Newsrooms are not constantly bubbling cauldrons of activity, contrary to what you may have seen in the movies and TV. Most of the time, us news types are sitting around bitching about how nothing is going on.
Then the alarms start going off.
Back in the day, when I started in a newsroom 20 years ago as a seventeen year old intern, they were actual alarms, triggered to go off when the old Associated Press wire, which was constantly spitting out reams of news stories, sent a big story. They sounded like bicycle bells, and they went off when the AP sent a bulletin — which is the highest level of importance that can be granted a story — or an alert — which is granted to everything that is not quite up there with there with ‘the president has been shot.”
Tuesday, the AP wire computers started making noise when this bulletin crossed just after one in the afternoon: WASHINGTON DC — SHAKING FELT IN CAPITOL BUILDING. CAPITOL BEING EVACUATED.
That’s how it begins. One line.
We could hear the fright in the voice of our Capitol Hill Correspondent as he opened the audio channel and said: “If anyone can hear me, I have to do. Right now. Something just happened. We were just literally shaken from our seats. We don’t know what’s going out. We’re being told to get out, right now. I have my phone.”
Thirty seconds after that, on the AP wire: PENTAGON BEING EVACUATED
At this points, we are rallying. Anchors are being diverted into the special report studio. We are going on the air. Right now. And we have to do without scripts or our DC reporters, because their safety and security is priority number one. We’re trying to make calls, but nothing is going through.
Sixty seconds after the Pentagon bulletin :
US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY: MAGNITUDE 5.8 EARTHQUAKE CENTERED NEAR MINERAL, VIRGINIA
All of us, almost in unison, yell to each other: “It’s an earthquake! Do you see that?”
Now we know what’s happening. Now we know D.C. isn’t under attack — and, approaching the anniversary of 9/11, can you blame us? Once we realize how far this thing was felt, several of us call our relatives and do interviews about what this felt like in Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. One woman gets her brother, in Connecticut. (I have actually used my own mother on my air twice, in other situations, at another network). We start making calls to emergency officials in Virginia to see if this has affected mining country. We reach out to the NYC airports, which have just closed. Knowing no one is in danger in DC, we can get them back on the air via cell phone to tell us what happened.
What’s imperative in this situation is to separate gossip from news. They are very different things. Gossip is when a network named after an animal goes on the air and announces they’ve heard the Washington Monument might be tilting. A simple call to the parks department would clear that up. It’s also okay in this situation to say: We don’t know what is happening, or why it’s happening. The Capitol and the Pentagon are being evacuated. That’s news. We have to go on with that. Why? Not sure. We’re going to find out, though, and not speculate.
From high alert, to special reports, to expanding coverage, to the president maybe missing a shot on the golf course — all in the course of 30 minutes…
..and back to all of us news types bitching about how bored we all are.
