Answer by Terry Irving, Author and TV Producer, on Quora,
I was working as Editorial Senior Producer in the New York Control Room for CNN in the evening of Monday August 29th, 2005. Most of us had worked through the previous night and all day as Hurricane Katrina came ashore. For the first half of NewsNight with Aaron Brown, the story was how Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast (although no one really knew how badly yet) but, miraculously, had jinked to the east and the enormous power of the storm had largely missed New Orleans. There were pictures and reports of damage, but they were relatively minor and cheerful weathercasters were showing how lucky everyone in New Orleans should feel.
Then I got a phone call from Jeanne Meserve, a superb reporter and longtime friend. In a hushed voice, she said, "It's all flooded. I can hear the people calling. There are bodies floating by."
For an instant, we were all taken by surprise--this was supposed to be a "feel good" story about a city managing to survive almost certain destruction. Jeanne continued, "I don't know why -- maybe it's the levees. I'm up on Interstate 10 and there's at least 10 feet of water down there. The cameraman went out in a boat but they wanted to bring some people back so I stayed here. It's pitch black and I can hear the screaming."
I could tell how hard she was trying not to break into tears. Her voice was still hushed, almost reverent as she tried to convey the enormity of what was happening out in the dark; working very strictly from the cries, the little she could see in the light from the overpass, and the brief reports from rescue boats.
Executive Producer Wil Surratt ordered the phone call put into an audio connection immediately, gave Aaron Brown the briefest of instructions ("It's Jeanne. She's saying that it's really bad. She's ahead of the wires so just talk to her and get the news.") and we put her on the air. I know we went overtime -- in fact, I believe CNN stayed lived all night.
We didn't have any pictures until the crew came back and they'd been more involved in rescuing people than shooting video so the shots were spotty and didn't really show much in the dark. It was mostly Jeanne Meserve's steady, calm, and hushed voice coming out of the darkness and describing a human tragedy that would only be revealed in the morning. She did a fantastic job -- never going beyond the bounds of what she actually knew, never making assumptions about what had happened, but simply reporting the cries in the dark, the desperate people swamping the one or two rescue boats, the swirling of the black water.
So, how does it feel? Well, it's satisfying if you manage to get it right -- show the right pictures, avoid the old or mislabeled ones that always pop up, tell the facts you can verify, and carefully report what you believe is happening with a repeated statements that it's conjecture and what you've based it on.
It's satisfying but, the fact is, a major breaking news story is always a tragedy. You get a warning for any good news (Mandela's release, Election Results, etc.) but bad news just comes out of the dark when you least expect it. You can work like crazy for as long as you can but, at some point, you have to stop and then the human misery and sorrow hits you like a hammer.
Don't buy the story that news people don't care. Watch Frank Reynolds reporting on the shooting of Ronald Reagan or Walter Cronkite's announcement of the death of President Kennedy, or anyone's reporting on the Twin Towers. Yeah, six months later when you get an award or something, you might feel good but, at the time, it's just a determination to keep working, a dread of making a mistake, and the fear that if you stop for a second, the story might just overwhelm you.
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