Breaking News...

It has become one of my pet peeves that the term "Breaking News" has been abused -- particularly by the cable news networks -- to the point of becoming nonsense. It already was pretty bad; I regularly joked with friends about how, "When news breaks, we'll fix it!" And one friend remembered a TV station in Pittsburgh that released an expensive promotional campaign for its evening news show under the catch phrase, "If it happened today, it's news to us." No one caught the potentially oblivious meaning of the phrase until it was actually on the air. (I can see how they made the mistake. Read with the intended meaning, it's a pretty clever local news campaign.)

But real breaking news -- that fast-paced, rapidly changing, developing story so perfectly caught by Ben Hecht in "The Front Page" and perfectly portrayed in the movie adaptation "His Girl Friday" -- that is something special, the Holy Grail of journalism. It's the rush that keeps you in the business.

It looks like this:

This is longtime WDBJ reporter Joe Dashiell (on right) and News Director Amy Morris working on a script for a voice over. But I get ahead of myself...

The story for a week has been the murder of Tina Smith followed by the disappearance of her 12-year-old daughter and live-in boyfriend (that is, Tina's boyfriend). Tina was found by co-workers when she didn't come in for work on Monday, but apparently had been killed Friday. An Amber Alert was immediately issued for the girl -- what had happened? How was she involved? Was she at risk as a witness? What was up with the boyfriend?

It became the week-long obsession of every newsroom in the area ... and a few nationally. The Nancy Grace show on CNN featured it for several days (to the general amusement of the local media, who found her stuff shallow and often idiotic), and I spent the better part of a Saturday trying to figure out how to feed footage of news conferences at the Roanoke County police department to both CBS and CNN.

The girl and the man were in Wal*Mart. They could be anywhere. North Carolina? Still in Virginia? Ohio?

And then an urgent notice. Florida! Police were called to a gas station. We went into high gear....

That's Bob Grebe, morning anchor, who's usually condemned to features about the Greek Festival and Haunted Houses at Halloween, working the phones for more details. As I walked through the newsroom -- at loose ends because I had no particular story to work on that day -- he was calling out that I should quickly cut together a couple of 30-second sequences of the footage coming down from the network from Florida, just so the producers putting together the news interruptions -- yes, we actually cut into the vapid morning talk shows with updates -- would have something to show. He was on.

And that's what it's all about. It's why you're a journalist, a newsman. It's what keep you showing up every day for lousy pay and bad attitudes from "civilians" -- those people who think you're out to get them when you show up with a camera to let them tell their version of things -- and basically a guarantee of obscurity. (Seriously, how many journalists can you name? Now, how many idiotic, drug addled, sex-obsessed Hollywood actors?)

It's BREAKING NEWS. It's happening right now, and no one -- but you, after you've called the guy on the spot, or the person who is inside, or the one who has the real details -- knows what's happening. It's happening right now, and you're putting it all together, and you're going to understand it and explain it better than anyone else ... because you get it.

Look at that first picture again. Look at that lean in that Joe is doing -- the search for the right term, just the right word, to make it perfect. Look how Bob's eyes are in the second image -- normally a photo problem, a "blinker," but no, because he's listening with care to every word. Vision would distract him.

Look at this:

It's the calm after the storm. We now know the guy in Florida was just some OD case, not the people we were looking for. The urgency has passed. Amy is putting together a summary for the evening news, but again, look at her eyes -- the intense concentration to find just the right thing, the right turn of phrase, to make the story clear in the least number of words and seconds.

Yet, the story still develops. And tomorrow, there will be another. And sometime soon, there will be more breaking news -- there always is -- and once again, we will all know why we are in this business...

Welcome to the world that has made me show up for work for ... Good God! ... 22 years ...