Category Archives: News

If I ever get to teach a class on public relations — to stand in front of people and talk about what works and what does not — I will include this rule in my lessons: Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever block a camera with your hand.

That’s what Albany “International” Airport’s Doug Myers did when he confronted a pair of Infowars.com activists leafleting — and shooting video of it — at the airport. His hand job is at 1:48 in.

When I used to sit and watch countless hours of boring raw news footage, nothing made my day like the hand in front of the camera. It’s a golden moment, one that would literally send me to my feet dancing around the room — and when someone did it it was guaranteed to appear in a news promo.

While we’re at it, one other rule: Keep cool, smile, and don’t raise your voice. Myers managed to do none of these things, instead giving the activists exactly what they wanted: an angry authority figure who was losing his sh*t. Nice work.

Oh, a third rule: when things go wrong, don’t try to fix them by lying in your subsequent statement:

“On Nov. 23, we asked two individuals to move away from the escalator area of the terminal where they were distributing fliers. Our concern — as it always is — was for the safety of the passengers and the public who were in the airport.”

Anybody who watched the video knows that this wasn’t about being near the escalator — but to their credit, the airport backed off the absurd “million dollars of insurance” demand made by Myers:

“Filing a simple form and providing advance notice of their arrival are all that is required. We would welcome them back to the airport to distribute their information.”

Class dismissed.

OK, I admit it: I still get nostalgic for my days hawking TV news.

There was a time that working in local TV was fun — before cable and the internet started sapping away the ad dollars. Today, everybody longs for those quaint old days when the only competition was radio and the newspapers.

What I really loved was chasing around our news people with a camera to make they’re work look hyper-exciting. This spot is chock-full of cliches and somewhat dated, but a good example of the genre:

One interesting note: we did not risk life and limb to get that opening shot, the one where the news vehicle stops just short of the camera. No, instead we had it accelerate away from us in reverse and ran the footage backward. Thank you, Georges Méliès.

And yes, I know: It would have been better if the license plate said “WNYT 13.”

Nobody cares what I think about the Kegs and Eggs “riot.”

That may be the sort of blasphemy that gets my blogging license revoked, but what can I say that doesn’t overstate the obvious? So I won’t bore you.

No, this is not about what we think, but why we think what we think.

Simply put, the Saturday morning trouble in Albany would not be a news story without the video. There would be no parade of blog posts, endless ranting on talk radio, outraged public officials holding press conferences, or breathless local TV news hype.

It’s all about the video.

Consider the example of fires.

Houses catch on fire all the time. Even if nobody gets hurt, it’s one of the worst things you can experience. But is it news? Not really — unless there’s video. If there are pictures of your house burning down, that’s when news producers consider it a story.

Twenty years ago — hell, TEN years ago — the Kegs and Eggs thing would have been confined to a routine newspaper story and a brief item on your newscast. Technology has changed us.

From Marshall McCluhan scholar Mark Federman:

Whenever we create a new innovation – be it an invention or a new idea – many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset.

I’d say McLuhan is out there in the cosmos somewhere having a good laugh right about now.