Coverage is harder in the digital age

Photographer Jeff Melton thinks I have a pair of cursed shoes. Every time I wear them to work, there's some sort of big fire, wreck or other event that spells out bad news for people in the county.

The first time I wore them, there was a murder. Since then, I've forgotten all the places those ill-fated shoes have taken me.

But lately, even without the shoes, bad things keep on happening in Cleveland County. The past two weeks have been prime examples of that. I've been to a fire that displaced a family near Boiling Springs, a fatal wreck at a dragstrip, and tonight I went to a bad wreck near Polkville.

For the record, I have a love-hate relationship with these types of events. I hate them because they make me nervous beyond words. I don't know where I'm allowed to stand and who I'm allowed to talk to, much less who I even need to talk to. Like many journalists, if these types of events happen at night, they keep me from sleeping.

On the flip side, I love them because it's always a challenge to get the information I need to make a good news story.

It's also hard to piece together information from so many people - some of whom might not be telling the exact truth. Some of them politely refuse to give information. Others aren't nearly as nice. It's hard to balance not bothering emergency workers as they help victims, clean up messes and investigate what happened.

But in the digital age, it's even harder to know what we should and shouldn't get on video.

Tonight was a prime example.

On the Web, I posted a video of the two cars and of people cleaning up the scene. While I was on the scene, I got footage from a distance of the helicopter that was getting ready to take a patient to the hospital and of the outside of an ambulance holding a patient.

For the record, most journalists try not to get footage of actual patients if they don't have to (which is what I did by just getting the outside of the ambulance).

At any rate, an emergency official asked me to turn off my camera for a while before the helicopter took off. I did so without a second thought. It was the right thing to do.

It was also the right thing for that person to ask me to do so, and I appreciate that person letting me know - because I don't know of a single journalist who a) would not have wanted footage of that, and b) who would have known that you're not supposed to get footage of a helicopter taking off.

With all that said, we all want to do the right thing, and emergency officials should have no qualms about telling journalists the rules, especially in the digital age. And in a lot of cases, we simply don't know what our boundaries are and need direction. Just do it nicely,as the worker did tonight, because we're just doing our jobs, too.

Sigh of relief from the battle-tested Flamingoes

Remember back to the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett is on her knees in the dirt hollering that she will never go hungry again.

Now transpose that to an ill-fated and pink-clad bunch of baseball players and insert the words, "I will never play fantasy baseball again!"

For those of you who follow my blog, you've heard me whine about the inevitable fate of the Flamingoes, my ill-fated fantasy baseball league team. I joined in this year and set a goal of coming in ninth place. There are only 10 teams, so I thought that wasn't too lofty a goal.

Unfortunately, the Flamingoes caught the bird flu around late May and suffered through the loss of three pitchers, two outfielders, an infielder and a utility player or two.

All within three weeks.

And that isn't something you can come back from, as my poor pink friends found out. No matter how hard I tried to doctor them, they kept dropping dead.

Soriano. Peavy (he later came back). Some dude who broke his wrist. Another who practically shredded his ankle. One guy missed games as a penalty for brawling. And the list goes on and on.

But even after all that, I received a glimmer of hope today.

Yes, I'm still the loser out of the bunch, but it turns out that my team had the highest batting average in the league. Small consolation, but it just might be the turnip that keeps my proverbial Scarlett in the league next year.

And I already have a goal: Just beat one person.

Not too lofty, right?

New tech-ey stuff

I recently updated the Firefox browser on my work computer, subsequently wiping out some of the extensions I regularly use and wreaking havoc on settings. For some reason, the download went awry.

So I installed Google Chrome, the new browser from (you guessed it) Google. I also downloaded Flock, which touted itself as being a "social networking" browser. But after trying them both out for a couple weeks, I decided to try my luck again with Firefox, which has been my favorite since the first version came out.

So I reinstalled the newest version of Firefox and transferred my favorites back. I then went about trying to get all the same extensions I had before, with mixed success. But I also came across an extension I didn't have from before. It's called Last FM and works a lot like Pandora.

Don't know what Pandora is?

It's a Web service where you enter in artists you like and it finds music by those artists and similar artists. You can give the music a thumbs up and it'll play more like it. A thumbs down will make it come up less often. You can also see what your friends are listening to on Pandora. For example, my roommate likes to listen to Jazz, while my friend Jennifer has a Pandora station for Timbaland. Personally, I have a "Classics" station that has some of my all-time favorite songs and artists in it - from the Rolling Stones to Sugarland.

At any rate, Pandora is great.

But this new Last FM is better, simply because I don't have to go to a Web site to have access to it. It's at the top of the browser window.

Clever.

And convenient, too, which is why I can go from Miranda Lambert to John Hiatt to Nelly Furtado to Timbaland - all without having to hit a button. (Unless I click on the heart button, which marks the song as track I love.) And, unlike my iPod, I don't have to purchase the music.

And that makes me like it even more.