Tuesday 21 August 2007

China airlines accident



A China Airlines flight out of Taipei and bound for 那覇 Naha, Japan burst into planes shortly after landing yesterday. I worked on this piece of news all afternoon and all night. I only wrote one story and updated 2, actually. But the two stories that I updated kept me busy for six straight hair pulling hours. I must have updated the updates five or six times. Aside from new images coming in from NHK and from our reporter who flew over there this afternoon, there were a lot of communication problems and I had to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Compared to my colleague who's still in Naha, I think I had a more stressful time writing the story than she had getting the source for the story. I'm just glad the day is over. And I'm very glad that aside from a heart attack and other panic-related problems, no one was reported to be hurt.

On another note, I was really amazed at how quickly NHK worked to cover the event and to come up with a half-hour special program by 21h00, just eight hours after the event occurred. They had great-looking models and computer graphics completed in time, and got an ex-pilot for ANA and a Tokyo University professor to comment and analyze what had happened. I was absolutely amazed. This type of production capability is what I must aim for.

And just for fun, all of our stories wrote around the word "explosion." We were forbidden to use the word. If you've ever watched China Airlines' in-flight news, you may know why. ;)

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