by Joe Muto
“Oh, sure,” I said, nodding. “You can’t be too careful with terrorists. After all, the TV Guide offices are in this building, right?”
Nina looked at me through narrowed eyes.
I followed her onto an escalator that took us down to the basement of the building, into a long, barren, fluorescent-lit hallway. Straight ahead was an entrance to the subway and a subterranean Wendy’s restaurant. The smell of hash-brown-flavored frying oil filled the space.
“Whoa, it’s way too early for a burger,” I cracked.
“Oh, they actually don’t have burgers this early,” Nina said, ignoring my joke. “And their breakfast kinda sucks.”
We rounded a corner, passed two workers in Wendy’s uniforms unloading a pallet stacked with forty-pound bags of frozen French fries, and approached two security guards standing sentry in the middle of the hallway. I couldn’t imagine what exactly they were guarding, because there didn’t appear to be anything else in the corridor except exposed ductwork overhead and a stack of beat-up folding chairs piled against a wall.
“Be honest,” I said to Nina. “Are you taking me somewhere to murder me?”
This time she laughed. I’d finally cracked the Ice Queen!
“No,” she said. “I’m taking you to the newsroom.”
As we got closer to the security guards, I saw that they were actually posted outside a set of thick, heavy glass doors. One of them pulled a door open as we approached, grunting a little with the effort.
As we stepped through the doorway, Nina smiled at me and said, “Welcome to your new home.”
I have to admit—I was impressed.
The Fox newsroom was built in a space formerly occupied by a Sam Goody record store. It was a massive room, about the size of two end-to-end football fields. It was packed with people—about 250 of them—sitting elbow to elbow at workstations, each equipped with a computer and a small television set with a cable hookup. Most sets were tuned to Fox, though I noticed that some were showing CNN or MSNBC. The volume was up on most of the televisions, and the din from the clashing audio was constant and relentless. I noticed a lot of people eating breakfast at their desks, and the smell of coffee and eggs and fried potatoes and toasted bagels hung thick in the air.
At the near end of the room was a glassed-in area with a half dozen people staring at a wall of forty tiny monitors, each screen no bigger than a postcard. There was a bank of ten VCRs, each about the size of a large microwave oven, arranged on shelves underneath the monitors. The technicians were jamming tapes into some machines, and snatching them out of others; hitting RECORD on the machines with new tapes and boxing the old ones, labeling them with Sharpies.
“That’s intake,” Nina said. “The satellite feeds come in from all over—updates from our reporters in the field, international footage from AP and Reuters, local news packages from our affiliates. They get recorded onto tapes, logged into the system, and filed away in the library.”
“Why are those VCRs so big?” I asked.
Nina shrugged. “They’re just old, I guess. They’ve had the same equipment here since the network started in ninety-six.”
Near intake were two large oval tables, each with about a dozen people sitting at them, most of them talking on the phone. I heard a smattering of foreign languages coming from several workers at one of the desks.
“Those are the two assignment desks—foreign and domestic,” Nina continued. “They keep in touch with all of our sources, gather the information, and spread it to everyone else at the network.”
We started walking toward the back of the room. The seating arrangement changed to squared-off areas of six desks apiece, bordered on all sides by waist-high cubicle walls.
“Each show has its own little seating area—we call them pods.” Nina started pointing as we walked past each pod, naming each show in turn. “Here’s the Fox Report. Here’s Studio B. That’s Greta. Then O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, and Cavuto.” Each pod had a large sign on the wall behind it identifying the show.
About halfway down the length of the room was a glassed-in studio with lights suspended from the ceiling, a bulky camera on a tripod, and a shiny, metallic anchor’s desk.
“Most of the studios are in other parts of the building, but we have one here. This is Studio N,” Nina said as we walked past. “N as in newsroom, as you probably figured out.”
“Oh, yeah, I definitely figured that out on my own,” I lied.
At the very back of the newsroom was another glassed-in area with monitors and VCRs.
“Is this another intake?” I asked. It looked very similar to the room we’d already seen.
“This is playback,” Nina said. “The videos that you see on air are all played from here.” A woman behind the glass was sitting in a chair, loading tapes into each machine. There was an intercom in front of her, with a disembodied voice barking commands. The door was propped open, so I could hear what was being said.
“Playback, ready number three,” the voice said.
I watched as the woman’s hand moved to the VCR marked #3, her index finger hovering over the PLAY button.
The intercom crackled again: “Ready, aaaannd . . . roll three!”
The woman’s finger shot forward and stabbed the PLAY button, and on the tiny monitor above the VCR, the video sprang into motion. It was footage of American troops marching through the desert. I looked over to a TV on a nearby desk and, sure enough, the same footage was playing on the air, with a slight lag of a second or two.
“Whose voice is that?” I asked Nina.
“That’s the director. He’s in the control room on the ground floor.” She pointed toward the ceiling.
“Wait, so they have to have someone whose job it is to just put the tape in the deck and press PLAY? Can’t they do that remotely?”
Nina shrugged. “Probably. But this is the way they do it.”
She led me away from playback toward an area where the activity seemed more frantic than the rest of the newsroom. Employees who looked about my age scurried among twenty shelves filled with tapes from floor to ceiling, darting from shelf to shelf, lingering briefly until they found the tape they were looking for, then moving on to the next shelf. They reminded me of honeybees flying from flower to flower. They all carried white plastic bins marked UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE, into which they tossed tapes with abandon.
“Did they steal those from the post pffice?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Nina said. “I guess at some point. But we just get them from the mailroom here in the building.” She pointed to a corner where the empty bins were piled into three tall stacks, each of them at almost my chin level.11
“The tapes you saw them recording in intake come back here to the tape library,” Nina said. “The production assistants take the tapes they need and bring them to edit rooms, where editors cut them.”
Sure enough, the PAs—some of them carrying bins filled to overflowing with tapes—would periodically break away from the shelving area and haul their stash to one of several closet-size rooms that lined the wall. Inside each room, I could see an editor sitting in front of dual monitors, working the control wheels of a tape-to-tape editing rig.
Nina led me to an area that seemed to be the center of all the activity, with PAs hovering over computer screens, taking notes, then darting toward the library. “This is the PA pod,” Nina said. “And this is Jim Siegendorf, the executive producer in charge of all the production assistants.” She gestured to a plump, baby-faced man in his early forties sitting at a desk amid the busy production assistants. He was the oldest person in the pod by about fifteen years, and the only one wearing a suit and tie. (Everyone else was in nothing fancier than khakis and a button-down shirt, though jeans and a polo were more common.)
Executive producer struck me as an impressive title then, and I later found out that it was actually the highest position you could obtain within the company without being named a vice president. The duties of an EP at Fo
x varied widely, depending on the specific position. Some EPs were running prime-time shows, or even entire blocks of shows—there was an EP for the overnights, responsible for everything that aired between eleven P.M. and six A.M., for example. Another EP was in charge of all the weekend programming. Jim had arguably the least enviable EP job: managing the unruly lot of irresponsible sub-twenty-five-year-olds who made up the production assistant pool.
Jim spotted Nina and me, and stood to greet us.
“You must be Joe Muto,” he said. “We spoke on the phone a few weeks ago. Good to meet you in person, finally.” I took his outstretched hand and shook it. Jim raised his voice for the benefit of the people standing around us. “Everyone! This is Joe, our newest PA!”
A few of the PAs looked my way and vaguely nodded in my direction, or gave little half waves, before darting off to pull more tapes. Most of them ignored Jim entirely and went about their business. Jim seemed not to notice.
“Are you enjoying the big city so far?” Jim asked. “Must be a real change from all the farms in Ohio.”
“Actually,” I started, “Cincinnati is a pretty decent-size metropolitan area—”
“Anyway,” he interrupted, checking his watch, “let’s get you your ID badge, and then let’s get you to a control room. We’re putting you on script duty.”
—
Nina dropped me off at the control room less than half an hour later. My ID badge hung on a lanyard around my neck, still warm from the laminator. I wasn’t thrilled with the picture—the photographer had caught me in sort of a half smile, and due to the early hour, my eyes were barely open, so I looked completely stoned. My hair was still wet from my morning shower, and the collar of my shirt hung open at a weird angle. Oh, well, I can always take a better picture when I get this one replaced eventually.12
The control room was smaller than I expected. It was on the ground floor of the building and had a large window looking out onto Forty-Eighth Street. Tourists would amble by, press their faces against the dark tinted glass, and wave as if the room held Matt Lauer and Katie Couric instead of a bunch of grumpy, stressed producers and tech guys. There was an odd dank, moldy smell in the room, supposedly the result of an ongoing drainage problem on that side of the building. A large air purifier sat in the corner and ran continuously to no apparent effect.
Even worse, as I learned later, the room smelled strongly of dead animals for a day or two after any heavy rain. Exterminators came in at one point and searched the crawl spaces for rat and raccoon carcasses, but no source for the smell was ever discovered. (A popular joke around the office was that it was the corpse of the last person to cross Roger Ailes.)
The control room was laid out like mission control for a space launch. The front of the room was a solid wall of monitors, with the biggest screen in the middle showing what was on air at that moment, and dozens of smaller screens around it showing the various camera feeds, satellite hookups, and video playback machines. Even more monitors were suspended from the ceiling, tuned to our competitors: CNN, MSNBC, Headline News, and CNBC. (We were supposed to monitor at all times what they were doing, in case they picked up on a story that was more exciting than whatever we had on air. If we saw they had a good car chase, or live pictures from a fire or tornado or something exciting like that, we were expected to jump on it as well.)
The room was jammed with about a dozen people arranged into two rows. The front row was tech: three guys who controlled the on-screen graphics, the video feeds, and the satellite connections, respectively; and the director, who bossed those three around. The second row was editorial: a senior producer, one or two producers, and a copy editor. A glassed-in booth in the back of the room had Metallica posters on the walls, giant speakers, and a mixing board that was manned by a long-haired rocker type who was apparently day-jobbing it as an audio technician.
And jammed into one corner was a rickety card table topped with an ancient-looking computer hooked up to a pair of brand-new laser printers. There were two rolling desk chairs, one of which was occupied by a girl my age. She was cute, with a sweet smile and chin-length light blond hair that framed a pleasantly round face and bee-stung lips. She was probably the best-dressed person in the room, wearing a preppy ensemble of a sleeveless dress with a pearl necklace and high heels. She looked like a sexpot version of a GOP politician’s wife, or a sorority girl on her way to her first mixer. She eyed Nina and me coolly as we approached.
Nina introduced us. “Joe Muto, this is Camie Strong.”
I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
She reached to complete the handshake. “Nice to meet y—”
“Back from commercial in one minute!” the director called out from the front row. “One minute!”
Camie’s eyes went wide. “Ohhh!” she exclaimed, and jumped out of her chair, grabbing a stack of papers off the printer and bolting from the room, almost knocking me over in the process.
I looked at Nina with surprise. “What was that all about?”
Nina chuckled, shaking her head. “She’s got to drop off those scripts for the anchor before they come back from commercial break. Watch the monitor.” The big screen in the middle of the video wall showed the square-jawed anchorman on the set, looking down and shuffling through papers on his desk, frowning as if he couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“Thirty seconds!” the director called out.
Suddenly, Camie burst onto the screen. She said something to the anchor and thrust the sheaf of papers at him. The anchor’s mic was turned off during the commercial breaks, so I couldn’t hear what she said to him, but the look on her face was apologetic. The anchor said something back, then waved her away. Camie turned and darted out of the camera frame.
“Fifteen seconds . . . ten . . . five, four, three, two . . .”
Music started playing and an animated Fox logo whooshed across the screen.
“Welcome back to Fox News Live,” the anchor began. “Continuing now with our top story: Saddam Hussein appeared in court today for the first time since his capture. . . .” I turned to Nina. “I don’t get it. They’re reading off the teleprompter, right? Why do they need the script printed for them?”
“The prompter goes down sometimes. They need backups.”
“But why does she wait until the last minute like that to drop them off?”
“Most of these scripts don’t get written until about five minutes before the anchor reads them. Then the senior editor has to go through them, and the copy editor. You have to wait until they both give their approval to print them for the anchor.”
Camie came back into the room, out of breath, with her hair a bit disheveled. “That was close.” She plopped back down in her seat, finger-combed her hair, and straightened her pearls.
“Have you ever missed a delivery?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said, crossing her fingers. “But I’ve only been on the job a week and a half.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s not a lot of time to get the hang of it.”
“Let’s hope it is,” Nina said. “Because she’s going to be training you.”
Camie spent the next hour showing me the ropes. There was only one computer for us to share, so I watched over her shoulder while her fingers skipped across the keyboard. The entire show—scripts, names of guests, videos, etc.—was laid out like a spreadsheet in a software program called Avstar. Each show was divided into blocks, broken up by commercial breaks. The blocks were identified by letters—A-block, B-block, and so on.
Each hour was produced by a totally new staff, Camie explained. The senior producer and producer picked all the stories a few hours before showtime, then the producer assigned each story to one of the three or four writers, who were toiling away at their desks in the newsroom. After the writers finished with the script, they put their initials next to it. Then the copy editor gave it a once-over and put her initials next to it. Finally, the senior producer checked and initialed it. It was then, an
d only then, that we were allowed to print it and run it to the studio.
Ostensibly, the purpose of all those layers of approval was to cut down on typos, misinformation, and so on. But the end result was that, as Nina had said, sometimes the scripts weren’t ready for us to print until mere minutes before the anchors read them. This complicated matters for Camie and me, since the studio wasn’t anywhere near the control room. To get to the studio, you had to exit the control room, go down the hall, through a set of magnetically locked security doors into the lobby, travel forty yards through the lobby past three elevator banks, go through another set of security doors that a guard had to open for you, into another hallway, and finally through one more set of doors into the backstage area of the studio. It was about two minutes just to walk the route that we sometimes had less than thirty seconds to complete, which meant that more often than not, we had to make the journey at a full sprint. It was bad enough for me and my bleeding feet, but it must have been even worse for Camie, who clacked down the corridors like a madwoman, hauling ass in high heels, pearls chattering.
“Doesn’t it bother you to run in those things?” I asked after witnessing her third sprint of the hour.
She rolled her eyes at me. “What am I going to do, wear sneakers with this dress?”
—
Camie and I, as script PAs, were stuck in the control room all day. But everybody else in the room changed out every hour, on the hour. As the previous show wrapped up, a whole new group of producers flooded the room, standing anxiously in the back while their predecessors logged off their computers. This awkward baton handoff had only a very small window in which to happen, basically the span of a commercial break.
After two or three of these changeovers, I began to get lulled into complacency. I’d never actually watched the news for so long at one stretch. It was shockingly repetitive. Each hour had the same set of stories (Saddam, Iraq, Bush campaign update, Kerry campaign update, rinse, repeat), the same reporters in the field, the same video clips. Only the anchors and the pundits changed. And even they started to blur together after a while, just a steady stream of bleached teeth and pouffy hair and precise diction, all repeating the same conservative-leaning analysis (Saddam’s trial will help President Bush by reminding voters that he’s a strong commander in chief, the Kerry campaign is in disarray because it hasn’t yet figured out how to counter Bush’s strength, etc.)