A perfect example of interns doing work that paid people should do!
WMAZ 13 is the NBC affiliate in Macon, and well, um, I'm sort-of speechless about it at this moment. I'm not sure if the station is trying to get their audience more involved in their broadcasts or if this was just a big whoops-y, but Google news picked up this supposed "story" from there site which actually ended up being their 6 o'clock broadcast script. (If they read this and go back and fix it, I've taken a screen shot for y'all also.)
It pretty much looks like the person who uploaded this "story" (an intern, I presume, being an intern many times myself) just didn't pay attention to the fact that EVERYTHING WAS IN CAPS, there were quotes, throws, ots's and all of the elements of a script included. I won't be totally judgmental; based on the little that I know about broadcast script writing, it's very well done. DOT-coms and letter abbreviations punctuated correctly in most places.
Really, there are two big problems here.
1. It's on their web site like this....posed in story form.
2. Google picked it up like this and is broadcasting it to the WORLD.
I remember, as a GPB news radio intern, being asked to blog stories. "Okay. Sure," I would say. Often, I would just want to be lazy and copy and paste the AP report exactly how it was from the wire to our blog on blogspot and be done with it. Can I go home yet? Well, that came back to bite me in the behind. Periods would be missing. People's names would be spelled wrong. There would be broadcast lingo or incomplete sentences. Really, readers don't need to be getting their online news in ALL CAPS. Not even readers in middle Georgia. Okay, yeah, that GM may be trying to involve people yadda yadda innovation, but it's just a news formality. I think that a lot of TV stations are going to be dealing with this sort-of cross-over from TV to internet, or print, really. Even CNN has trouble with it sometimes. Yes, you have to write a story to go to air, but then when you attempt to put the story online, readers need more details, people's full names spelled correctly, a headline, etc.--all of the elements that come into play with print. I would love to be able to say that this will promise us print people more jobs when newspapers go out of business, but obviously TV stations don't care enough to give the effort to get it right both ways.
It pretty much looks like the person who uploaded this "story" (an intern, I presume, being an intern many times myself) just didn't pay attention to the fact that EVERYTHING WAS IN CAPS, there were quotes, throws, ots's and all of the elements of a script included. I won't be totally judgmental; based on the little that I know about broadcast script writing, it's very well done. DOT-coms and letter abbreviations punctuated correctly in most places.
Really, there are two big problems here.
1. It's on their web site like this....posed in story form.
2. Google picked it up like this and is broadcasting it to the WORLD.
I remember, as a GPB news radio intern, being asked to blog stories. "Okay. Sure," I would say. Often, I would just want to be lazy and copy and paste the AP report exactly how it was from the wire to our blog on blogspot and be done with it. Can I go home yet? Well, that came back to bite me in the behind. Periods would be missing. People's names would be spelled wrong. There would be broadcast lingo or incomplete sentences. Really, readers don't need to be getting their online news in ALL CAPS. Not even readers in middle Georgia. Okay, yeah, that GM may be trying to involve people yadda yadda innovation, but it's just a news formality. I think that a lot of TV stations are going to be dealing with this sort-of cross-over from TV to internet, or print, really. Even CNN has trouble with it sometimes. Yes, you have to write a story to go to air, but then when you attempt to put the story online, readers need more details, people's full names spelled correctly, a headline, etc.--all of the elements that come into play with print. I would love to be able to say that this will promise us print people more jobs when newspapers go out of business, but obviously TV stations don't care enough to give the effort to get it right both ways.