Thursday, August 16, 2007

Scanner traffic

We work on a few dozen stories on any given day here. With all the follow-ups, day of stories and things we are trying to gather information to see if it might be newsworthy we stay busy. We constantly ask our reporters, producers, anchors, photographers and viewers to send us story ideas.

As those come in we try and fact check everything we can…some stories take more work than others and often times stories never see the light of day. Other stories you don’t have that kind of time example:

Yesterday we heard a lot of chatter on the scanners about an incident but couldn’t get more details so here we were staring at a tiny little scanner. This is information you NEVER go on the air with. While police and fire departments all have frequencies on a scanner things can happen and what someone thinks they see or hear are not necessarily fact. After more than hour of making calls and crews running all over town trying to figure out what was happening we had nothing and ‘conversation’ on the scanner was gone. The best I can put together was somebody somewhere was having a training drill.

Had we simply reported what we heard madness would have ensued. So often people get frustrated because they have a story idea and don’t understand why we don’t go on the air and say John Doe said “blah, blah, blah.” Yesterday was a great example of why we don’t rush to report anything. It is our responsibility to report all the information to the viewer.