I don’t get the ‘breaking news shakes’ often, but it does happen. My hands will be shaking and my voice will catch, even as my mind races forward with what needs to happen next. Which calls need to be made? Who do I need to contact? If there isn’t a manager in house, do I need to call one? Which crew is the easiest/quickest to move? Do we need to worry about cut-ins? Is there any talent in house?
All these things and more are busting through my head even as I struggle to get the basic premise of what happening typed into a message or my voice to come back so I can speak.
This isn’t brought on by the daily-type of breaking news. Car wrecks, shootings, political scandals don’t cause shakes.
I tend to get them during severe weather coverage when things turn bad. When I know people are hurting somewhere and there isn’t a damn thing I can do to help them other than send a camera there to document what happened. Tornado coverage, which I’ve mentioned before, can give me the shakes.
National tragedies can give me the shakes.
Even then, I can’t always guess which ones will steal my voice and make my hands shudder. The Boston bombing didn’t give me the shakes. Newtown did, though, and I was on vacation when that happened.
The death of Nelson Mandela is something I wouldn’t have thought would give me the breaking news shakes. As an older gentleman, his death wouldn’t come as a surprise. But I think it was the way it was announced that got me. Somehow, the family and South Africa as a whole had managed to keep it from slipping out to the rest of the world. The first inkling I had was mere minutes before the announcement was made, when a speaker we have connected to ABC to warn us of incoming video from breaking news situations across the country crackled to life. If I turned to one of their live channels, I could tune in to a live announcement form South Africa.
Suspicion and a dreadful sense of what was coming settled on my shoulders and I quickly dialed in the channel and turned up the volume. In front of the camera stood the South African President, waiting to be cued, to be told he was live.
I already knew what was coming. There was no other reason for an American broadcast station to throw up a broadcast from South Africa without any preamble or explanation.
And yet I didn’t speak up.
I didn’t tell any of my producers or coworkers what I was listening in on. I didn’t warn them about what was about to be announced. We were minutes away from our own newscast starting, but my focus was on an impending news conference.
The announcement was made.
My voice returned to me then, and I finally got the words out to the newsroom.
I began making calls, figuring out what we could do, what ties may exist locally to the story. My hands shook as I dialed the phone and waited for someone to answer on the other end.