Npr hourly news broadcast software#
Npr hourly news broadcast free#

Still, there were moments when Detrow had to come up with questions on the fly, and he did so with equanimity and sense of humor as he spoke to reporters who had dropped everything to lend a hand. “It took the problem-solving skills of everyone onsite in those first minutes to keep pushing through and get the show on the air,” Oliver said. Marrapodi was doing the same outside, taking notes on a computer, or sometimes with just pen and paper, snapping photos of them with a cell phone and texting them to the host.Įric Marrapodi took notes on the fly and texted pictures of them to host Scott Detrow. Parvaz sat next to Detrow in the studio, taking questions that were texted to her and turning them into interview scripts. Kane also activated an emergency conference line that would end up staying open all day, allowing editors throughout the organization keep up with developments.īut as reporters started phoning in, they couldn’t get scripts to the host because the email and internal communications systems were down. ET, the production team knew they had about 20 minutes before facing the abyss.ĭeputy managing editor Jim Kane put out an appeal for correspondents to call in and talk to host Scott Detrow, who was filling in that Sunday for Lulu Garcia-Navarro, about newsy topics they’ve been covering.

Npr hourly news broadcast software#

So as the show’s soothing jingle played and the pre-recorded billboard was broadcast from the technical director’s computer (since the studio player software was offline) at 8 a.m. Think on your feetįortunately, WESUN had planned to start the show with live two-ways about President Biden’s trip to Europe and Israel’s new government. I was the National Desk editor on that extraordinary day, and after speaking with a number of people involved, I’ve come up with six takeaways on how best to respond to technical failures - especially now that so much of what gets broadcast is stored and manipulated digitally, making the potential for calamity greater than ever. Indeed, most listeners didn’t notice anything amiss - or if they did, they didn’t email NPR about the broadcast. “But if you didn’t notice them, you wouldn’t have known there was a problem,” said Sharahn Thomas, NPR’s vice president for content operations. There were a few silences and other hiccups spread throughout Weekend Edition Sunday’s six hours of broadcasts. What made this latest crisis worse is that content nowadays is stored digitally.īut because of quick thinking, improvisation and doing what NPR journalists do so well - live hits - the show went on the air and covered the news of the day. And yet the broadcast went forward because producers were able to raid the shelves for pieces lined up for other shows.

Npr hourly news broadcast free#

That was an accident: Someone was “salvaging” tapes - cutting them with a razor blade to free up empty reels. It was the worst broadcast crisis anyone at Weekend Edition could remember, at least since a Saturday in the early 1990s when, according to veteran show producer Ned Wharton, “someone sliced through all the reel-to-reel tapes,” including one with “a profile of Captain Kangaroo that someone worked really hard on!” “Who can we get on the air and what can they say?” “When I came in, it was pure triage,” Marrapodi said. “But that morning was like nothing imaginable.”Įric Marrapodi, who runs NPR’s live special programming, was taking his son to an end-of-year baseball party when he saw a message about the meltdown and rushed to the studio. “Over the years we have conquered a variety of technical challenges during live broadcast,” recalled executive producer Sarah Oliver, who has been at Weekend Edition since 1997. Communications channels that NPR staff use to contact each other and member stations were also disrupted. Suddenly, less than an hour before air time on June 13, the audio became inaccessible because of a technical failure. Weekend Edition producers were loading files for broadcast and making last-minute music button selections, while engineers auditioned audio that was about to go out to hundreds of stations across the country. It was a routine Sunday morning in Studio 31 at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Scott Detrow does the best he can with what he has, aided by WESUN editor D.