Found: Who is responsible for no more IP addresses

Thu Jan 27 20:56:25 UTC 2011

On Thursday, January 27, 2011 03:26:58 pm Mark Keymer wrote:
> If you work at FOX maybe you should help get the news guys on the right
> page. :)

Coming from broadcast engineering prior to my current IT gig, let me tell you that in most larger broadcast organizations the tech folk are rather fortunate if the talent knows who they are at all, and even more fortunate if the talent takes instruction from them; the right people to get to are the producers.  Most of the time, large broadcaster talent and producers (and managers) aren't terribly receptive to corrections from technical staff.

I was in a very good situation in the stations for which I worked; but they were smaller organizations.  I always felt like a valuable part of the team, and I and the talent were great friends, as they knew I cared about making them look and sound good.

In the age of conglomeration, central IT/engineering, and outsourcing, it may be that the actual production outfit for whom the talent directly works is not the same organization for whom the IT folk work, and the broadcast tech folk may work for someone entirely different.  Additionally, the IT and tech staff are many of the times terribly understaffed, and may not even pay attention to the actual product going over the air, concentrating on the transmission, computer, automation, or studio operations/production systems technical operation rather than the content transmitted. Or they're fixing yet another virus infection; perhaps they might even get docked for correcting such an error with 'shouldn't you have been working instead of watching our news?' 

Now, if that tech happens to be the operator on duty in master control, he or she can sometimes have QA feedback capability, but not always, and almost never directly to the talent.

So, a good case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand does.

And once it is on the air, it's very difficult to get it changed; egg in the face, you know.  The fact that it was changed at all should speak volumes, IMO.  Someone did catch at least part of the error, and had sufficient feedback capability to get it corrected.