Race against the clock

The rush of a breaking news situation is something that's hard to describe.

Our new sports reporter last night asked me what it's like, and I didn't really have an answer.

"You just go," I told him. "You go into autopilot mode and you figure things out as you go along. This is what you're trained for."

An active SWAT scene was unfolding in our coverage area on Labor Day. I was filling in as the evening anchor/producer and had one reporter working nightside, as per usual. She was doing a simple labor day story on workers for the evening shows when the newsroom phone rang around 7:00.

The newsroom was cleared out besides the two of us and our digital producer who was getting ready to leave for the day.

I'm not sure if it's been luck or instinct, but I feel like I've developed a knack for feeling when a story is going to develop into something worth covering. It's happened with fires, accidents, and feel-good stories.

I had a feeling about this phone call.

A man new to the area called the newsroom and said he saw a large police presence in his neighborhood and wanted to know if we knew anything. I told the reporter to get her keys as he was on the phone as we tried to figure out where she would go.

She got near the scene and didn't see police. I told her to drive to the next street up, and behold, there was a line of police cars and a SWAT truck.

I sent someone from the control room to the scene with the live equipment in anticipation of going live for the 10:00 show. Our chief meteorologist went with him and brought back her memory card from the scene so we could get video to use with her live shot.

As she gathered information and communicated it back to me, I updated our online story. Within a couple hours, it had 10,000 views. We average between 30-40 thousand per day. On non-holidays. Monday ended as our second-highest page count online in the last month.

The entire process was invigorating. The fast-paced and fluidity of the situation is why I got into news.

While we were scrambling for a web story and what would develop into just over the first minute of the 10 and 11 newscasts, I still had to produce and prepare for the remaining portions of the shows.

It was my first time really dealing with a rapid situation like this since I started at WDTV. I've had breaking news situations develop while I was producing shows before, but nothing at that magnitude or that close to the start of the shows.

Amist all the chaos, I realized something important in our industry. We were first, we were fast, and we were right. We reported what we could confirm and what we knew; we left out the speculation and the rumors, even if they turned out to be true. It's journalism 101. Gather, authenticate, organize, report. There's no time to think about the process. The process thinks for you, once you know how to manage it and fight through the noise.

We beat every local media outlet to the story, including our competing television station. I later learned that their news director was not happy at all that we had the story so quickly and had the information that we did when we did.

A college professor told of the horrors of days when you walk into the newsroom the day after getting beat on a major story. We were also told of the joy and adrenaline rush that comes with winning that battle. That time, we had the upper hand. We have a lot in the last few months, and our numbers are starting to reflect that fact.

Facebook commenters command their own post, but they'll get this sidebar after last night. Some of them said on our posts that the story shouldn't be updated as it unfolded. We also went one hour between updates as police negotiated with the armed suspect, to which other commenters complained of our lack of updates. Meanwhile, we were the only media outlet covering the situation.

Police switched frequencies on their radios so local scanners couldn't hear their communication, as is standard for these situations. Without that initial phone call tip, we would have been later to the scene. Eventually, the dispatchers alerted police units that several media outlets were calling for information. We weren't because we were there.

The industry isn't what it used to be - people don't wait for news to end before they report it anymore, and that can sometimes be dangerous. It's the job of journalists - as was ours Monday night - to only report the facts that we know ethically and efficiently.

Sure, being first is great.

Being first and being right is even better.

Especially when you anger the competition.

Underappreciated silence

Silence is hard to come by in a city.

Perhaps the most peaceful nights I experienced during four years living in Downtown Pittsburgh came in the early morning hours of a calm winter snow storm.

I loved those nights. I loved just walking down the street and actually hearing my own thoughts.

I vividly remember experiencing my surroundings during my first trip home freshman year. I got out of the car in the early evening - rush hour in the city - and was stunned by the peace that draped a suburban neighborhood. I took that peace for granted for the first 18 years of my life.

Silence is underappreciated, but only when its doses are infrequent.

"Sometimes, quiet is violent."

The lyrics from a Twenty One Pilots song ring true during moments of extended silence. One can get trapped inside their mind, alone with nothing but consuming and crushing thoughts and the feeling of loneliness and insecurity.

Finding silence in life can prove difficult, but peaceful moments are invaluable.

Our world is consumed by noise, especially in the media.

The news cycle never ends. Journalism is a 24/7 job, even though 40 hours is all that a company will pay for in one week.

I try to take advantage of every off day and downtime moment I have to detox from the news and the world. I never thought I would enjoy off days.

Mine come on Thursdays and Fridays; those are my weekends.

I live within walking distance of a really quiet park. I enjoy spending my off days either shooting around at the infrequently used basketball courts or just sitting on a park bench and listening to the sounds of silence around me: crickets, playful birds, the occasional child's laughter from the opposite end of the neighborhood. There's a stream that runs beside the path that leads from my apartment complex to the park. Once the birds realize I don't pose a threat, they zip around each other, bouncing between the trees and bathing in the stream. Our neighborhood also has, by my count, about a dozen photogenic deer that roam around the area.

You don't get that in the city.

Instead, you get sirens, screams, and screeching breaks or horns from traffic.

You don't get silence in the newsroom. If you do, something's wrong.

The police scanners are always buzzing. The television has to always be on, tuned into either our competitor or cable news to follow developments of a national breaking story. The phone constantly rings, rarely though is answering it beneficial to our newsroom. People call asking for scores of games, listings for their favorite show, complaints about our newscast, questions about their signal strength, or just to have someone to talk to on a lonely night. Sometimes, a story tip or another station is on the other end. Cell phones are dinging and vibrating with constant push notifications and text messages. Everyone's computer makes the same notification noise when an email gets sent to the newsroom.

That's just the beginning.

I love the noise and rush of the newsroom and the city environment.

Escaping that sometimes is healthy.

Sometimes, after a long night, when all of my neighbors are already asleep and I'm just getting back to my apartment, I'll stand outside and lean against the large tree outside my door and just listen to the sounds of the deep night and look at the stars. Those deep breaths are usually the most satisfying.

We don't appreciate silecne if we're surrounded by noise. Conversely, we don't appreciate silecne if that's all we experience.

One of the most important things we can do is strike that balance and learn to appreciate peace amidst chaos.

Highs and Lows

This job will take you down every emotional road possible on any given day without hesitation or warning. 

The mental battle that television news sends you on daily is not for the faint of heart. I think that's the biggest challenge that I've had to learn to work with during my first few months working in the industry. 

They tell you how difficult it is in textbooks, they warn you that you'll have to hold your emotions in until you get home, and they stress that the daily challenges don't get easier. If anything, you learn how to work with around those mental barriers. It doesn't become 100 percent real until you're completely immersed in the business.

There are days when I go home and can't stop smiling because of how well a story turned out or from a positive compliment in the newsroom about my work. There are other days when I go home beating myself up over simple mistakes that feel much larger in the moment. 

Oftentimes, it's a combination of the two, with a million other feelings mixed in my brain blender.

"You're only good as your next game," a former boss in the sports industry told me repeatedly. It doesn't matter if I think my story turned out well and if I feel as if I made a legitimate impact because of my work. It also doesn't matter if I stumbled over a word or had a typo in a story. The highs and lows of a normal day are irrelevant when the sun rises the next morning. 

I remind myself of that every day, but I can't seem to get the negatives through my head.

The mistakes and shortcomings feel monumental in the moment; they're often not too meaningful. Hindsight doesn't often offer a cure to the feeling that I let my team around me down because of an error. 

I beat myself up over the little things; I'm my biggest critic. There's little time to sulk in negativity when an objective needs completed. 

I'm well aware that I have a job to do and people are counting on me to effectively and accurately complete that job. When I remind myself of that, I'm able to fight past the negativity in my head after doing something only I really noticed and felt. 

Along with the mental highs and lows of my performance on the job comes the actual job itself. 

I have had more days than I can count already that have been mental roller coasters and then some. I started one day at the scene of a drowning death and ended it at a gym dedication ceremony. One day last week, I covered a massive construction project coming to I-79, a grant received by a local folklife center, and helped break a disturbing story about a woman who sexually assaulted a 2-month-old family member. 

Another day recently, I covered a Marion County Commission meeting that involved two stories regarding "Non-profit Day" and the possibility of a former Gateway Clipper passenger boat coming to a local city. My third story of the day involved a tractor-trailer that went off the road and plowed through a tattoo studio. I showed up to the scene of that crash minutes after talking to someone about going on a boat for a wedding, only to interview people who were cleaning up their destroyed livelihoods. Oh. Then I went to the courthouse to get a criminal complaint regarding two people charged with child neglect after children were found in a dirty and rat-infested home.

That was one day.

Some are easier and lighter than others, but the heavy ones have really taught me how to flip my emotional switches in an instant. I've done that for years at the anchor desk - transitioning from sad to happy stories - but it's another thing to do it out in the field.

I love the adrenaline rush that comes with working in the news business, but the emotional highs and lows drain people out of this industry quickly. What you just read was only scratching the surface of the mental battle faced every day in television news. I hope to touch on others when the time is right.

With that being said, I love where I'm at right now professionally. My station has given me the opportunity to grow in ways that other stations wouldn't at this stage in my life. My co-workers are phenomenal human beings and all watch out for each other consistently. It's been a nice transition. I'm glad this is where I ended up at the start of my career.

Everything happens for a reason. I trust that those reasons will continue revealing themselves through my daily professional and personal highs and lows.

UPDATE

Things happen for a reason, eh? Shortly after I closed out of writing, for some reason, I went to YouTube. I'm trying to go home now after a long day at work. I can't remember for the life of me why I went to YouTube.

With one click, I came across an interview with my first favorite baseball player, Jack Wilson.

He talks about making errors as a shortstop in baseball and the importance of not keeping the mental images of mistakes linger in the mind. I'd say it was fairly topical and relevant after the night I had that triggered this post.

Give it a watch below.

I'm back after searching for something I didn't need

I've thought about jumping back into writing some columns recently but had no idea how to approach something like this without structure.

When I was a weekly sports columnist for The Globe, I had a certain set of rules and stipulations. There was a structure. I knew what I had to do every week and executed exactly 100 times over three and a half years.

The Croup's Corner column was an up and down ride throughout my college career, but it was a large part of who I was for that period of time.

My deadlines were Sunday nights and my topic was Point Park Athletics.

The guidelines were simple, but the fact that those guidelines existed helped push me along from week to week. I knew when I had to finish and I knew what I had to accomplish, the only thing I had to worry about was exactly how I would execute.

I'm picking up Croup's Corner again, though in a far different capacity.

I want to get back to writing somewhat consistently for a purpose. I sometimes write four stories every day at my job, but it's not the same.

When I wrote my column, I got in a zone, let my mind take over, and let 800 words flow from a keyboard to Google Docs. Some columns were more in-depth, some had more commentary, and some had more anecdotes. There was no template, but it happened every week and there was a general subject.

I don't have that now, but I've been searching for some sort of structure on which to base the new Croup's Corner.

But I don't need a structure.

I just need a platform. Luckily, the internet exists.

I'm not going to follow a set of strict rules. There isn't going to be one specific topic I focus on when I write. I'm not sure what this will develop into yet, but I want it to be consistent. I want to share stories from my days, thoughts about my work, and the occasional commentary on the world.

I already have a few topics in mind that I want to cover. I’m really excited to jump back into consistent writing in a capacity that’s different from my work life.

So, welcome back to Croup’s Corner! Come and go from this column as you please.