Liveblogging my Last 6pm Broadcast

Julia and I are moving to Seattle on Wednesday, and today is my last day directing at KEZI. In under two years, I worked my way up from part time "technical" director on morning shows, to full-time real-life director of the station's signature show: the hour-long 6pm/6:30pm broadcasts. (I also direct the 11pm news, but nobody cares.) Quite an achievement, I think, for someone with absolutely no television experience coming into this place. I've had a lot of fun here, and learned a lot. Hooray for me.

After many months of practice, directing live television has become a bit too easy for me, so in a way I'm glad to be moving on to new challenges. In fact, directing is so easy that I can do a perfect job even while typing during commercial breaks and long packages.

6:14
We're about to go into the weather block. Before the show, Brad, the Senior Director, revealed a carrot cake he'd bought for my departure, which was really cool. Before the show I told the crew, "It's my last 6 o'clock show, so in the words of General Custer, 'Don't fuck up.'"

No fuck-ups so far, except that a transmitter somewhere apparently exploded, causing us to lose our "Relay for Life" remote live shot while we were in the middle of its package -- which only meant the anchors had to read the tag, so it looked fine on your set at home, even if my producer was visibly irritated.

6:20
All week we've been airing excerpts from local celebrity Rick Dancer's latest "Rick Dancer Reports" special, "The Not-So-Wild West." In each segment, he goes to a tiny backwater Oregon town where the inhabitants would seem to prefer that he had not gone there in the first place. Today he's somewhere called "Enterprise," population 2002 (consistently, since the 1920s -- weird). Like all small Oregon towns, they fear city folk, change, and growth.

This package is about four minutes. On a job interview in Seattle I learned that up there they never run a package of more than 1 minute in duration. (There's a little less actually newsworthy stuff going on here.)

6:28:
The D/E block break, after the end of the 6pm and before the start of the 6:30 -- the break in which we have to do the most adjusting, swapping out anchors and whatnot -- is the shortest break. What's that about?

6:34
Two news helicopters covering the same high-speed chase collided in Phoenix today. Like many news items, it's both tragic and kind of awesome.

6:36
In KEZI tradition, before the show I used a label maker to put my name on the ever-expanding Wall of Quitters. The station has a lot of trouble keeping people around, for a lot of reasons. I'm only leaving because Julia and I want to seek out opportunities in Seattle, but a lot of people quit because of management decisions around here. Check out Oregon Media Insiders for intermittent updates on the madness at KEZI.

6:43
It just occured to me that I missed a chance at another KEZI quitting tradition: I should have made a fool of myself on the Newsroom camera during the 5pm broadcast. Ah well.

My producer, a drastically overworked pregnant woman, had to leave "early" (actually really late, considering she'd have left at 5:30pm if we had a regular evening producer -- we haven't had one for weeks). I'm determined to finish the show early enough to roll credits.

6:49
We're twenty seconds heavy -- already my plan to roll credits is jeopardized. But I shall prevail.

6:52
Give Michael Vick credit -- at least he got in trouble for something original.

6:58
We did get credits in -- but at the expense of the copyright. Oops! Now I can upload the whole broadcast on YouTube.