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Whilst I smiled upon seeing this, I would classify it as one step below the graphics of Calvin pissing on something. How can this be THE thing you want to tell people you don't know???
Tonight, we did something really cool. A little TV station in the midwest, which can't even afford a fourth letter for its call sign (trust me, that's a funny joke if you work in broadcasting) launched a national news network.
I can't even remember when this started. Nine months ago, I think? It's been pretty much non-stop insanity since then.
The gravity of this didn't really settle in until somewhere around the D block in the third hour, about 15 minutes before the end of the newscast, and the post-show debrief, and then the champagne popped in the newsroom for the wrap party.
And you know what? I've been so goddamn busy with the deep-tech part of this build that despite the fact they've been rehearsing for almost a month (with my crew constantly underfoot running cables and installing machines) that tonight was actually the very first time that I watched a single minute of it.
We reported actual news.
Nobody is going to win a Pulitzer for anything that aired tonight. We didn't break the Watergate scandal, or the McCarthy investigations, or the Pentagon Papers, or anything like that. We just did simple network news the way that Cronkite used to do. When he wasn't busy covering man's landing on the moon, or the assassination of the President, of course.
Who knows if this thing will work. It started as a joke at a corporate-level meeting a little under a year ago. The joke was that cable news had gotten so enamored with opinion and commentary that it'd forgotten to do actual news. We laughed at the time. I didn't think it would turn into a real thing.
But whether it succeeds or fails, the energy during the wrap party tonight was unbelievable. During a period of national crisis, when broadcast stations are laying off staff left and right, we hired 150 people, and spent about $24 million (I personally spent about $6 million of that, with @rleete's pen) and said "You know what? Nobody has ever done this before, so what the hell? Let's give it a try!"
I am heavily conscious of the fact that most people in this business never get to do this sort of thing.
And I'm curious as hell to see where it goes from here.
A few candid shots.
Control Room 2, which is the main control room for the show. If it vaguely resembles a NASA control room, that was definitely intentional. Designing huge control rooms like this, with three tiers of desks (6" of floor elevation separating each one) and seats for a dozen operators, went out of style many years ago. **** it. I had the real-estate available, and I wanted to build something cool.
SAC (Satellite Air Control), where the uplink to Galaxy 14 is managed. West coast on the left side of the room, East coast on the right:
(At the time of the photo, West was still in syndicated programming. We stagger the broadcast, so that it goes live at 8pm local time on both coasts.)
Control 3, the pre-production and remote-coordination control room:
The wrap party:
My crew built all of this. I designed about 90% of it. And, just as a point of amusement, this is what about 50% of the photos on my phone look like from the past 9 months:
Literally thousands of photos me me holding a wire such that the number on the label is visible, with the timestamp on the photo relating to a pencil-note in one of the many little black books which I always have in my back-right pocket, and swap out about once every two weeks. If someone at a shadowy government or corporate agency really is spying on each one of us individually as some would believe, then I really feel sorry for my agent.
Last edited by Joe Perez; Sep 2, 2020 at 09:43 AM.
Joe, no matter how many times I reload the page, I can see about half of the photos you have posted above, and exactly half (the top half) of one photo (second one under "The wrap party"). VPN does not help, either.
Joe, no matter how many times I reload the page, I can see about half of the photos you have posted above, and exactly half (the top half) of one photo (second one under "The wrap party"). VPN does not help, either.
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