For Local TV Reporters, the Murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward are Deeply Personal

My husband told me the news yesterday morning as I was making lunches for my kids.

“A reporter and photographer just got shot during on live television in Roanoke,” he said quietly.

“What?!” I sputtered. “Are they okay?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It just happened.”

It didn’t take long for the details- and the horrifying video- to emerge. Thousands of people took to social media over the ensuing hours to express their shock and outrage. But for anyone who has ever worked as a local television news reporter or photographer, yesterday’s murders hit even harder. We were all Alison Parker and Adam Ward once. Some of us still are.

And yesterday, our worst nightmare came true.

I didn’t know Alison or Adam, but they were emblematic of every young reporter and photographer in the business. Like Alison, most reporters emerge from college with a journalism degree and demo reel and began working their way from small market stations up to the larger ones– Roanoke is a typical second job city. They work long hours for next to no money, take every opportunity to fill in as an anchor or specialty reporter, and are always hustling to find the next big story, the one that just might win them an Emmy and help catapult them to a larger market.

Adam was the quintessential news photographer- strong, easygoing, and up for the daily adventure of local news. Both Alison and Adam were in relationships with co-workers, and that’s no surprise, either- In a market the size of Roanoke, most news employees are typically young, single, and working together around the clock. Romances are inevitable.

So is danger.

There is not a reporter or photographer out there who hasn’t envisioned for themselves variations of what happened to Alison and Adam yesterday morning. Anything can happen during a live shot, and it doesn’t take much time working in TV news (or watching it) to discover that troublemakers are drawn to a television camera like moths to a flame. Some of them think it’s hilarious to stand behind the reporter during a live shot and make faces or obscene gestures. Others like to stand behind the photographer instead, and try to catch the reporter off guard. And some are there to intimidate because they’re not happy with the subject matter.  Reporters have been slapped, tackled, punched and spit on while doing live shots- The problem is so pervasive that my broadcast news professor at the University of Georgia gave us a list of techniques on how to handle potential live shot threats. (“Kick ’em hard in the back of the knee if they jump in front of you,” I remember him saying, “and they’ll drop like a bag of concrete.”)

Consequently, live shots are often filled with tension, particularly when you spot a stranger headed toward you just as you’re about to go on the air. I still vividly remember a night when I did a live shot about the toll drug dealing was taking on a local neighborhood– A few seconds before I went on the air, two large young men materialized out of nowhere and stood intimidatingly close to me just off camera, glaring at me the whole time I was talking. As I shakily recited my lines, I remember literally bracing myself for whatever it was that they were about to do. I remember wondering if that was going to be the end for me. And I remember thinking that if it was, it wasn’t worth it.

The live shot wasn’t worth my life.

I had knots in my stomach all day yesterday. I barely slept last night. I agonized over Alison and Adam’s deaths and I’m positive that my anxiety was shared by thousands of television  journalists across the country. We know from where the killer stood in the video that Alison had to have seen him out of the corner of her eye as he approached her. She saw him stand too close behind her photographer, saw him raise his arm and hold it out in front of him. I don’t think she could make out the gun in his hand, but she definitely knew something very off was happening just a few feet away from her. And yet Alison was a total professional. She had to be frightened, yet she didn’t flinch, didn’t take her eyes off the woman she was interviewing, didn’t let that smile leave her face– until the gun went off.

As for Adam, all I can hope is that he never knew what hit him.

The news cycle will soon regenerate as it always does and memories of these two promising journalists will blur into those of countless other shooting victims we’ve collectively mourned over the last few weeks, months, years. But for legions of reporters and photographers out there, I doubt the horror of what happened yesterday morning will ever really go away. Some of us were just like Alison and Adam once. Some of us are just like them now.

And in big cities and small ones across the country,  live reporting will never be the same.