Yesterday, I talked a little about the Breaking News situation and how we dealt with handling the Virginia Tech Shootings.A couple of things I would like to add today. First, our gamble paid off with moving "Talkin' Tribe" to Sportstime Ohio while we did news on Channel 3 at 7 PM instead. In the overnight Neilsen ratings, Channel 3 posted about an 11 Rating/17 Share from 7-7:30 PM. It was our highest rated show of the day...though the 6 & 11 PM also ranked first in their respective timeslots.
How did we get anchor Tim White to Virginia so fast? He was actually in Washington D.C. at the time the shootings occurred getting ready to fly back to Cleveland to anchor the news Monday Night. Tim was able to be in the right place at the right time - and drove to Blacksburg to begin our on-site coverage of a story that has become a national and a local story...since it was just a few years ago that Case Western experienced a similar attack.
Because we couldn't get our satellite truck from Cleveland there as fast as Tim, we relied on our Gannett sister stations nearby to provide uplinks with their equipment for our live coverage. It's one of the perks of having a large company own you. You have lots of resources available to you across the country.
A day later, the other local Cleveland stations finally arrived....
