0/5

Fires stretch newsrooms to the limit

How did media cope with the unfolding news on Black Saturday?

jkeyte“It was like getting hit by a fire version of a tsunami,” Seven Network Melbourne news director Steve Carey says. “It just rolled through and there was little time to react.”

Such was the enormity of the Victorian bushfires that newsrooms struggled to cope with Black Saturday. Prior to the fires breaking out, the top story of the day in Melbourne had been the 46.4 weather.

At about 4pm, after receiving “unbelievable” footage of 12m-high flames, Carey decided to extend Seven’s 6pm news broadcast to an hour. The bulletin drew a peak audience of 663,000 people, up more than 200,000 on the previous Saturday.

Meanwhile, radio was responding instantly. A Yarra Glen site being used for an outside broadcast by 3AW was abandoned when fires licked too close. Weekday commentator Neil Mitchell was on air by 4pm as panic calls were coming in and news was breaking. The station kept up its coverage for a full week, considered by many to be a lifeline with its constant updates.

Media reporters began hearing late on Saturday afternoon that people had died, but that was not officially confirmed until Victorian police held the first press conference at 10pm and announced at least 14 people, and maybe as many as 40, had perished.

The apparent tardiness of that announcement has angered some.

“I don’t feel the media and the ABC were adequately serviced with information,” ABC Victoria news boss Marco Bass says.

“I find it hard to believe the emergency services in Victoria didn’t know earlier than 10 o’clock there had been a considerable number of deaths. The information was being dribbled out very slowly, even on Sunday.”

Bass began preparing for fire stories on Friday, arranging an extra satellite truck from Sydney for live crosses from the field and deploying reporters to Gippsland and Kilmore.

“We were anticipating there were going to be fires,” he says. “They were warning it could be very serious.”

TEN’s 5pm Saturday bulletin reported record temperatures and had aerial shots of flames blowing across fields.

“All media really struggled with the scale of the crisis. It seemed to unfold so quickly,” TEN news boss Jim Carroll says.

“It’s a physically and emotionally challenging story to cover.”

Media outlets began pouring resources into the story, fielding 40-strong teams of reporters and technicians, including reinforcements from Sydney.

“The scale of it has overwhelmed all media,” Bass says.

“By Sunday afternoon we were all working together because the size of this story was just so vast. There were two separate locations and the roadblocks made it very difficult to get access. It’s by far the biggest logistical and editorial exercise I have faced in my career.”

Source: The Australian

4 Responses

  1. so is this the reason that 9 news on black saturday only covered the fires for 7mins 34secs before informing us that the people that went to the beach were disappointed with the windy conditions?

    and what ever happened to the apology that people were talking about on this site? i never saw it.

  2. Networks may be low, but I don’t think they are so low that they’d deliberately hold fire coverage to protect their precious ratings launch! Like the article says – it happened so quickly, information was scarce from the authorites and news rooms would have only had skeleton staff around on the weekend. I thought they did the best they could in those circumstances.

  3. This is what annoys me, Victorian police/authorities did not do enough to warn people about the potential fire risks in their area. They should have informed media to get this information out earlier in the day.

    Also TV media outlets should have reacted quicker too to the reporting too. Sunday’s news was pretty poor. They didn’t have the resources, plus I think the stations didn’t want to ruin their new programming for the new ratings period!

Leave a Reply