THE MEDIA
Caught Up in the Event, While Unraveling Its Cause
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JACQUES STEINBERG - NEW YORK TIMES
As the power went out yesterday afternoon in the offices of the many news organizations based in New York, with deadlines looming for the broadcast networks' evening news reports and the morning newspapers, journalists found themselves in an odd predicament. Frantically calling across town and around the country to find out the scope of the power failure, they were trapped in a news event they were trying to cover.
Most news organizations, including The New York Times , The New York Post and the major cable and broadcast news organizations, had backup power supplies. But those supplies were not powerful enough to run their entire newsrooms or plentiful enough to last forever.
All three major broadcast networks ? NBC, CBS and ABC ? managed to begin broadcasting continuous news reports to their affiliates soon after the power failure, while the three main cable news networks ? the Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC ?? were able to stay on the air. Brian Williams, on NBC, was reduced to broadcasting the old-fashioned way, without a computerized teleprompter.
The first priority for the news organizations was figuring out the extent of the blackout. "In the beginning, all we knew was that our power was off," said Kevin Magee, vice president of programming at Fox News. "I called Philadelphia to find out if it had lost power, because it is on the East Coast and, frankly, because I grew up there."
At Fox News, the newscaster John Gibson immediately began reporting from the plaza in front of its headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas, where hundreds of people had gathered after spilling out of the surrounding office towers. They were a captive audience, virtually trapped in Midtown as the subways stopped. Interns raced from the newsroom with reports from news wires for Mr. Gibson to relate over the air.
Employees hauled out cases of bottled water and then a large red cooler. "I got the water to the talent ? that was another one of my jobs," Mr. Magee said. He said he bought out the supply of bottled water from the magazine stand in the building lobby, which could not pull down its front grate to close without power.
Television news organizations also wondered who would be able to actually watch their broadcasts. The most interested viewers could not; their televisions lacked power.
For radio stations, the blackout represented an opportunity to turn back the clock, because in areas without electricity, battery-operated radios were often the only source of news.
But it was not always easy to capitalize on demand. WINS, the all-news radio station, which has offices in Midtown Manhattan and a broadcast tower in New Jersey, went off the air for about 20 minutes immediately after the blackout hit, said Greg Janoff, the station's vice president and general manager. The station lost its signal again, for about 20 minutes, at around 6 P.M., for reasons that were not immediately clear.
Apart from that, the station was broadcasting news of the blackout continuously, whether a reporter's description of gas station attendants in Long Island donning orange vests to direct traffic at busy intersections, or pleas from hospitals begging residents to supply them with fuel for emergency generators.
In the newsroom of The New York Post in Midtown Manhattan, the editors learned that the paper had enough auxiliary power for just about two hours of work, one editor working there said. They turned off almost all the lights to conserve power and huddled around a few working computer terminals, peering over computer printers with flashlights as they rushed to lay out the paper. Just a few minutes after the close of the first edition, Lorenzo Ciniglio, a freelance photographer, broke through the doors, lugging many pounds of heavy camera equipment and dripping with sweat. He had raced on foot from East 96th Street to the office on West 48th Street, "snapping pictures of overheated crowds and overflowing buildings along the way," then climbed 10 flights to the newsroom, only to miss the deadline. Reporters and editors were continuing to gather news in case the power returned later in the evening, an editor said. "This is the freelancer's life," Mr. Ciniglio said.
At The Times, the blackout left the newspaper's printing plant in College Point, Queens, without power. To compensate, The Times was planning last night to double the press run at its plant in Edison, N.J. But Toby Usnik, a company spokesman, warned that some readers would not get sections of Friday's paper ? like the Weekend section ? until Saturday.
The day was not without its humor. Just before 6:30 P.M., Times employees received a mass e-mail message from the director of food services ? apparently preprogrammed ? that invited them to "cool off" with free Italian ices in the cafeteria on Monday afternoon. "The dog days of summer are here!" the message advised.
nytimes.com |
