680News - Lisa Brandt

On any given news day, priorities emerge. A story that can seem very important at 5:30 a.m. when we kick off the show can become irrelevant very quickly if something new develops.

Last week, in a tragic accident, a little boy fell from the 11th floor of his apartment building and we got word from reporter Carl Hantske that the child was being rushed by ambulance to hospital with vital signs absent. Like you, our hearts sink when we hear about such an occurrence, but we focus on our jobs, carry on and bring the story to you. It immediately became our lead, bumping our original lead story to second and on down the line until some stories we had initially felt strongly about were no longer in the show.

This morning, shortly after we started on the air with our reporters and story line-ups in place, a tanker-truck flipped over on the 401 westbound west of Keele causing another instant priority shift.

That’s what we mean when we say “the news is always changing.” Some days it changes quickly, some days, not so much. But when it does, there is a mad scramble behind the scenes.

Reporters race to new locations, information is fed via Blackberry and telephone and Paul, our senior writer Jennifer and I must work fast to update our copy. Our editor, Elizabeth Harrison, is responsible for managing the changing of assignments and fact-checking. Everyone knows his or her role but we have compared the manoeuvre to turning a ship around – it’s a mammoth task. Lucky for us, we all thrive on the challenge and for me, it’s one of the best parts of my job: teamwork. There’s nothing quite like working like a demon and knowing that your teammates are doing the same, for a common cause. It’s an adrenaline rush that we thrive on.

We don’t expect you to really care too much about what it takes to change things around to create a better program. It’s our job! But we hope you know we put our hearts and brains into it, every day.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 9:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.