CityNews has long been boasting about its unique anchorless news format, which goes from reporter to reporter without anyone coming on in between, allowing stories to air without a de facto anchor.
 
It’s not my favourite idea, but it definitely is different. Still, I always wondered what would happen if there was a problem and things didn’t go as planned in the carefully arranged line-up. On Sunday, I got my answer.
 
The 6 PM show started with reporter Faiza Amin live on location near a controversial anti-immigration billboard. She did the intro, threw to the story and waited. It came on with no sound for what seemed like an hour, but actually was about 20 seconds. Anyone who’s worked in broadcasting knows how long that can feel when there’s a technical snafu.
 
They came back to Amin – whose story had essentially not aired – and although I sensed that she had more stories to read, she threw back to the newsroom, promising “more later.”
 
Apparently with nowhere else to go, the director took a shot of the newsroom position where Pam Seatle should have been. But she wasn’t in position and instead could be seen in the distant background sitting at a computer (below.) When she discovered she was up, she bounded out of her chair and rushed out of frame, her shoes making a loud clicking noise in an otherwise silent studio as she tried to get where she needed to be. She appeared to put on the wireless mic she really should have already been wearing and grabbed the script she didn’t have in front of her.
 
Meanwhile, the harried director took the viz of a shooting scene with no sound as Pam struggled to get ready. After another 20 seconds of silent video, in which you can hear the mic being pinned on, Seatle finally began reading the copy.
 
She then got through a second voice-over story O.K., before the video separator took viewers to another live eye, this time at a local park where some dog poisonings were suspected. The reporter, Erica Natividad, also had mic issues, as she silently mouthed her intro. So they started playing the story, with her still speaking on camera.

Finally, they got the tape sound issue straightened out, but now you heard Natividad read the tail end of her intro while also airing her pre-recorded voiceover that began her story. So she was effectively talking over herself.

By the time they got it all straightened out, three precious minutes had gone by, and the show looked and sounded like a disaster.
 
I was going to go over to CFTO, but frankly it was like one of those spectacular car crashes on the highway, where automobiles explode into a ball of flame. You know you shouldn't stare, but you just can't look away.  
 
I bring all this up not to make fun of them (I’ve been there, done that – when something goes wrong right off the top of a show, it can be like dominos of disaster falling, and it’s almost impossible to recover.)
 
We were always told that if something went wrong, immediately throw back to the anchor, who would pick up the pieces and keep going. In this case, there was no anchor to go back to and they were hoist by their own petard
 
When they got rid of Gord Martineau, presumably to save on his salary, they let go of a real pro. And though he wouldn’t likely have been working on a Sunday, it shows the danger of such a freeform news format. With no one to go back to, there’s no place to hide. And in this case, that wasn’t a good destination.