I was at a conference in the early 00’s, back when the concept of “viral videos’ was becoming a thing, and everyone wanted that ten million click sensation. Someone asked Dave Ryan’s producer who had a great track record with clickable videos, what the secret was and he said, “Be instantly topical and relevant, make lots of videos and keep your fingers crossed.”
And other times the “go up and swing and hope for the best” approach can apply to news coverage.
On Wednesday August 1, 2007 at approximately 6 pm, the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 people.
You have to be here to understand the significance of that bridge. It’s right there. On one side of the river is the University of Minnesota which is a city in-and-of-itself, and on the other side is the exit to the Metrodome where thousands of people were queuing up for that night’s game. And the bridge was filled with stop-and-go commuting.
I had just finished dinner, went to retrieve something from my car, went and checked email and my client in Greece had sent a frantic message asking if I was all right.
I went and told my wife, “Ruh roh. I think something happened”. We turned on the TV and found ourselves in the middle of the number one news story on the planet.
Here’s a lesson for what might happen if something suddenly happens like this in your market: cell phone service crashed. We suddenly became a 3rd World Country.
This was pre-social media so people were frantic to let their loved ones know they were fine. I heard a station taking landline and pay phone calls from people who couldn’t get through to their families, so they were relaying messages on the air. “Kelsey wants her parents in Edina to know that she got to her appointment in Dinkytown and she wasn’t on the bridge.”
Fast forward a week. One of the things that you’ll see with these types of tragedies is that there will be a candlelight vigil and moment of silence the day or week after. I happened to have just started at KSOL in SFO when it was the one year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Tony Valera and I went out to a relic of the disaster, a former on-ramp to an elevated freeway called The Cypress Structure. It had pancaked, been torn down and now was this pile of dirt and asphalt that arc’ed up and ended in mid-air.
At 5:04 pm the Bay Area STOPPED and all you could hear were the sounds of church bells. Tony stuck a cell phone out the window and captured that. It was hypnotic and transformative.
So my suggestion to my client was that they should do a moment of silence and have someone down at the bridge site on the one week anniversary for that occasion. There was a little push back. I explained that having a moment of silence in the studio would be dead air. But to go down there and cover that would be different. It’s silence but with context and a raw sound to it.
More pushback.
So Lucas Phelan, who was going to be on the air, sent a promo person named Alli Petterson down with a mobile phone.
At the exact moment of the collapse, downtown Minneapolis went silent, bells rang, Alli, with her live phone bowed her head….and a stringer for the Associated Press happened to point, shoot and her photo ended up being the image that ended up in print and digital media around the world.
And it sounded great. Or at least better than if they’d ignored it and kicked off the Hot 6 @ 6.
Now, in the spirit of Paul Harvey, Alli moved south to Tampa, applied at KDWB’s sister station, WFLZ, blah blah blah, and she’s married to Tommy Chuck!
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