Having integrity is hard

Last week, five people died in a plane crash near my station’s viewing area and most of the victims lived in my new town, Augusta.

This was my first chance to dive headfirst into breaking news at my new station.

It was an easy meeting as the director and assistant director helped stimulate of ideas and divvied out content to shows.

I produce the 5 p.m. newscast. We had an anchor in the studio, a reporter in the newsroom, our other main anchor in the field accompanied by a field producer and two reporters. This was such a team effort and communication was vital.

I felt in my element and seem to have my routine down pat. My Google Drive document was open separating all of the junk from the confirmed reports via sources, police and locals. I had Twitter open finding sources while others sifted through Facebook. As the day went on, I triple checked all of our information.  

It’s 5 p.m. We’re in the show.

The content ping-ponged back and forth and updates were coming in spurts. It gave me such a high knowing that I was able to produce a solid, important, breaking newscast.

It would have been easy to attribute or assume information from other stations and sources or use the names that we had since the morning. We wouldn’t. My news director told us before we left that “it’s hard to have integrity” but it’s what’s right and what keeps our viewers coming back to us.

Here comes the question that some journalist will always ask: Don’t we want to be first?  

Our social media editor wrote this on our Facebook page:

Check out those likes. Our audience respected our decision to wait. It is so gratifying to know our viewers understand our difficult role. I even put a reporter in the newsroom talking about this post and explaining why we weren't naming anyone online or on air.

Once my 12-hour day was done, I got home and it was all a blur.

I saw this tweet the next day.

I love when the work week seems like a blur. It usually means high productivity. #tgif
— Jeff Kátra (@jeffkatra) February 22, 2013

I hope I helped to serve the community and those families well.