EmailThe Kobe Bryant story was big news all across America, and even here in Britain
But it was nowhere a bigger story in than in Los Angeles, home of both The Lakers, Bryant's team, and of Spectrum1, LA's only 24-hour news channel.
Every major news outlet covered the story in pretty much the same way - which was fine. But Tanya McRae, an MMJ with Spectrum1 in LA did something different, something she could only do because she was working with an iPhone on her own, instead of with a crew, or even with a big video camera.
As Tanya posted on Facebook, "After Kobe Bryant’s death on Sunday, I got in my car and went searching for a story to do. I was driving on the freeway and saw this woman standing alone on an overpass with a homemade “Honk for Kobe. RIP” sign. I got off at the next exit and went back to find her."
The piece is great, and it captures the feeling that people all over LA were experiencing.
This was both breaking news and on the fly journalism
Print reporters have worked this way for years, because all they had to carry was a pad and a pencil.
Now TV journalists can be just as spontaneous.
And, she edited the entire piece in the seat of her car!
It's a new world for news
Congrats, Tanya.
Featured Courses
Recent Posts
No News Today — or tomorrow for that matter.
March 26, 2024
For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.
What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024
When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.
What Is News? What Should it Be?
February 20, 2024
Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.