wsls channel 10 totally low-tech 11:00 news

Did anyone else in the ‘Noke catch the WSLS Channel 10 Totally Low-Tech 11:00 News last night?

I guess they had an underground electrical fire in downtown Roanoke last night and AEP had to shut off the power over a multi-block area of the grid. This left many businesses without power at an extremely inopportune time of night – including the news station and the newspaper offices.

So 11:00 News Anchors John and Karen were standing outside the station doing the newscast live and broadcasting from a van with a generator. It was great. They kept messing up, and every time they’d go to a video feed the sound would be all out of whack or the wrong clip would come up, and you could hear engineers and cameraman chatting over the commercial breaks, and people kept driving by and honking and waving and stuff so they could be on TV, because they’re freaks. Oh, and you could totally tell that Karen’s jacket didn’t match her pants. John actually made a funny comment for once in his life, though, when he said “This segment has been brought to you by our friends at Harley-Davidson” right after some super-loud motorcycle went screaming by.

Then Local Meteorologist Jamey gave us the weather forecast. Karen held up a clipboard with a printed-out weather map on it, and Jamey’s big hand showed us the fronts and such, and then he had this little tool that told us the current temperature and humidity, and then came the best part – the forecast. Karen flipped to a second page on the clipboard. Written in blue Sharpie:

Tonight’s Low: 54

Tomorrow: Partly sunny, chance of rain

High 73

Later Sportscaster Justin did the sports report. Which means he read the scores off a clipboard of his own. And then John made him repeat the basketball scores, because it’s all about John, yanno.

The funniest part, maybe, is that even with all the engineering problems and the power outage and the standing-outside-with-a-clipboard newscasting, they were STILL more professional than WSET’s newscast is on a good night.