What Happened With The 'Evening News'?
(CBS)
The second problem occurred at the end of the broadcast. Couric's introduction of Kelly Cobiella's piece on giving went smoothly, but when the piece ran it did not have any sound. After about ten seconds, Couric broke in, once again mentioning technical problems. She then ended the show. A long version of the credits ran, followed by a pair of CBS News promos. After that, because there was still time left in the broadcast, viewers once again saw a wide shot of Couric and the "Evening News" set. The shot, accompanied by nothing but music, lasted for a minute or so, until programming began for the 7 pm Eastern Time hour. (Here it is on Youtube.)
Vice President of News Operations Frank Governale explained what happened in an e-mail. The source of the Palmer piece's problems seems to have been relatively simple. "The tape machine had difficulty playing back the piece since the tape seems to have been creased," writes Governale. "This resulted in bad video (blocking errors caused by unreadable bits on the tape)."
The problem with the Cobiella piece is a bit harder to explain without some technical jargon. "The lack of audio was traced to the audio console in one of our control rooms," writes Governale. He explains that "[w]e found the audio board's configuration file to be corrupt and believe there was a glitch/hit sometime during the broadcast that made the audio console's program crash. After the problem was encountered the audio engineer rebooted the console and all mappings were normal, and all channels played back normally."
Translation? The machine that controls audio – which was working fine in other parts of broadcast – suddenly went belly up and had to be reset. Think of it like a computer suddenly freezing up and needing a reboot. By the time the control room was able to reset the console, it was too late to run the piece.
The Cobiella piece did air on the later feed of the broadcast, and it will air tonight in those markets where it failed last night. (The "Evening News" usually runs two feeds, with the first, at 6:30 Eastern, airing in most Eastern and Central time zone markets.) "We had two tech failures," says "Evening News" Executive Producer Rome Hartman, "and we wish it hadn't happened."
Unreal.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/29/eveningnews/bios/main1083718.shtml
I'm impressed by his background, and - as a result - I can't imagine him not developing a more appropriate response plan for any similar events in the future.
1 - Your explanation for what went wrong at the end of the show literally cries out "We need redundant systems, but don't have them." How much would it cost for CBS to have a back-up audio system that would take over in the event that the primary system's software crashes? Let me guess. Less than Katie earns in one month? (And, by the way, I think she deserves what she earns.) Backing-up critical systems should be a "no brainer" in today's age...especially for such an important show.
2 - What was the show's director thinking, when he (she?) decided Katie should just continue standing there for those 3 minutes? No where in your "what happened" explanation did you address the major criticism voiced on YouTube...that neither Katie nor her team came up with anything for her to do other than continue standing there. I think it would be very educational for us...as well as for the CBS Evening News' team if you all were to answer not just the "what happened, technically" question but also the "what happened to Katie" question. At a minimum, this would allow you to develop an organizational protocol for dealing with this situation in the future, in the unlikely event that you are ever stuck again with filling the last 3 minutes of air time "on the fly".
Thanks for getting back to us all on this non-technical issue.
Its not the end of the world.
Its only the TV news, its not brain surgery.
Take a deep breath folks, its only TV News.
Always makes it hard at the end of the show... since it's not like you can float the story and go on to the next one...
And that's the one bad thing about moving from analog equipment to all the fancy digital stuff we use these days... there's nothing better than being in the middle of an hourlong show and your switcher crashing... which so far has only happened to me once...