Who cares about the election in Egypt or the Eurozone crisis? Today's big story was a guy jumping out of a helicopter at 2,400 feet without a parachute. He wore his wing suit and landed on cardboard boxes.
Today at work I was watching one of the editor's put together a story about the people who recently died climbing Mount Everest. He used to live in Texas in the same area I did, and he went to one of the high schools by me and knew where my high school was. Also, one of the other interns I met yesterday went to UT Austin and she also knew the area. Small world!!!
It was interesting to see how the story was put together. The editor looked through the archives and found the video of Mount Everest they already had and wrote it down and sent that off to the corespondent so she knew what to write to. Someone from the New York office had done an interview with a guy from National Geographic and transcribed it and sent the text of it to London. The corespondent, who was actually in London today, then wrote the story. The producer looked it over and made a few changes, and then the corespondent tracked it (recorded the voice). As soon as that was done she was out the door on her next story (which was actually that Wing Man one). The editor then put together all the video and sound. They actually did it slightly out of order because they had to send the script back to New York to get the approval from them. The story was originally supposed to air on the morning show (which is noon London time), but then it got held until tomorrow so it wasn't as urgent and the people in the New York office didn't look it over until much later in the day.
This is in direct contrast to the newsroom I'm used to working in, where you pitch your own story idea, get your own video, do your own interviews, write your own story and then edit your own story. In that sense the finished package isn't really a collaboration but rather something you can take ownership of. Here, it's much, much, much more of a team effort. It was also really interesting because part of it was worked on in New York, so they had to send this story across thousands of miles to put it all together.
I don't know if the story will ever actually make it on air. The guy who was editing it had to leave at 4, and by that time they had just gotten a revised script back from New York. Apparently there were a lot of changes, except the correspondent who voiced it was already gone for the day and wouldn't be back until tomorrow.
But while all this was going on, Wing Man was going to jump out of the helicopter. Sky News was broadcasting the story but they said they weren't going to do it live (how considerate of them), but thankfully I was in a newsroom so we just watched the live feed through their servers.
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