The Irene Diaries: Friday Afternoon

Wanna make those camera crews contract? Just add water. That's what happened at Atlantic Beach on Friday, as the outermost rain bands of Hurricane Irene began lashing at the shore. What had been a loose knit confederation of lights and lenses strewn across the Sheraton parking lot was now a clot of photogs and reporters huddling under the roof of the pier-side bar. Sure, it got a little crowded, but rubbing rain-suits with the competition beats still beats setting up a karaoke booth inside a car wash. That's kind of what it feels like to shoot video on the edges of an approaching hurricane. Though to be fair, I've never set up a karaoke booth, in or outside of a car wash.

What I have done is point a TV camera at everything under the cloud cover and for my lack of money, few things are as satisfactory to target as a fishing pier under duress. Yes, what had been our stage just hours earlier was now safe to use only as a backdrop. And what a backdrop! Every time one of those ten feet seas crashed into it, the old pier groaned, swayed and threatened to collapse into the surf. This of course made for a fabulous measuring stick and Sheeka and I spent the better part of both newscasts expecting it to crumble and fall. But even if that waterlogged wooden walkway exploded into a million splintery pieces, not all the camera crews present would have caught it.

Not with all those angry birds flying about. Throw in some words with friends and you got a couple of reasons why grizzled journalists in head-to-toe rain gear were stealing glances away from nature's fury to check their Twitter feed. That includes me! In fact, the biggest difference to modern day storm coverage is by far the wonderful handheld devices everyone seems to be staring at. Whereas you used to feel kind of isolated waiting on a storm everyone else has run from, now it's just another chat-fest. As an insatiable communicator, I love it, but I can't help but wonder when we'll have the first hurricane death caused by electronic distraction. Oooh! That would make for a cool status update! 

'Scuse me, won't you...

The Irene Diaries: Friday Morning

"The news crew awoke before dawn...they put their boots on." Actually, we went with flip-flops. That hussy rainmaker known as Irene was still was doing her make-up off shore, leaving us the better part of a day to pretend to be tourists. But tourists rarely rise before four. They don't rig the business end of a fishing pier in wire and lights in hopes they'll lure in viewers. It's exactly what we did. Taking a stance behind my sticks, I traded gazes with reporter Sheeka Strickland as distant co-workers chortled in out earbuds. Across the parking lot, Chris Weaver hunched over some buttons in our television transmission truck and tuned in the bird.

Bird. That's tee-veese for satellite. Without them, we couldn't beam our signal back to the Greater Piedmont Googolplex. But it wasn't just our homeland we were about to slather in storm warning. No, we were gonna hook up every step-sister station down the line with breathless remotes on the coming or Irene. It sounds tawdry but it's not. Once Sheeka wrapped up our local report, she and I stood down while Weaver dialed up another affiliate. Like magic, new voices poured from the tiny speakers wedged in our ears. Soon a voice would address us directly, tell her we were about to go on air with Susie and Chet, Brock and Sasha, Bert and Ernie. Sheeka blinked away the introductions, until the booming sound of an out of town anchor began mangling every fact they could find.

"Hurricane Irene is barreling toward the South Carolina coast, Streeka Shickland is on the Outer Banks there and joins us from Atlantic City." This went on for hours as Sheeka's image bounced from Phoenix to Florida to Connecticut and back again. At some point I lost track, if not consciousness, of the places we visited while standing on that pier. All I knew is that the bigger the market we beamed into, the cheesier the game-show voice in my headset sounded. Four hours later, we were just about done, which was a good thing since our immediate surroundings had sprung to life. Cops, surfers, carpenters and reprobates milled about the place, each one marveling at the darkening skies and newly erected spotlights. That's when the industrial-strength raindrops began to fall.

It would not stop raining for twenty eight more hours...

The Irene Diaries: Thursday

A pox on me for dropping off like that, but I’ve been a little busy. A certain homicidal cyclone has blasted my glass and zapped my synapses for the better part of five days. It roared ashore South of Cape Lookout - low, slow and overexposed. I was quite nearby at the time, passed out in a sand-infested bed on the fifth floor of the Atlantic Beach Sheraton. I sleep deeply. Thus I heard nothing when the tempest struck: the blithering wind, the airborne lumber, the off-kilter car alarms tripped by the passing killer. Can you blame me? I was two days into a bender of Gatorade, Granola and gear. That’s what it takes to create the flavor of these truly signature whirlwinds. Television News didn’t ordain the hurricane. It did, however, pay for The Reception - until the soaking wet storm reporter was as big a cliche as the best man giving drunken shout-outs over the banquet hall P.A.; But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

We were almost to the coast when dirty weather set in. Sloppy raindrops came in at every angle, slathering our two vehicle convoy in pre-Irene precipitation. It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was enough to put reporter Sheeka Strickland, photojournalist Chris Weaver and yours truly in a storm chasing mood. Good thing, as that was our chosen mission. Actually, it was more like storm-waiting. With Hurricane Irene slowly barreling toward us, all we had to do was set up our TV trucks at the ocean’s edge and wait for conditions to get Biblical. Okay, so we needed to do more than wait. The desk expected a torrent of storm reports from the coast, starting with the very next newscast. That was just a few hours away, which is why Weave and I pulled over at the first shot-worthy thing we saw: the sunset. Tropical systems have a way of bringing out the best (and worst) in the horizon and we openly indulged in dusk before pushing on to the hotel.

The hotel: an aged Sheraton devoid of any tourists but far from empty. One look at the parking lot told us that. Satellite trucks littered the parking lot, the local ones wrapped in color-coordinated promises, the ones from the network bland and clandestine. Everywhere you looked, swarthy men and pretty women roamed from between vehicles, dragging cable, setting up cameras, shooting each other friendly birds. It’s the very milieu I came to bathe in, an ad-hoc gathering of journeymen and the occasional ingenue. Though I knew many of them, there wasn’t much time to socialize. There’d be plenty of that later. For now we had to establish our signal, plant Sheeka at ocean’s edge and send her image to a million plus living rooms. So we strung our fiber-optic cable from the truck to the battered pier that would serve as our stage. By ten o clock we were firmly ensconced and the first of our breathless reports began. By the time the first live shot was finished, we all felt a little better but our satisfaction was tempered by the fact that many, many more would follow beginning at five o clock the very next morning.

So we crawled up into our respective rooms and enjoyed the last bit of air-conditioning we’d feel in several days...

Five Floors Above Irene

Many stories from covering Hurricane Irene to come, but for now a quick video from Atlantic Beach, North Carolina...

The Hulk and the Hurricane

It's not every day you tell a grown man you loved him as Thunder Lips, but that's exactly what I said to Hulk Hogan when I ran into him at work on Wednesday. He told me was I was dating myself. I said that was okay around here. He half chuckled before ambling down the hall - gingerly, like a man who's taken a folding chair to the face. I was in suitable awe, but I couldn't linger too long on this deflated superhero. There was a bigger name on the other line. IRENE. Seems this salty wench is intent on crashing our Carolina shores and if that's going to happen I simply have to be there. Why? Hard to say. Voluntary deprivation is normally not my bag, but the pageantry attached to these marquee winds draws me in like a punch-drunk barfly. Too bad escorting a harlot onshore is such thoroughly miserable business, with little to no reward. In the end, there are only bragging rights, the ability to name-drop the latest storm at the very next keg party; it's the TV news equivalent of getting a new tattoo. All I know is for me, the only thing more unpleasant than chasing a hurricane is watching someone else do it. Thus, I'm hustling to the coast with electronics in tow and safety in mind. Friends are joining me. Dirty weather awaits. I'll try and keep the blog updated but things get hinky when trashcans take flight. So check my Twitter feed or Facebook. Get with.  Know that I'll be checking in... Courage!

Off the Handle

I have seen the FUTURE of news gathering! At least I caught a glimpse of it before it buzzed that burning house. First though, a disclaimer: Here at Viewfinder BLUES, we pride ourselves on remaining calm in the face of emerging technology. Too often, practitioners of our craft set aside better judgment in the rush to be perceived as early adopters. No sooner does a new tool or technique emerge than a certain type of news shooter declares his (or her) fanaticism, until every story the produce features a tilted swish-pan, extensive wide-angle lens use or every overwrought auteur's favorite device: the infamous dip to black. (Guilty! Guilty!! Guilty!!!) Thus, the founding faculty of the Lenslinger Institute vows never to go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs when a sober endorsement will do. Having said that...

Sweet Lincoln's Mullet, THIS is the coolest thing to hit the news scene since the introduction of the wireless microphone cut workplace injuries in half! Officially, it's known First-Person-View or FPV. It's the latest craze among the RC Aviation crowd and no doubt has it's roots in the military. Basically, it's (one of those wonderful) GoPro camera strapped to a flying platform. But it's no mindless drone. Instead, an earthbound operator watches a real time feed through special goggles, enabling said joystick jockey to jam his flying eye into the very bunghole of calamity, all while feeding instant Hi-Def video back to its base and beyond. The possibilities of such a toy-like news gathering tool are endless! Okay, so one would last about five seconds in even a category 2 Hurricane and they probably wouldn't harvest much footage at that County Commissioner meeting, but imagine what you could do at a road-choking traffic accident or a spread-out ostrich farm or even some highly predictable controlled burn situation.

That's where the intelligent beings known as the Roswell Flight Test Crew broke out their tiny quadcopters and flew them through the plume of an abandoned apartment complex - a set of structures thoughtfully set ablaze by the Longview, California Fire Department. The results are staggering - even withOUT the pyrotechnics and driving metal soundtrack. The Roswell developers say it's still in the prototype stage, but whatever they fly it over next, it's sure to turn industry heads - provided it doesn't make an unceremonious splash. As for me, I'll be honing my (non-existent) joystick skills and reminding Mrs. Slinger how a GoPro camera would fit quite nicely in my Christmas stocking. For now, I'd like to hear YOUR suggestions for how this truly bad-ass hovercraft can enrich local newscasts. Just speak up, would ya? I'll be out back, practicing my swish-pans.

Schmuck Alert: Bachmann's Mob

I have an aching distaste for politicians. They remind me of small market news anchors with coke problems: paranoid, grandiose, willing to gab all night with total strangers - as long as another blast of adulation was coming back their way. Perhaps I'm projecting. On second thought, no. I've stood through enough city council meetings, governor's huddles and Presidential pit stops to know the only thing more maniacal than your average incumbent is the person currently working so furiously to unseat them.Which brings me to Michelle Bachmann, aka the poor man's Sarah Palin. Lately she's been making all the right noises as she crisscrosses the country in an effort to make Barack Obama a community organizer again. That's cool! Depending on your views, she's either the GOP's latest great white hope or a headstrong wretch whose husband wants to pray Barney Frank back to lumberjack status. None of which concerns me.

What does concern me, however, is the way Michele Bachmann handles her business. In the eight weeks that she's been a Presidential candidate, her sycophants have manhandled members of the press; shoving, pushing and threatening reporters as they attempted to make her a viable choice for leader of the free world by hanging on her every heavily scripted soundbite. It's happened five times. Five times! It's flippin' systemic! Much of the roughhousing has happened in the scrum, when membes of the Fourth Estate close in on a candidate and pepper them with questions. It's an American tradition that dates back to the American Revolution  -  though I can't ever remember George Washington getting his knickers in a twist whenever some scribe wanted to fixate on his wooden teeth. Even Sarah Palin herself manages to plow though a far angrier press mob without drawing blood (and looking like a million bucks, might I add).

Don't get me wrong. Certain reporter types CAN be assholes (Don't make me draw up a list). But if you're aching to lead the planet's last superpower into the Twenty-teens, you're simply going to have to deal with it. And telling your goons to let loose with the elbows and retorts is only going to make you look bad - especially in an age where a candidate's every wet fart is tweeted, Facebooked and blogged before those late night comedians even come into the office.  That's why we've taken unprecedented steps here at the Lenslinger Institute. We're issuing our first ever STANDING Schmuck Alert on Michelle Bachmann, not because we think she has a prayer of gaining office, but because of the fatwa she has apparently declared on the working media. That Mickey Mouse shit won't get you to the White House, lady, but it WILL get you top billing every night on TMZ. Here's hoping you enjoy the view.

Schmuck!