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“We were able to show what the radar’s doing, and our meteorologist could actually do a far better job by being remote.
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“The OTT Desk was never meant for it, but they figured out how to build graphics and lower thirds on the screen,” says Ware.
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That’s how I got a lot on TV for our viewers - load it, tap it, and it would play.” We could do FaceTime interviews, we could route any of our live shots to it, we could play video directly out of it. DeBrosse calls it a “pretty neat piece of technology” that Gray recently invested in for each of its stations: “It’s like a mini studio that can be operated by one person. (KPLC)įrom Baton Rouge, KPLC provided wall-to-wall hurricane coverage, sending the signal back to Lake Charles using WAFB’s OTT Desk.

But it was well worth it, because it kept people from being hurt.” As Hurricane Laura bore down on Lake Charles, Louisiana, most of KPLC’s news team relocated to sister station WAFB in Baton Rouge. “It was a little chaotic getting out and getting everybody over to Baton Rouge to continue broadcasting. “Gray owns so many stations that we could go to other places,” says DeBrosse, who ultimately coordinated a move to WAFB, about 130 miles away. The first step was finding a new home base for broadcast. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked creative changes in newsrooms around the country, a weather emergency spurred innovation at KPLC. Before the hurricane made landfall as a destructive Category Four storm - one of the strongest ever to hit Louisiana - he and his team developed a new coverage plan that helped them stay safe without sacrificing their critical service to the community. Greg DeBrosse is the station’s news director. He showed me a way that it could happen - and it could be better.” I was like, ‘No, we’re staying,’ and he convinced me otherwise. “I don’t want to take credit for the decision to evacuate,” says Ware.

We are going to tell the community what they have to do to stay safe,’” says Ware.įast-forward a few days: The hurricane was gaining power, forecasters were predicting a deadly storm surge, and it was all heading straight for Lake Charles. After all, that’s what the Gray station in Lake Charles had always done to serve its market, where viewers live just off the Gulf of Mexico and deal with lots of extreme weather. When Laura was approaching southwest Louisiana in August, KPLC General Manager John Ware told his staff they were going to stay put and cover the storm. As we publish this, Hurricane Delta is bearing down on the Louisiana coast - just six weeks after Hurricane Laura struck the same area with catastrophic impact and tested at least one newsroom’s grit and ingenuity to the limit.
