My first on-air assignment was covering the decision to close the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times , the second closing of a daily newspaper in San Diego within two years. One of my last was a live report, via phone, from a news van outside O.J. Simpson's Brentwood mansion, trying to describe the scene while a few hundred feet away crowds rocked a police car. You might be interviewing JFK's true assassin, but it won't mean diddly if your hair is flipping up and you look like the Flying Nun. Much like a Boy Scout, a TV reporter must always be prepared, which translates to carrying a warm jacket, a change of clothes and your makeup kit wherever you go. Breaking news is everything in TV news, and you never know when you're going to get pulled off the story about the little girl battling cancer and sent to Jamul to cover a fire.
TV news is much more volatile than print.
While a Union-Tribune reporter might cover two or three stories a week, a TV reporter does two or three a day. One afternoon I was called off an election story and sent to the hills of Escondido to look for plastic bags filled with body parts. In TV, the search for cool video is everything. At each station, the assignment desk is manned by faceless, unknown employees with unstylish hairdos who choose most of the story ideas for the reporters, make the contacts, land many of the big interviews and assign crews. They're the scanner jockeys who listen to the police and fire frequencies day and night, hoping to hear something the other stations don't.