KTVU News all hell the other night when a massive audio problem glitch hit the newscast for almost half the program!
Some kind of equipment failure in Master Control. It was, fortunately, fixed during the show amid calls into the newsroom but the damage was already done. Red faces everywhere.
"Not a people error", said an embarrassed Twoser, but people don't care about that.
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Gee, where'd you get that story, Rich.
ReplyDeleteYou still don't have all of it. It knocked KTVU's over the air signal off for at least an hour. When I called them, they didn't know about it!!
Boy, on top of things you are...
When I worked for ABC I was channel surfing one afternoon at 3pm and flipped through Oprah.
ReplyDeleteBlack
So I thought I'd watch for a while and see how long it would take to get back.
3 minutes
5 minutes
Finally at the 10 minute mark I called master at KABC and told them they were in black.
The guy said "Oh s..." and on came Oprah.
"Not a people error"
ReplyDeleteNo, the people error was the blogger who fancies himself a media maven but didn't know about this. The one who just blogged about how far KTVU has fallen even though a year ago he was saying they were still the gold standard and had survived cutbacks relatively well and I was telling him all the ways they were screwed up (which he now enumerates) and he was telling me I didn't know what I was talking about.
Maybe if I had double-Ds he'd listen to me.
That's the problem with these new fully computer intergrated newsrooms and master control, TOC etc...
ReplyDeleteWhen the systems take a shit....they shit big and almost every thing crashes. Very few manual overrides are available to the troops...or they have no clue how to access them.
Just in the last month TV stations in Houston and San Diego killed entire newscast due to "glitches" that crippled the entire operation.
I was listening to KSCO one time, the host was interviewing a local engineering expert about the bay bridge problems. The volume difference between the host and guest was so great that there was no setpoint that would be bearable...turn it up to hear the quite guest and the host was beyond too loud, turn it down to moderate the host and the guest was below a whisper. It went on and on and on. It got to the point that I had to call the station. Turned out to be an avoidable operator error.
ReplyDeleteHappens to the best of them I guess : /