A hapless squirrel taught the class a lesson this morning when it stumbled into a transformer on the south edge of campus and plunged the multimedia newsroom into darknness.
The electrocution happened about an hour before J694 class began. The KUJH-TV news meeting had just begun. As the realization that the whole campus had been affected sunk in, the multimedia newsroom cleared out. Producer Karen Ambramowitz looked pretty lonely, fielding phone calls by herself. As the clock ticked toward class time, it was clear what I had to do. "I've got 10 people due here in a few minutes," I told Karen. "We'll handle the phones and get going on the story from here."
And we did. It was one of those team building, group bonding moments when everybody fires up their skills to cover a breaking story. I love this business.
Staci Wolfe headed out the door with Megan Kellerher, Amanda Tate, Bryan Wilcox and a camera. Audrey Esther made a few phone calls and grabbed a camera to get an interview with an electrical engineer. Meagan sat down at the G5 and began to screen video as it came in from the field. Katy Humpert got on one of the few battery powered computers that was working and got an interview with a guy in Columbia, Mo., whose whole business is keeping animals out of electrical equipment. Erin Ohm started to struggle with making a map of the affected area. Adam Sechrist grabbed a digital camera to get stills of students studying in the dark. Louis Mora and Candice Rukes and Robert Riley worked to bring together the facts for a breaking news post to the web. Byran sweated it out in the server closet to get the server back up so we could post to the web.
Within an hour, just as class time was ending, we had the pieces together and server on line so we could put a story on the web. When the tape came back from the substation, KUJH-TV reporters Kyle Geiken and Denise Spidle drew a crowd. They had the squirrel. As we rolled tape, a cheer went up for a KUJH exclusive.
We had the money shot: One very charred squirrel who died to make this a day when we all did multimedia news for real. View the unedited b-roll of the fried squirrel (WARNING: THIS VIDEO IS GRAPHIC AND COULD BE OFFENSIVE).
Catch the whole KUJH-TV story, Power outage hits campus.
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