographer can shoot a pretty passable story all while doing a wicked 'Pee-Pee Dance'. See if you can spot the moment where my sclera turned yella...

Crashing ConvergeSouth

Once upon a time I led a session or two at ConvergeSouth, the semi-annual web-head summit that takes place right here in Greensboro. This year, I just showed up and started rolling. It was a lack of tactics on my part; having meant to attend but never bothering to register, I promptly forgot about the damn thing until Friday morning. That's when a series of newsworthy events failed to happen and I found myself surrounded by producers annoyed that I was still in the building and blocking their view of The View. It was then I glanced at my Twitter page and saw news of the steepening think tank at North Carolina A&T State University. Knowing I’d have to somehow squeeze ninety seconds of TV out of a room full of computer geeks, I headed over anyway. After all, these are my people!

Or were they?

Once my eyes adjusted to the cavernous classroom, I found myself staring at a bunch of strangers. They weren't staring back, of course. Rather, their collective gaze was fixated on their laptops, their Blackberries, their iPads. Hey, this IS a tech conference! Giving the speaker one's undivided attention is Two Thousand and Late, anyway. Besides, what fun is it to hang with the techno-crowd if you can't electronically notify your disciples that you are in fact, hanging with the techno-crowd. Don't answer that. Just know that as I scanned the crowd, I did spot a few familiar faces. Polinsky, Wharton, Ainbinder, Hwang... Fine folks all the way around, but barely a fraction of the insatiable communicators that founded this gathering five years ago. 'What happened to the old gang?' I wondered as I trudged up the stairs. Did politics ruin the fun? Did infighting trump future-speak?

Is the McRib really back to stay this time?

I never found out, for no sooner did I grow bored with making smart people nervous than the keynote speaker captured my attention. More on him in a minute, but can I just tell you potent a tool even the crappiest TV camera can be? For example, an auditorium full of forward-thinking early adopters with heavy disdain for mainstream media and a raging gadget habit will STILL run their fingers through their hair whenever a fancycam is pointed their way. Anarchists, assassins, ar-teests ... no matter the mindset it's just human nature to sit up a little straighter whenever some camera-schlub cranks up the ole vanity-enhancer. If that weren't enough, nine out of ten audience members were absorbed in their Twitter feeds. Cradling my own mobile device (once called a "phone"), I knew that with a single hashtag I could plant my thoughts on the screens of the very folk who were clocking me out of the corners of their collective eye.

'Is it just me - or is the cameraman gassy?', I wanted to tweet, but sadly lacked the grapes to hit SEND.

Besides, it was too late for my tomfoolery - for by now the keynote speaker was really hitting his stride. Looking down at the program, I saw his name: Brent D. Payne, SEO Director. 'Cool', I thought - not entirely sure what SEO stood for. Turns out, it's Search Engine Optimization, a concept a needy narrator type like myself can really get behind. So could everyone else in the auditorium apparently, for folks actually started glancing up from their screens every now and then, before muttering to themselves and changing their status updates for the twelfth time in so many minutes. Not that Brent D. Payne minded. Dude was used to it. Listening to him run through surefire ways to increase your web-traffic, it occurred to me he'd been semi-ignored by classier crowds that this. Then I started tweeting tips myself, knowing that if I followed my new hero's every rule, I'd be overseeing a media empire to rival Howard Stern's, instead of sitting here nursing a cocktail and talking to you...

Not that I don't value our special times. Really, it's isn't you. It's me. I need some time to work on ME...

And We LIKED IT That Way!

You there, jabbering into the laptop. Nice suit. Hey, did I ever tell you how we used to put together TV in the field? It’s crazy now that I think about it, but at the time it seemed totally dope. First off, we ran around with these colossal cameras on one shoulder and a Samsonite full of VCR parts hanging off the other... VCR, Video Cassette Recorder. You know, those rickety brick like devices your parents used to play reruns of Barney on. You know, Barney - big purple dinosaur, first openly gay children’s show host. Anyway, we’d have to bring a bunch of these like, huge tapes with us, ‘cause once you filled them up, there they were. I mean, you could dub the stuff over to another tape but it took forever and the only draggin‘ and droppin‘ going on were the ashes falling off all those cigarettes they used to make us smoke.

Oh, and get this: All the microphones had cords hanging off them. No joke, they were physically attached to the recording deck. On shoots we’d be tethered to each other, me with the camera and deck, you with the big-ass microphone. On walk-downs and such, camera crews would get all tangled. It wasn’t at all uncommon to spend ten minutes afterward untying yourself from the other schlub sportin’ forty feet of cable. If you weren’t careful, you could even trip a civilian or worse yet, a cop! I once took a bailiff out at the knees during a gang-bang, thought I was gonna spend the weekend in the pokey. And then there were the lights. We used to attach these big ole landing strip lamps on-top of our cameras, then strap on a battery belt just to power them. A battery belt! A belt made of batteries! I shit you not.

Of course it really wasn’t all that bad, since we only had, what, two or three newscasts a day. Hell, if a ballgame or show went long, the studio crew would tape it in advance and cue it up for later. Can you imagine? News in a can? Of course back then stations still signed off at night. Yeah, around midnight they’d just throw up some horse blanket and chill ‘til dawn. No infomercials, no dirty 800 number spots, just a still image and - get this - tone. TONE! they’d blast that right intro people’s homes like it was some kind of air raid. I’m tellin’ ya, it was whack! Good thing was we rarely ever went live. Stations only had one live truck a piece back then, not a fleet like now. Yeah, back then if you were going live, there had to be a plane crash or a submarine hunt or some kind of cop car convention, Not like now when any old city council meeting attracts a satellite farm out back, I remember when we first got our - Hmm? What’s that? You’re trying to track audio?

Yeah, I’ll shut up.