Honoring Lisa Colagrossi’s Passing – 8 Years Ago Today

“Oh my god… something is wrong!”

The last words uttered by a decorated local broadcast journalist en route to the Manhattan  base after a live shot on March 19th, 2015  for WABC-TV’s Eyewitness News This Morning. Her truck driver/photog got out in the middle of traffic, stopped an oncoming FDNY ambulance in moving traffic, banging the door,  forcing them to take her over with another patient saying she would die. Well honestly she was basically brain dead regardless, the family pulled the life support plug on the 20th and passed away officially 8 years ago today.

According to New York Post’s  Page Six her living mother told the management who attended her funeral in her then residence of Stamford, Conn. that “you made my daughter work herself to death”. Following the Page Six expose, both parties of the family and WABC-TV denied the exchange, and each party covered up one another, but let’s be honest, the management was shady and we who know the industry could trust this Page Six story.

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30th Anniversary of the World Trade Center Bombing in New York

On a very cold Friday lunch hour in Lower Manhattan, a large boom was heard amongst 50,000 locals at the World Trade Center Complex in New York City.  Reports say it occurred around 12:15 local time. An explosion occurred at the garage level of the complex, with extremists intents. The goal was for the terrorist to knock off one of the pillars and if you took one down the rest could topple down.

The initial reports was a transformer explosion. Consolidated Edison, or ConEd the city’s electric company reported they didn’t have an outage, nor did they cut off power. Transformers step down voltages of power, many customers do not need high voltage energy. Transformers explode in neighborhoods, and are often one for every few customers. Any explosion wouldn’t carry up 110 stories… this initial report was debunked later in the day, but it was probed by the Channel 2 anchors.

6 people died, 5 initially reported, the 6th soul was found a few weeks later into mid March. Channel 2 reported just before the 5:00 news that they got confirmation a 9-1-1 call was placed just minutes before the bombing with a “foreign accent” said then correspondent Chris Jogensen.

Days later, more information came out, the Feds were on top of the case, and found the Ryder rent a truck’s Vehicle Identifier Number or VIN from a damaged effect of the said truck. Fun fact, VIN numbers are replicated throughout various parts of a vehicle, so it’s not just a sticker on the side door. They tracked down the VIN, finding it to belong to a local Ryder site in New Jersey, one of the co-conspirators came back to the place with the Feds hiding and caught the man.

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The AutoCam Invasion in Boston, early 1990s

The recession of the 1980s into the early 90s pushed media companies to economize. The Massachusetts economy had it worse than some other places. AutoCam was made by TSM at the time. The  pedestal had this sculpture look. There was Radamec, and Vinten. All three are supported by Vinten as they bought TSM and merged with Radamec a few years later.

 WBZ-TV 1991

WBZ channel 4 was one of the first of the market to get AutoCam. They used standard ENG cameras to shoot.

WCVB-TV 1993/94

When the new set for the 90s came along in 1993, they were the next station. They had the black colored pedestals. Chronicle taught New Englanders this new technology in the behind the scenes of NewsCenter 5 in 1994

on the 25th anniversary special of the station, they had shot taped interviews, notably one from a competing station. That scene showed the AutoCam but not the boxy looking Ikgami, they switched to ENG cameras too. Ironically these bots are controlled via  hard wired connections to a computer. The camera is fed as a pass through for a touch panel monitor to trigger automated shots. The computer is the brain, and the “brain” controls the motors. The bots are dumb. Why I say this? When WCVB switched to HD, they kept ol peds, but put full HD cameras and new computer, but all the intelligence was fully backwards compatible. some stations like CBS’ Sacramento station still had these ol devices as late as 2018… but modern controllers and HD cams.

WHDH-TV 1991

it was likely that WHDH Channel 7 was the first to go to one person robotics. The station was loosing a lot of money because of the said recession and to pay off the once principal owner Bob Kraft… ironically the following year after the sale of WHDH properties, did Kraft buy the New England Patriots… you wonder if there’s a correlation.

but whoever was managing the station kept the station low fi. Sets were modified off the shelf furniture… maybe the newsroom for Live at Five was the best. But the cameras that tied into the  TSM AutoCam was the RCA-TK46. They were high tech for the time…in the early 1980s. These used tubes to capture pictures in studio. When a tube would go on the fritz, the picture would look blurry. These weren’t  as efficient like the TK-47 even those were used up till the mid 1990s. Supposedly these cameras had been purported in comments on other socials to not last for long.

But the stations blue on white branding was perfect to throw on the TK46 camera’s blue on white color scheme.

The average height of a robotic pedestal at full stow is 60″ most studios often have the cameras low for that “10 pound” factor. But the Tk46 against the AutoCam made the setup even monstrous  as the station allowed the press to come in April 1993 to announce the sale to Sunbeam Broadcasting

Both Channels 5 and 7 had one or two in their newsroom as a secondary set. WCVB and WHDH today have moved onto the Vinten’s Fusion which combines the brains of Vinten and Radamec’s approaches to automatic movement. WBZ did go to the next generation AutoCam under Vinten; the SP-2000 X-Y but CBS standardized with the 5th grade science project known as CamBot aprox in 2016.

WLVI didn’t go robotic and their manual pedestals were really outdated. WFXT went with Fox’s preferred Radamec pedestals when they did news again in 1996. However in March of 1992, the  launch of New England Cable News, they were on AutoCam from the start. The 1989 vintage continued to be in use at NECN until 2010, when they went to SP 2000 and then went to Fusion just as NBCU took managerial control. In 2020, the Fusion pedestals didn’t move to Needham, but maybe got repurposed at 30 Rock…

 

Hate Mail

Part of what’s installed on a VMware ESXi based HPE ProLiant DL 360 G5 server, has an open source, low end PBX, called Asterisk, (in fact it’s really Issabel, a “fork” or a derivative from Elastix, which the brand name no longer exists for an Asterisk code.) Issabel is a full fledged Asterisk phone system, with a lower grade Exchange (email, calendar and contacts) as well.

With that technicalities aside, there are backdoor numbers where sketch-callers leave messages.

We know Copenhagen is more narrow-minded than say the Copenhagen in Denmark, but I watched a documentary recently, it makes me wonder if Copenhagen, Minibrick and Copenhagen Denmark are unfortunate sister cities of chauvinism.

The content is threatening of nature and contains vulgar language

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#TunedOut: Raw Interviews with 4 Area Men

Taking a page out of PBS’ Frontline where they feature full length interviews, we did kinda the same for our series of reports. I thought I was outside on the deck for longer than an hour in record, but it turns out I had 20 minutes of usable content. We published this today after exporting a more condensed raw clips. There are slurs and bad words FYI. Also we threw our station’s animated bug on the lower right to protect our content.

#TunedOut: Lonely Single and Sexless Men – A Puzzling View on Romantic Relationships

Our third installment had mostly confused minifigures. To give a fair disclosure, A Puzzling View On Relationships had been plagiarized by my own blog I once published quasi-anonymously and you can see it on my decades of writing with the struggles of my autistic condition here.  Posts specifically to A Puzzling View is on it’s own hard link.

The rhetoric of the Manosphere doesn’t help matters.

#TunedOut: Kate and Jordan, the Prescott Park Ladies!

For our third installment of the ongoing series, Tuned Out: Is Masculinity in Crisis? we went lighter, and did the package of the trip to Portsmouth in November. The actual runtime of the interview was only 3:45, the conversation before and after may had been totally a minute. I was scared to death because in New Hampshire it’s hard to have a prosumer ENG/EFP camera and not have the fear to creep them out. In fact when the line of “I think masculinity is changing” had to be edited, because the microphone was not aimed at her, I was so nervous, but within the first ten seconds I flipped the microphone over, some sound got caught, so I had to cut it out, and I don’t do jump cuts, so that’s why you saw some boats riding around. This is the traditional ENG style of editing.

We kept the package down to 90 seconds; because there were certain questions where me and the minifig producer stumped “Kate”; and it wouldn’t look good. The anchor lead it off, and our reporter thanked me because BCOP did buy my clips through travel reimbursements

We used several seconds of b-roll of Downtown Portsmouth, N.H. to make it appear we were on an assignment, so getting Congress Street and shots on the water and seeing Kittery, Maine from the distance was important.

Some people could critique “Kate’s” dialect as potentially “ditzy”, she was coherent, and intelligent. Something to think about.

 

#TunedOut: On Fringe & Cringe Podcasters

Part 2 was intended to get as many eyes as possible. And as of this writing, there’s been 110 views since the upload on February 7th. Some trolls claimed, because we got 88 views, no one cares.

Well for a non fiction story for BCOP 6 to air, and to get 88 views for that troll to comment, is good enough. In fact management insisted we focus on exposing the podcasters for more views.

The associated promo was entitled Desktop Sexism

 

Rebuilding Local Media with building bricks and minifigures as the subjects. Also the King of Simulating Live events in Post Production™.