State Of Panic

While working a live shot last night for the 6pm show, I heard weather guy say, we were going to have flurries. For the norther states this is nothing new, but immediately groaned and knew stupidity was about to arrive.

Five to ten minuets later I get a text message warning us (all photographers) that we maybe called in from 2AM-10AM to shoot snow. Seriously, we were wanting to go nuts over flurries. I know we had a little flurries the other day and a couple of us got some video, but to panic this much is ridiculous. When The Wife woke up she noticed a dusting of snow, but by the time I woke, it was all gone. We freaked out for this? Well it's because I'm in North Carolina... WRONG!

I open up my iGoogle page and I noticed that WSAZ out of Huntington, WVa had breaking news! I know it sounds odd that I have a Huntington feed, but it's the only station that I can get a reasonable amount of news from Ironton. So what was the breaking news "Slick Roads Causing Problems." What, who ever heard such a thing, slick roads means I might have to be cautious while driving? That you WSAZ! I know I'm being a little cynical over this, but why is that breaking news. Breaking news is like the town of Poca is on fire or the Governor just freed all the prisoners at South Central Correctional Center not the roads are slick.

We need to stop this freaking people out over the sublime, if you want to do a story about slick roads warning people to drive slow that's fine, just don't throw out the all caps BREAKING NEWS.

Back to North Carolina, I understand people freak out over the littlest of winter time weather, but we don't have to encourage it. If we say flurries, treat it like that. Tell the morning crew to shoot a little and if it's still going on have the day siders shoot some. I'm getting to cynical for TV news.

Freaking Out

If you don't watch news or work in it let me inform you a little bit about news and weather; they love to freak out over it. No matter where I have worked if the word snow is used, you will find people running around screaming, changing schedules, whaling and gnashing of teeth. I use to work in Toledo and they would freak out, come on your in Toledo, it's cold and snow will happen. At The Network the weather guys would be live for hours on end and the news director would order pizza.

Here in Raleigh I understand that they are not use to snow, I mean the average temperature in January is around 40. Yesterday they had a slew of people running around trying to get snow video. They got some video of said snow, but all of it was gone by 9 in the morning, yet we were still running video of it in the 11. Now we have a serious threat for Saturday and I seriously believe that if Durham was attacked a la Red Dawn (WOLVERINES!!!!!) we would not be going this full out for it.

The sad thing is all the other stations are probably doing the same thing, why do we do this? People get tired of the freak outs. Back in Columbus people would laugh at the stations for going all out for rain storms. The public is tired of us telling them that the world is about to end because we are getting three inches of snow.

I'm probably cranky about this because if it does happen, I will have to work 13 days in a row. Not a happy camper about that... stupid snow