Grand Rapids TV station airs live shot from Michigan "win" over Michigan State

How hard is it to have someone in his ear from the station to confirm the result at the buzzer ... or to audible the plot twist on the fly?

 

I'll try this again, because there's a whole lot of criticism here that has absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened.

The station involved is an ABC affiliate, and this was an ABC game. The newscast starts shortly after the game ends. I can't speak to this specific situation, but I know when I'm doing a post-football newscast we typically have about 2 minutes of warning that our newscast is going to start. (Sometimes the network will jabber and run highlights from other games for 15 minutes, and sometimes they'll dump straight out of the game seconds after it ends. We don't know what it's going to be until they go to a commercial and we're told that they're done.)

So, the top story from that newscast is going to be the game that just ended. They have two options -- start with the sports guy doing highlights, or start with the guy outside the stadium. They started with the guy at the stadium, because people just watched the game and don't need to see the highlights immediately. It's a perfectly reasonable call... except for a few things.

-- The live location is far enough away from the stadium that to make a hit at the top of the newscast, the reporter had to bail early.

-- The reporter didn't ask anyone how the game turned out, and nobody told him. He needs to ask. No matter how obvious it may have been that Michigan was going to win... Michigan didn't win.

-- The live location sucked. It's tricky -- you really don't want to be in the middle of the crowd, but it's pretty hard to do any sort of crowd reaction story when there's no evidence of a crowd. It's made worse when he's obviously bullshitting the crowd reaction... because he's talking about the wrong fans being happy.

-- The reporter had dick to say. Even if Michigan won, that's a shit live shot. He's just filling airtime. Describe something, dude. Tell me what the crowd was like inside the stadium. Tell me anything. Don't just stand there in the dark and tell me fans are leaving happy. Particularly when they aren't.

Bottom line, he screwed up, badly. There should have been a producer to make sure he knew what happened, or to get in his ear and tell him what happened as soon as they realized that the reporter didn't know what happened.

But, it's a Saturday night in Grand Rapids. The producer is probably green as hell and may not even know what happened in the game. (The fact that the super says Michigan won tells me the producer wasn't exactly on top of things.) The reporter probably hasn't done this much.

You can act like this is some kind of horrible breach, or a "rush to be first," or whatever, but it's not. It's an embarrassing mistake made possible by a screwy occurrence that inexperienced people had to deal with in a very brief timespan. Shit happens. They'll do better next time.

 

Here's my take. If it HAD gone perfectly well, you'd have a guy in the dark poorly describing a game that most people probably saw and guessing at the fan reaction because it's perfectly predictable.

What is the value in that?

 

Like I said, very little. Even if Michigan had won, that's a crappy live shot.

 

We had a situation like this a few years ago at my newspaper during a season-ending crosstown rivalry game in town.

Since it was the local "Big Game," we had planned on one or two crowd shots to put as A1 centerpiece with copyblock and tease to sports. As I'm waiting for those photos, I hear from the sports guy on the desk that "Podunk" just beat "Smallville" with a long TD on the last play of the game.

I get the A1 photos and I notice they're all pics of Smallville fans and cheerleaders smiling and cheering. I call the photog and tell him I'm not sure these are the appropriate photos since Podunk won the game, and he replies, "What!? PODUNK won the game!?" Yep, it turns out he took off with a few seconds on the clock thinking Smallville had it wrapped up. Fortunately, he had some Podunk shots that he was able to send me and we avoided the embarrassment.

As an aside, Smallville, my alma mater, got screwed. The reporter who covered the game came in and told me the Podunk quarterback was a yard or two past the line of scrimmage when he threw the winning TD pass, and the refs totally missed it.

 

1. Why wouldn't the photographer send in crowd shots from both sides to cover his butt in a close game? I hate that.

2. Your reporter is a Smallville homer!

 

Ace, the photog was (and still is) pretty dependable, and he probably would have sent both in other circumstances, but I think the fact the game looked over save for a miracle play (which actually happened) and wanting to get me the photos quickly had him in the mindset he only had to send me the one group of photos.

It was something we learned from. I know the guy and get along with him pretty well, and when we talk about getting football photos sent, I would kid him, saying "Now, don't leave the game early tonight" and he would laugh and say "No, won't be doing that again."

Oh, and while the reporter left a lot to be desired in a few areas, he wasn't a homer. He lived in the nearby town (the one our paper is published in) and he had no dog in the hunt concerning these teams. And his viewpoint on the blown call has been corroborated by other people in town.

 

I was teasing on the homer.

More than once, though, I have had photographers fail to turn a single photo of the RB from a local team who rushed for 300 yards and 6 TDs or whatever. Other times they have shot the crap out of East Bumphuk from 200 miles away and didn't get a decent shot of a winning Podunk player.

 

The UM/MSU game was on ESPN...not ABC. The live hit took place at 7:21, I believe the final play of the game had either just happened or was happening as he did the live hit. That's what makes it so jacked up.
In my years in TV....and we had a game still going...I ran a lower third of the last score I saw, put whatever quarter it was (NEVER a "F" indicating final) and try to update on the set. Nowadays with smart phones, how this guy didn't have a stream going on his phone is beyond me.

 

Jesus... you're right. I had assumed that the game would have been on the ABC affiliate in the local markets. That's pathetic.

I don't know how you fuck it up quite this badly, other than a few people who just can't roll with a developing situation.