One Year Later

The winter storm has been at the front of everyone's mind, but one year ago Wednesday, all eyes were on a little town in southeast Alabama.

A man named Jimmy Lee Dykes got on a Dale County school bus, killed the driver, took a little boy hostage and held him in an underground bunker for seven days. On February 4th, 2013, authorities stormed that bunker. Dykes was killed and the little boy was rescued unharmed.

Here's a brief look at that week. I edited this as part of my station's submission for the TV Station of the Year award for the entire state.



One year later, I'm happy to report that the little boy who was taken hostage is doing well. He's lost weight, and his behavior at school and home has improved. It's also worth mentioning that he was misdiagnosed as being autistic. The boy's brother and guardian says he's only talked about the ordeal a few times.

Sh*t Crazy Newsroom Callers Say

You've probably figured out by now that we get a lot of phone calls. Most are for people wanting us to cover particular stories. Others are to complain about one thing or another. Every once in awhile we get peculiar requests...

This particular caller wanted us to escort him to see Sen. Richard Shelby when he's in the area this weekend. Obviously we can't do this for a number of reasons, the main one being we don't want to walk a potentially crazy person up to the senator.

The man told us that he has sent Sen. Shelby as well as Sen. Jeff Sessions packages, but says the senators never picked those packages up.

The man just didn't seem to understand that we would not be taking him to Sen. Shelby. In fact, "When you know what reporter is doing the story, call me back." He even tried to leave his phone number.

The conversation ended like this: "I tried to call *assignment editor* but he never calls me back."

That's a clear sign you or your request is crazy.

What's a Producer Do Anyways?

On average I answer about 20 phone calls a day. Not all of them are from viewers - maybe half. My favorites are those who ask who I am and then proceed to tell me how much they enjoy watching me on the news. Explaining to them why that's impossible is pointless - to viewers, if you work in t.v. news, you're on the air.

To say that the average person doesn't understand how the news works is probably the biggest understatement in the business. To many of the people who call, the anchors are the only people who do any work. Forget about the reporters and producers and anyone else who's behind the scenes.

I've talked before about how newsrooms truly operate but it was more to do with the network-affiliate relationship. This post will be more about how the newsroom is run and the functions of different people, specifically the producer. It seems to be the most misunderstood role in news, at least in my neck of the woods anyway.

Let's start at the top, shall we?

The anchors are the most-recognized faces. They are the face of the news and generally draw the most reaction. If a story is wrong, they are who gets blamed by the public. But when it comes to day-to-day operations, the anchors don't typically cover stories. They spend their days reading through scripts written by other people. They are the last line of defense for fact errors.

The reporters are who viewers see around town most often. They deal with the public day in and day out. They work with mayors, councilmen, schools, crazy people, you name it.

Then there's the producer, a.k.a. me. We are the creators of the shows, and we are responsible for everything that is in it. If something is wrong, it ultimately falls back on us.


I kind of fell into producing. It was a stroke of luck and a good friend who landed me my first job - in a field I had no training in. It just so happened I had a knack for it.

One of the first things I learned is that being a producer is all about balance. Not only do producers have to rely on themselves to put together a good show, but they also have to rely on everyone else to ensure it goes off smoothly, and at times that can be frustrating.

Producers are the middle-man of the newsroom. We're involved in every situation, and more often than not how the producer reacts sets the tone of those situations. In times of crisis, it's the producer who answers the question, "what now?"



TVNewsCheck keeps up with what's going on in the broadcast industry. In this article, they refer to producers as the leaders of the newsroom, and I wholeheartedly agree. Producers decide which stories run, where they run and how they run. They determine which reporters go live and which anchor reads what story.

TVNewsCheck says it best: "Without question, the producer influences and touches more content than anyone else."