Tonight, on Broadcast Gladiators...

Investigative reporters rarely engender sympathy, but you have to feel sorry for XETV’s John Matte - who suffered a televised beat-down that has to be viewed repeatedly to be fully absorbed. Matte and his photog were following up on a fraud report when the wife of the man they were investigating showed up with accented threats and a volatile bottle of water. What followed is an interlude worthy of an SNL sketch, but the laughter ends abruptly when hubby shows up. Accused con-man Sam Suleiman didn't bring any H20 but he did pack his can of whup-ass. With a sucker punch and an awkward grapple, Suleiman commits wanton on-camera assault, only to be hemmed in by a beefy bystander. From there the footage grows ever more surreal, with good wife Rosa berating the lens while her esteemed husband rolls around in the grass with two other grown men. If it weren't so pathetically stupid, it'd be kinda funny.

But I swear, I'm not laughing. No one deserves to be physically abused, even guys with wireless microphones and good hair. In this case, the reporter-turned punching bag is also an attorney. Methinks he'll fare okay in a court of law. But the resulting footage has sparked quite the debate in newsrooms and message boards. When to 'film' and when to help? The first thing news managers will tell you to do if you're assaulted is to keep rolling. That way there's irrefutable evidence of just what when down before the authorities arrive. It's wise enough advice, but I still think I'd have a hard time stepping back for a wide shot if my partner of the day were suddenly being pummelled. (Well, there was that one guy I wouldn't mind seeing take a punch. Or three.) Hey, I'm no gladiator, but I am a Southern man who grew up with brothers. Staying out of the fray ain't exactly in my DNA.

Luckily, the kind of stories I tend to cover don't feature alot of fisticuffs. Let's just say you won't find too many enraged combatants down at band camp. Until the triangle players show up, that is. Those guys are vicious!

Jonesing for a Manifesto

This Just In: A befuddled Lenslinger has reportedly taken himself hostage in his upstairs lair with an ample supply of Guatamalan coffee, a few tattered notebooks and his beloved Achtung Baby CD. Analysts believe the photog-blogger is staging a desperate attempt to write something worthy. Details of his progress are sketchy, but alarmed neighbors have reported seeing an overly furry figure in wrinkled cabanawear striking Elvis-like Kung Fu poses in front of his second story window. A SWAT team has yet to be called, but Reactionary News 6 has obtained copies of three abandoned diatribes - all fished out of the Pittman family dumpster by our crack squad of I-Team hairspray vultures...

Steve Irwin is dead and no one's happy about it. That includes me; my kids love The Crocodile Hunter and explaining his sudden demise was a lousy was to start the week. My oldest says she wants to be a zoological vet. She may change her mind but I credit the exuberant Australian with kick-starting her interest in the field. I'll miss his Uber-Ossie schtick, his too-tight khaki shorts and most of all the way his proclivity for wrestling wild animals made my friends at the N.C. Zoo go absolutely batshit. As for that video of his underwater death, let's hope it never surfaces. Otherwise the photog (and the ghoul)in me will demand I watch it. Just being honest.

Jury selection has begun in the Rhode Island nightclub tragedy known as the Great White Fire. There are enough victims and survivors of this blaze to fuel a thousand posts, but as always, I think of the shooter. When WPRI photog Brian Butler saw the band's pyrotechnics first ignite the foam covered walls, he wisely retreated, kept his camera focused and reportedly urged others to get out as well. Three minutes later the club was an inferno. Some pundits faulted him for not doing more, but that's an easy call from a cushy confines of an air-conditined news-set. Having cut my own teeth shooting local bands in crowded nightclubs, I wonder if I would have had the state of mind to seek immediate egress - let alone keep rolling.

For better or worse, Katie Couric is now the face of the CBS Evening News. Let's see... overpayed morning mouthpiece lands coveted anchor gig at damaged tiffany network while jealous colleagues recoil and a nation of viewers swoon. Nope, couldn't care less. It's my belief that the protracted brouhaha will eventually be judged as much to do about nothing - as the cult of personality is one the wane now that advanced technology makes it so easy to customize personal news intake. Besides, who still watches evening newscasts anyway? Wait - don't answer that. I gotta show my face in the newsroom tomorrow and pretend I'm enthused about filling ninety more seconds of dead air. Can't we just show an old Bullwinkle episode instead?

Stay tuned to Reactionary News 6 for extensive team smotherage of this unfolding story. Just don't get too excited, this guy hasn't written anything worth a damn since early 2005...

Backstage with Bo Bice

Ran into Bo Bice again today. Okay, so I slithered past a gaggle of hyperventilating female fans outside The N Club in Greensboro for a few closing minutes of the singer’s late afternoon sound check. While Bo and his band ripped through a few Southern Rawk standards, I shot the breeze with a few colleagues - telling them what little I knew about the former American Idol finalist. ‘He’s a righteous dude’, I told them, explaining that, much like Bucky Covington, Bice seems to truly appreciate the die-hard fans that a certain juggernaut of a show left in his care. A few minutes later the laidback longhair proved me right, emerging from a back room to lay some love on Chaz Erwin - a certified Bo Bice enthusiast who just happens to live life in a wheelchair. Pretty standard protocol all right, but the Alabama native works the room with such genuine warmth that I always come away an admirer - even if I can’t name any of his songs.

For a glimpse of said encounter, complete with an ugly shirt cameo by yours truly, click here. But brace yourself - it’s a really ugly shirt.

All Hail Olaf!

Perhaps its my affinity for bearded cameramen, but I for one, would like to buy Olaf Wiig a hefty vessel of his favorite beverage. From all accounts, the New Zealand freelance photog was the proverbial pillar of strength during the thirteen days he and Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni were held hostage in Gaza. From diffusing his captors’ rancor to protecting his partner to telling his wife not to worry during that prison video, Wiig proved to be sharp, resourceful and more than a little dashing. Not bad for a guy who looks at life through a tube. (Then again, those who shoulder a lens on hostile soil are known for their verve - otherwise they’d be crankin’ out fluff statewide with the rest of us adolescents.) Now that Olaf and Steve are free and rested, they’re making the rounds at FNC, where they’re detailing their nearly two weeks of discomfort and uncertainty at the hands of unpredictable gunmen. Most telling of Wiig’s influence is the following exchange between the two seasoned colleagues during the first few hours of their captivity.

S. CENTANNI: If we tried to sit up against the concrete wall to ease the tension on the shoulder and wrists, the plastic ties digging into your skin, they would let you sit there for a couple minutes and then push you back down again, face down on the cement floor.

WIIG: I tried to sort of lighten the situation by...

S. CENTANNI: Oh! Yes.

WIIG: ... by suggesting to Steve that this was a really good excuse not to do any more live shots that evening.

S. CENTANNI: No more live shots today.

WIIG: Yes, got off of the rest of our rotation.

...Bound and blindfolded on a dank warehouse floor while jumpy Jihadists brandish automatic weapons, Olaf giddily laments missing a round of meaningless live shots. Spoken like a true photog!

Walker, Tombstone Ranger

Occasionally I get to park my camera in front of someone who deserves far more than the fleeting acclaim its lens delivers. Take Nat P. Walker. For eleven years he's served as chief groundskeeper for Thomasville's City Cemetery, slowly transforming the overgrown stone-garden into a few simple acres of gothic beauty. It keeps him occupied. Lately he's been worried about the crumbling state of the bronze plaques that decorate the graves of various war veterans. Not one to rest on his golf cart, ole Nat rang up his pal Congressman Howard "Mad Dog" Coble. Together they wrangled a mid-morning photo-op that brought out a gaggle of government wonks and one terminally distracted TV cameraman. When I asked Walker for a little pre-podium sound, he obliged - answering my questions with a polite, leathery growl. But his gruff exterior couldn't disguise an oddball wit. Wrapping up the interview, I asked the 61 year old if there was anything else he could think of. Ever so slowly, the crusty caretaker looked me dead in the eye and with a voice that would out-gravel Sam Elliot's asked, "You bring a covered-dish?"

Next time, I'll be sure to...

A Question of Weaponry

In the daily camera scrum, no one issue sparks a firefight quicker than the VJ debate. You know the scenario: All-purpose journalists with writer’s eyes, magic laptops and shrinky-dink lenses are threatening to take the ‘crew’ out of news crew. Only a couple of stations have bought into the idea so far, most under the tutelage of one Michael Rosenblum. To hear him tell it, this amalgamation of skills is an embittered industry’s only hope. His detractors cite his methods as the unforgivable dumbing-down of electronic newsgathering. Your humble lenslinger is somewhere in the middle, fiercely proud of his hard-earned solo skills, but still not sure he’d want to sit through an entire newscast of his own b-block masterpieces. Besides, at my shop, we produce far more varied fare: breathless live remotes from smoldering wreckage and political melees, esoteric think-pieces wrapped around invisible ideas and continuing team smotherage of the daily uproar. Chances are, your favorite station does too.

For now, anyway. Who knows what station group will be the next to buy into the VJ model, slash their staff of drama queens and A/V geeks until only the most dedicated or sloppy remain to forge a whole new newsgathering idiom. There’ll be plenty of help. Ever newer firms are clamoring to turn anyone with a pulse into a newfangled VJ, one who, ‘with a DV camera and laptop, can effectively do the work of three people without compromising story quality.’ Best of all it only takes a five day workshop to master these newly-forged paradigms of visual storytelling, lightning fast sessions that transform any old Joe into an instant auteur. And you wonder why that photog with the decade old tripod-scars is offended…

You’d think we TV news photogs would all be in favor of smaller, lighter cameras. You’d be wrong. Most who hold the heavy glass prefer it that way; trading a little lower back pain for a focal tube worth grappling with. I’m fortunate enough to sling an 18 pound (or so) Sony XDCam, a rocket launcher of a video-camera. Shoulder-mounted on a classic chassis, the ergonomically taut optical disc recorder boasts more drop-down menus than most third-world defense systems. With it, I can incite a riot at ground level Mardi Gras or silently lay crosshairs on the crowd from some far off balcony tripod’s perch. It is a precision instrument that takes only seconds to power-up but a lifetime to master. It’s this question of weaponry that, for me, renders the VJ model mute. Quite simply, I don’t wanna take a toy into battle. I can dig the solo groove, squint ad peck at the magic laptops, even buy into about a third of the hokey proclamations of the discipline’s loopiest prophet. But dude, hands off my glass.

The Sky is Crying

When Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a 1990 helicopter crash, he was at the height of his powers. Newly sober and focused like never before, the Blues guitarist with the unbelievable tone was excited about the new music he’d never live to make. He was still in his stage-clothes when he passed, the echoes of a sold-out Alpine Valley crowd still ringing in his ears as the chopper crashed into a fog-enshrouded embankment. ‘Guitar Hurricane’ was suddenly no more. Across the planet, his fans clutched their CD’s, tapes and vinyl over the hole in their soul and marveled at the little Texan who could throw himself into a trance while the Gods played his Stratocaster. For a guy who yearned to be a grizzled old Blues Cat since he first learned to work the frets as a young teenager, dying in his early prime seemed crushingly unfair.

It didn’t take long for that brief but brilliant career to transcend into legend. Unreleased tracks were parsed out in album form, books were written, a comprehensive box set was assembled and a handful of live performances offered on DVD. To the serious fan like myself though, it was never enough. Unsatisfied by the trickle of posthumous merchandise made of available, many of us did something that would bring a smile to Stevie’s ugly mug: we studied his Masters. Albert King, Lonnie Mack, Buddy Guy and quite a few others moved many a new unit thanks to Stevie, who never missed an opportunity to cite his influences. Yet we fans still yearned for more of the man himself.

Which is why the advent of YouTube is so damn cool. Not just a repository for backyard fight scenes and other viral videos, the rapidly extrapolating site has become an archivist’s fantasy. Now with the click of a mouse, I can access more performances, interviews and homemade documentaries about the late great Stevie Ray Vaughan than I ever knew existed. Unimpressed? Fine, pick your favorite artist and do a YouTube search. But pack a lunch first - if you’re like me you’ll be there awhile, bolt-upright and agog at the breadth of your obsession. As for the legality of these on-line releases, much has yet to be worked out. Many will say their very availability robs my musical hero’s estate of profits earned. Perhaps, but something tells me the old rules of media distribution are as outdated as all those mid-80’s 'Guitar Gods' Stevie rendered so irrelevant when he still toured the Earth.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s an acoustic version of ‘Testify’ that deserves my undivided attention.