Today was a great example of how being a Director can add years to your life in a matter of minutes. It's also a time when you have to become extremely focused on what you are doing and be a leader in the process.
Normally on Monday Nights, we air "Talkin' Tribe" at 7 PM on WKYC which eliminates a newscast in favor of the sports show - which we still direct live, but takes less time & staffing resources to execute than a newscast.
A little after 4 PM today, the decision was made to move "Talkin' Tribe" to Sportstime Ohio so we could bring viewers the latest information on the Virginia Tech tragedy at 7 pm... meaning we were expected to do 2 shows live AT THE SAME TIME. This in itself isn't that unusual since we normally have Indians being done live in Studio B while we are doing news live in Studio A.
The main factor today was we didn't have two crews scheduled or a plan for putting together a 7 PM newscast. So, we quickly coordinated our resources between news, engineering, and production - brought a few people in, kept a few people over and made it happen.
Fortunately, we have 2 control rooms (A Control is for news, B Control is the Indians control room) which can also be used in a situation like this.
It all came off without a hitch. Al Wohl directed the 6, I did the Akron Canton News at 6:30 PM and the 7 PM News.. and Matt Babb directed "Talkin' Tribe" - and everyone was happy. If folks wanted news, they got news. If they wanted Indians, they got Indians.
This is the future of TV...where a station like ours is multi-channeled. The days of a station being a single entity are long gone.
As I mentioned, we currently offer 7 streams of programming out of the WKYC Digital Broadcast Center:
WKYC - Analog TV 3
WKYC-DT - Digital Channel 2
Weather Plus
ION - WVPX Channel 23
Sportstime Ohio
Akron Canton News
WKYC.COM
