>My First Year in TV News, Part V
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I got a lot of the same questions when I was a television news anchor.
“Does someone do your hair every morning?”
“Does someone do your makeup?”
“Do you have a clothing allowance?”
My answer always surprised them: No. No, no and no.
My news station in Columbia, South Carolina was far from glamorous. It was roach infested and decorated in faux wood paneling from the 70s. The carpets were stained. The equipment was outdated. I was responsible for buying my own clothes (on an embarrassingly meager salary, I might add) and doing my own hair and makeup in the fluorescent bulb-lit ladies room.
The station’s owner was a notorious tightwad, and it showed. Although we got approval to produce an hour-long morning newscast, we were denied an engineer during the time we were on the air. That meant that if something broke, whether it was the copy machine (for scripts), the tape machine (for video), the Teleprompter, or the soundboard, then that was just the way it went.
Since the equipment was old and outdated, it broke all the time, and so there were many mornings when I had only my scripts to read from because the teleprompter was broken, or I had only the Teleprompter (which was even worse, since an intern was responsible for operating it) because the copier was jammed. There was at least one memorable morning when I had neither scripts nor Teleprompter, and had to sit and just… talk for the first eight minutes of the show until some poor sap finally managed to unjam the copy machine. It felt like an eternity, and it was yet another one of those moments when I mentally hunkered down and told myself that if I could get through that, I could get through anything my career could possibly require of me, because that was about as bad as it could get.
When the equipment wasn’t malfunctioning, the employees were. Bad hours and bad pay made the morning show’s behind-the-scenes jobs, shall we say, less than desirable. The positions were filled mostly with students from a nearby state university, who were trying to catch a break. They would file in at four every morning, morose and half-asleep and often still hung over from the night before.
Training was next to non-existent, and technical errors in the show abounded. I remember one morning when the kid responsible for rolling tapes got every single tape out of order. I read a story about an overnight murder and video of a house fire popped up. I read a story about a broccoli recall and video of the president popped up. On and on and on it went.
At first, I apologized like any anchor would, and continued reading. But after the third time, I had to acknowledge what was going on. “Hmm,” I said, after getting to the house fire story and seeing video of a puppy and a kitten napping together. “Wrong video again. Hey Joe, are you awake back there?” I could hear nervous laughter from the control room.
I moved on to the next story, about the president’s video to Japan, and then watched my desk monitor as video rolled showing a man being put into a police car. “Oh no,” I said, pausing. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is not our president, and that is not Japan. In fact, it looks like… Orangeburg.”
The laughter from the control room got louder. By the end of the “A-block,” I’d read a story, pause for the (wrong) video to roll, and everyone in the studio would roar with laughter.
Other times, my beloved Teleprompter operator, an enthusiastic yet ADD-ridden college student, would lose her focus while she was operating the thing. As I read the words on the screen, they’d get slower and slower and, sometimes, stop altogether. And so I’d read more annnnnd morrrrrre slowwwwwly until she heard what I was doing and jumped back on it, racing the words up to the screen so that I had to talkreallyfasttokeepupwithher.
Good times.
There are so many stories from that time that make me laugh out loud just thinking about them, stories about the poor sound operator who for some reason always got his buttons confused whenever we tried to put someone on the air who had called in on a phone.
“Our own Steven Sludge is headed to the area hit hardest by the tornado,” I’d tell viewers, “he joins us by phone to tell us what he knows. Steven?”
“Everybody dance now!”
Instead of Steven, C&C Music Factory burst over the airways, cued up for an aerobics instructor we were interviewing in the C-block. Yep. Wrong button. That happened all the time.
I would have been embarrassed by all the mistakes, but the truth was that I still felt incredibly lucky. I was a year out of college and there I was, a morning news anchor and managing editor in a capital city. It didn’t get much better than that.
And so I tried to do the best I could with what we had. My little crew and I put our heads together and made impromptu sets out of unused corners of the studio. We set up a table, a tablecloth and a few hotplates, and invited various chefs in town to come on the show and cook their favorite recipe. We invited dance troupes to perform a number in front of the weatherman’s screen. We featured visiting stand-up comedians and any celebrity that was in town for any reason.
I interviewed Cindy McCain and Nicholas Sparks and Alan Keyes. I held struggling cats that were up for adoption and I almost got my face burned off when one chef’s dish exploded on the set. We ended many newscasts with dance music, and would pan the studio cameras around to show our camera operators, all college students, dancing, often wearing crazy hats. We tried to keep it… random. And I have to say, in that department, we definitely succeeded.
We became like a little family, with one of the crew even deep frying a turkey each year for Thanksgiving and the rest of us bringing in dishes for a seven a-m feast. We had crap to work with, but we were all in it together and the ratings were so abysmal, it didn’t really matter what we did anyway.
I’d never want to relive that first year, but I’m glad I went through it. It was a trial by fire and I’m a better person today because of it.
This post originally appeared on Parents.com.
