DeBlog: What Happens When I Forget To Write A Story
The past two days I've filled in for Mike Binkley on the morning news. The show has 2 1/2 hours of news, and hundreds of scripts. What happens when I forget to write one of them?
The anchors write the headline teases that you see at 4:30, 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, and 6:30 a.m. Two overnight producers write the rest of the newscast. It forces the anchors to get familiar with the stories - so we know what's going on.
Angela and Mike usually get to work around 3:30 a.m., so there's not much time to get ready for the show.
This morning, I forgot to write a headline for the 5:30 open. When the script came up in the prompter, there was nothing there.
Here's what the script looked like in my pile:
And here's what it looked like on air, as I was looking at the video on the monitor, trying to guess whether I was teasing the story on cutting out coffee purchases or the story on Starbuck's 40th birthday:
