When Keene flooded in October, 2005, one Boston news station sent a crew that parked its truck right in front of my apartment, a moment of fame I duly blogged. (Footage filmed on my street showing “Teri Adler live in the city of Keene” is still posted in the WBZ-TV video archive.)
Today I experienced a feeling of deja vu all over again when J and I discovered not one but three Boston news trucks parked at the Waban T stop, presumably there to film the earth-shattering news that D line trains have resumed service today after Wednesday’s fatal crash and that investigators have determined the rear train was going 30mph faster than it should have been at the time of the collision.
I appreciate news crews’ apparent solicitude in following up on this important story…but why exactly is it necessary to have three different networks shooting live footage of an otherwise empty MTBA stop? (On weekends when there isn’t a home Red Sox, Celtics, or Bruins game, the D line is pretty quiet, offering plenty of parking lot space for news trucks but not much news.) Is there really that big a dearth of breaking news in the greater Boston area this weekend?
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Jun 1, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I suspect that this is more a commentary on news gathering, as opposed to news. That’s probably why, in this age of TV, I prefer to get my news in writing, either in a newspaper, a magazine or online.
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Jun 2, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I heard about this only by telephone here in VT – no local news coverage at all. Interesting that even given the virtual-media saturation we experience daily, there’s still no substitute for ‘being there,’ even if ‘there’ is a parking lot with a green & white sign. Maybe it’s the proximity of an uncrowded Starbucks that was the motivation in this case….
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Jun 2, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I normally don’t watch TV news, but in this case, since we’d seen online that there’d been an accident, we turned to the TV to find out what had happened. After allowing ourselves to be glued to the screen for about 15 minutes, though, we recognized that there was no new news, so we turned the coverage off. Even when I’m itching to know what’s happening now, I don’t necessarily need constant repetition of “we still don’t have anything new to report.”
Pavel, I suspect you’re right: the visual suggestion of “being there” can be reassuring if you aren’t/weren’t there. But for me, the incongruity was in being there and realizing nothing was currently happening: the news trucks were simply parked in an almost-empty parking lot. Actually, had the news crews gone into Starbucks and interviewed people who regularly ride the T, the story would have been more interesting.
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Jun 4, 2008 at 7:56 am
I think the television folks have lost their grip on what is worth reporting and what is not, and have hired so many “faces” they have run out of journalists.
I get my news via the web, or not at all, for the most part.
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