7 Comments

1. 

   “It leaves me wondering, as I sit at my desk with a lukewarm cup of almost acceptable coffee, how do they go on? How do these victims—the sick and suffering, the fearful, the desperate—overcome this moment?”

   So… you’re not making your best calls?

2. 

   The stories we tell matter, but so do the ones that never make headlines.

   Or it can be the total opposite. There is a reporter in Tijuana who was a legend because every night he would sleep in his car outside the Red Cross with the scanner on, waiting for anything, mainly shootings or accidents, but also any arrest that he could put on TV the next morning, and on a slow news day producers can put anything on tv, a kid busted for weed? You’d see him on TV, Homless arrested for loitering? Also TV worthy, and noone, nobody at all would stop to think about the real life implications of that kind of journalism, the cops loved him because he would put their job on TV, which they never thought of as wrong, the producers loved him because he would fill airtime, and the scanner would be this umbilical cord that would feed lazy newsrooms straight from the belly of the police HQ.

   Scanner culture is a cancer on newsrooms.

3. 

   I get why some of your examples are bad, but why do you think scanner culture is a cancer on newsrooms? Without the scanner we’d miss a lot, and only cover what the police tell us in their press releases.

4. 

   I think without the scanner we’d only miss the police’s version of events but in real time, I understad that the scanner is just a tool and the journalist can choose how to use it, in that sense there are better tools that allow us to get to the bottom of the truth, like information access laws (for example FOIA in the US)

   In the end the bigger problem is what I like to call lazy journalism, a way to do journalism in which you only get soundbites and print/brodcast those soundbites unchallenged as if they were truths. I think this is the real problem and has more to do with things like work quotas, the power of advertisers and corporate sources; but scanner culture is a facilitator of this, it might not be the cancer, but it sure helps it grow.

5. 

   There are other elements to consider. Our area went to encrypted digital police (thank God fire hasn’t gone that way yet – and they’ve run into MAJOR tech woes with the switch, perhaps a bit of karma) – so people on Facebook etc. ask, even beg us to know what happened in the wreck they passed over the pass etc. – and the overwhelmed OSP etc. often don’t have that info for hours, even days. It’s like I just said somewhere else, folks sneer at ambulance-chasing media – but boy, they sure want to know where that smoke column is coming from, why the traffic made them late for work or why they heard sirens in their area or saw cops racing down their street. And they ‘don’t want to bother’ dispatchers at the 911 non-emergency number – so they ask US, on Facebook etc. And are grateful for whatever info we can provide. Sure, that used to happen by phone, but many people who would NEVER bother a newsroom by phone are fine popping us a FB note. And when we find out, they are grateful for the info – whether it’s something that becomes a news story or not. It’s an interesting new role in the world of social media. But I digress (always;-)

6. 

   Everyday I always here the reports of the heroin overdoses on the scanner. Unfortunately, I’m getting used to it.

7. 

   Our scanner has really helped us out sometimes, alerting us to major shootings in the area/giving some guidance on where we ought to send folks. Far too often, we mentally tune it out.