I was on the local news last night — top of the ten o’clock hour.
They pegged it to Nagin’s 100+3 day press conference, citing his quip about commercial blight, and then segueing to our rodent-infested grocery.
They shot the interview with me yesterday afternoon. The camera operator (who bravely ventured into the grocery) turns out to be a blog-reader. He was even at Rising Tide. Unfortunately I didn’t get his name. The reporter was Cyndi Nguyen. After talking to me they interviewed Ryan and Zion, Lydia’s sons who live next door to the grocery.
That night they came back, and Cyndi did a live stand-up in front of the grocery. She even brandished a printout from this blog.
I was very happy with the way they handled the story. Twelve-year-old Zion giving a tour, showing where the rats come through, really brought it home.
I don’t have any way to record TV at home, but I took some pictures of the screen. You can watch the video on the WGNO website, but unfortunately you’ll need the RealOne Player (free) and I can’t figure how to actually save the file. I hate that file format. Why would a TV station want to make it difficult for people to share their content? They’ve got their brand plastered on the screen. They would only stand to benefit if it was easier to share.
I’ve also been contacted by some city officials who read my op-ed piece. There are some hopeful developments, but nothing substantive yet.
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I can’t remember exactly how I came across your blog, but I’ve been reading it for awhile. I wish there were more folks like you around who were willing to make the effort to make things better. You rock!
Mark is the photog, I’m a producer for WGNO, and loyal b.rox reader. Mark and I both pitched the story a day apart. Now if only we could cover the blog covering the TV news crew covering the blogger…
Zion was great, and the ‘juicy rats’ comment is the best thing we’ve put on TV in a while.
Great Stuff B! Thanks for letting us know where Cyndi ended up…she was a favorite here in Baton Rouge and didn’t know where she went…Now, if we can get the owner’s response…maybe he’ll call Vince for a disguise?
I think you can use WireTap to gank any given streaming asset into QT. I could be wrong, of course. You can also find the actual RM asset by burrowing through the layered redirects in the websise scripts; generally it’s neither encrypted or protected and can be easily downloaded once you burrow past the obfuscation.
Given Ian and Mark are apparently readers here, I bet you could get them slide you a DVD or some such.
Good on y’all. Shame that it takes calling in the media to force the city and the owner into responsible action, but let’s hope this works.
Mike, isn’t WireTap just for audio? And naturally I tried to dig down and get the asset, but it’s only available over RTSP, which my browser kicks over to RealPlayer.
I don’t really want the video — it’s not worth any trouble. If it were easy, sure, I’d keep a copy. My point is why wouldn’t ABC 26 want to make it easy?
There’s a program for Mac called CocoaJT which can record real player RTSP streams. I just recorded the stream and uploaded it here:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2mss4d
Simon, you are the man. Thanx.