SFLTV - South Florida TV blog

I was streaming some news from back home in Bulgaria, from bTV when they ran a news update showing the hurricane damage in New Orleans and what do you know, WFOR’s footage made it on the air. They also showed Bourboun street sign and a broken window of a police cruiser, not sure if that video was from CBS4.

My country too has been dealing with massive floods for the first time in decades, except there we have huge mountains and several villages were buried in avalanches of mud from the mountains. The weather has definitly gone crazy this year.

The local stations, although very weak in their coverage compared with here, have special phone lines and SMS numbers you can call to donate money. Every time you call or SMS you get charged 1BGL to your phone bill.

An insider tells me that WTVJ-NBC6 have hired a new assitant news director. What is interesting to note here is that this isn’t just another new hire. This person comes from WHDH where he was an Executive Producer. Before joining WHDH that same person worked at WFOR, and before that at WSVN.

Notice a trend here? If you’ve watched NBC6 lately you’d notice them trying to be edgier and faster paced, take this into account plus this new assistant news director and you’ll see how he or she fits into the overall picture and when you mix it well and let it sit what do you get? You get something that looks and talks like WFOR and WSVN, but it’s on NBC6. No more sleepy news? We’ll see. I was told he/she is “very aggressive and extremely competitive” don’t be surprised to see NBC6 being more hyper than usual.

I have WPLG’s promo. DVR is recording CBS4 right now and I have pre-recorded video from yesterday so expect to see them here soon.

One of the insiders just emailed me to say that CBS4’s Jason Wheeler will be off untill next week. Sand got in one of his eyes and scratched the cornea. Jason was reporting from Deerfield Beach last night neary the beach where the wind was blowing a lot of sand. Using gogles in the future might not be a bad idea.

Some might have wondered why on the fly-over video of damage in the area you’ve seen on 7 and 10 there’s a tag in the corner saying WPLG/WSVN. The two stations have made a pool arrangement to give the choppers and the crews some break while covering storm related damage. One station’s chopper crew would fly a few hours, go down to refuel and take a break while the other station would be up getting video footage for a few hours and so on. This isn’t permanent, probably for just a couple of days.

For those who watched the FTAA riots stations pooled their choppers then as well and sometimes you saw the same live video on a couple stations

Update: I’m watching WPLG’s coverage of the huge warehouse fire from earlier today, around 5pm, and it looks like they tapped both 7Skyforce and Sky10’s video. They had shots from WSVN’s chopper upclose from the scene, and then they’d switch to what I think it was Sky10 from the distance showing the fire. Then when both choppers were near each other 10 kept switching back and forth showing different angles