Twenty years ago I was a News Writer at Citytv, writing for BreakfastTelevision. When the War in Rwanda began -- did I say war? I mean massacre -- we were one of the few stations to cover it. Higher-ups decided that it needed someone to work all night long in case BIG things happened overnight. As one with the least seniority, I got the assignment. When I arrived I got a hand over, told what local stories were being followed, what was hot, what was not. It was just me and the Assignment Editor in the newsroom for the next several hours. Its not that I just sat around all night; I had work to do. I ripped the news wire and filed it on the clipboards, because it was high tech system. I followed-up on local stories where info was slim during the day. I created a different news crawl every hour and coordinated with Master Control (where my decades old buddy worked) to slide it on the air. And, I recorded the various satellite feeds that came in overnight that provided us with both raw footage and wrapped reports from the 4 corners of the round world. Oh, and I had to carefully watch all the footage that came in from Rwanda in order to identify the very little that could actually be broadcast on tee vee, especially on a morning show. Day after day -- for weeks -- I saw the worst that humanity had to offer. I saw sights that no one should see. I can still close my eyes and see it, like its been burned on the inside of my eyelids. Then, one by one, people would start to trickle in for the morning shift.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 01:15:35 +0000
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