Two bank robbers shot a police officer in Tampa recently. They broke into an apartment and held a man hostage during a three-hour police standoff. It ended when one of the suspects killed himself after learning from a television news report that the officer he shot had died.
As a television news organization, should you broadcast live from the scene?
Updates? Continuous coverage? Should you call for the helicopter to get aerial shots of the event?
These are all decisions that television organizations will make at the time of the crisis. News managers can step in and direct people toward critical places and important information.
But it may already be too late to instill in the reporters, producers, editors, photographers and pilots why and how they should choose their words carefully; and to shoot, select or air one image or soundbite over another.
Staff members need to be able to stand on the ground of earlier discussions. More useful would be written guidelines developed with staff about what the station stands for and how the station wants to communicate to the community.
In effect, we need to help decision-makers plan ahead of time how they should act during the crisis.
Lots of media organizations have mission statements that they develop with managers and post on the wall. Fewer have mission statements that people carry in their wallets or commit to memory. But a mission statement is only a start.
One Tampa Bay cable station developed guidelines for crime coverage that are posted on its website. Peppered throughout its hostage coverage that day were references to those crime guidelines. Anchors would say that they could not show particular scenes of the ongoing event because their guidelines did not permit it.
The two most applicable guidelines for this crisis included the phrases, “Bay News 9 will refrain from showing live pictures of police SWAT and tactical teams during hostage stand-offs” and ” We will never attempt to contact a hostage-taker during an incident.”
Well, the live coverage didn’t hone in on SWAT or tactical teams and the station never called the hostage taker.
But…
The hostage taker called them.
People in the newsroom had a place to start when deciding how to cover this breaking news, the murder of an on-duty police officer. They knew not to reveal tactical movements, they knew not to reveal the name of the victim until family notification, but they didn’t have a plan in place for what to do in case the shooter called.
As it happened, the shooter failed in his attempt to connect with the station.
Anchor Al Ruechel was on the set. He says he’s glad the shooter did not get through. “The line was busy with about a dozen other people trying to call us with their eyewitness accounts of the murder…” Read Ruechel’s first-person account of the event
Now it’s time for the station’s managers and staff to have a conversation and consider some additions to station guidelines. What will they do next time—when a call gets through? How will they make their decisions?
Breaking news coverage is the test of a news organization’s strength in many respects. But if newsrooms truly want to demonstrate superiority in covering spot news …the planning should start before things happen. What would your newsroom have done in this situation? In your organization, as in Tampa, it may be time for another conversation.
Poynter’s Lillian Dunlap has spent time at Bay News 9 during the past month, observing news coverage and newsroom organization as part of a professional internship.