Life comes at you fast

This is me in a state of bliss. No, seriously. I love my job.

You know what insanity is? Realizing that in 5 days, you'll officially be two years out of college, in your dream job, living on the beach. Honestly, it's the best kind of insanity there is out there and every day I sit back and thank God for the blessing of being where I am in life.

I know I talk about how thankful I am for the opportunities I have, how grateful I am for a chance to learn every day at my job, to not be stuck behind a desk 8 hours of the day, but sometimes I really have to let it truly sink in that I have the best job on the planet for me.

However, like I've said in that past, there are some definite downsides to this and one of those downsides came up in the struggle of covering the Boston Marathon bombings.

Breaking news is a big deal in so many ways to people who watch the news but even more so for those that "make" the news. The world we live in is so different than it ever was and I'm still waiting for television news to figure out it's place with the scope of what viewers expect changing so much.

The other day I had a gchat conversation with a friend of mine who said he didn't understand why reporters from CNN didn't get any closer to where police were. Earlier last week, I had another friend comment on how slow television stations were at reporting the facts and how he get most of his information from blogs and Reddit on the tragic situation. Then another friend made her own statements about how the news is potentially putting our police officers in danger for reporting things they're hearing over the scanners and whatnot.

Okay.

First, reporting things heard over the scanners is just a huge no. There's that. There's no if's, and's, or but's about that. Period.

Now that that's out the way, I feel like it's important for my industry to take a step back and look at everything that happened wrong in our coverage. I've learned that as much as I want to be first on a story, it's 1 MILLION TIMES more important to be accurate…but how do we reconcile that in a time when many of our viewers think they're entitled to information?

Well…I have one opinion to the whole thing. Viewers are entitled to one thing and one thing only: facts. As a reporter my job isn't to speculate, it's not to make assumptions about anything, but to investigate and get to the bottom of the issue. There's a reason reporters prefer to get emotional sound bites from people versus facts: we can say the facts, I'm not here to represent my subject's feelings, plain and simple.

You can't compare television news to a blog because, generally speaking, most people spouting things off on the Internet aren't triple checking their sources for accuracy. We aren't one in the same, so - to all my friends asking us to stoop to that level - well, you see how that ends up. To my other friend that suggested we get closer, well…after being told by police for lesser stories to back up from a scene or move further away from a location - for my own safety - I will just say: no.

My job isn't to change my standards for reporting to satisfy the viewer. My job is to get facts from multiple sources...or better yet, get the source saying it on camera to attribute what's being said, that way it doesn't blow up in my face should it be wrong.

If CNN had been right with their exclusive report, everyone would know and everyone would probably move on from it, but because they were wrong, it won't go away so easily; people may not remember who reported it first, but they will remember who reported it wrong.

#Redbox52: The problem with feelings

Ahhh! Happy Monday! I hope that everyone's week is going well. Normally, Monday is my day off, but now that we have a couple people that have moved on to new television stations (one to Fort Myers, the other to Orlando - gonna miss 'em so much!) things have gotten a bit shaken up. Not to worry though, I'm working better than ever and happier in the past few weeks than I've been in a long time.

So, onto this week's #Redbox52, Killing The Softly:

First thoughts: good movie - a taaaad bit violent, but since I don't mind violence, it's alright by me. I can definitely say the best thing about this movie is the intentional use of news footage from the financial crisis of 2008 - it was literally brilliant. 

Or maybe I'm so used to movies just doing their own thing that when I see something done well, it just blows me away.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to watch. The clips that were used were always placed against a scene that directly related to what was being said, I love that.

There was a lot of interesting dialogue in the movie and for some people that was a setback, but there were a few interactions that really got me going, one in particular was between Driver (Richard Jenkins) who works with the mafia as a middle man of sorts and Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) who is a hitman.

They're discussing a hit that needs to be made and Cogan goes into why he doesn't want to hit a particular target and gives a better understanding of the title of the movie.

"I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don't like feelings. Don't want to think about them."

It caught me off guard a bit once I understood what killing someone "softly" actually meant. After thinking it over, it brought to mind various interactions I had in the past with people on social networks, from Tumblr to Twitter, one of the great things was that you're able to make a connection with people, getting a glimpse into whatever parts of their life they're willing to expose.

The downside, of course, is that depending on what you put out there, you also are opening yourself up to a lot of criticism. In fact, I would go off on a limb and say that most interactions online whether it's commentary on a show or on an event happening in someone's life, what a celebrity is wearing or something happening in the news, since we don't directly know the people we can say whatever we want to, often without feeling any sort of remorse.

As someone who works in the news industry, one of my biggest fears is that one day, I will stop being able to relate to people, that I will eventually get desensitized to it all. Just yesterday I did a story about a 7-year-old who was mauled by 2 pitbull mix breeds that died and another story on a 90-year-old man who was murdered. A former coworker of mine once told me that one of the things that haunts him is the fact that when he would drive around town, the first thing he would remember is the stories he had done.

I drove around town a few weeks ago and realized, I was the same way. On one corner, a homeless person was found dead, on another, a manhunt for a robber that had guns and was taken down by dogs. It breaks my heart a little bit to think about how in just a matter of 1 year, I covered 3 or 4 stories about teenagers dying behind the wheel, far too many memorial services for young people who hadn't even gotten a chance to get to college, to live their lives to what we considered a full extent.

It hurts. On one hand, as a reporter, I don't want to relate, I don't want to have feelings about my stories because God knows they would haunt me...but on the other, to not have some sort of feeling about it all would make me less than a human. I don't know how reporters in the field, covering wars, genocide, sex slavery - it's one thing to do a long form documentary on it, but in news, it's often that you cover something for a day or two and then it's on to the next thing, no follow up, no seeing how things go later in life. It's a hard balance because if we stayed on one thing too long, the sad truth, is that most people wouldn't care...and I think that's probably what hurts the most.