What happened on last night's Reporting Scotland?

Don't panic Anas!

Lightening can strike twice sometimes and that was certainly the case for Reporting Scotland's Sally Magnusson last night. Last summer, she made headlines across the Scottish press after a lunchtime bulletin she read went into meltdown thanks to the lack of co-operation from technology. On last night's late bulletin, the technology failed on her again.

Being a student of journalism and an aspiring broadcast journalist, I had to think critically about what happened during the late night bulletin from BBC Scotland. I was lucky enough to record as much of the bulletin as possible last night and I played it back a number of times.

From early on in the bulletin, I was beginning to think that something was wrong. When the clip of Nigel Farage and the protests surrounding the presence of the UKIP leader didn't play properly then that was the moment when plan B had to come into play. Sally and her BBC Scotland weather presenter colleague Christopher Blanchett filled much of the remaining abundance of on air time talking about the weather and did it in a manner which was just genuinely admirable (it was pretty lucky that the weather map hadn't gone into meltdown as well!). 

BBC One Scotland could well have easily cut the bulletin short and gone straight to another local BBC news bulletin anywhere else within the United Kingdom, but they instead stuck with what they had left of the troubled news bulletin and the time left was used up very effectively despite the unfortunate circumstances. What I loved especially was that Sally and Christopher had such an engaging conversation on air about the weather prospects that were ahead for Scotland, that it could well have just the main subject of the whole bulletin. You could even tell at one stage that Sally was giving Christopher an indication that he should continue (since there was so much time left to fill). 

Both presenters should be lavished with praise for the calm, cool and collective manner that they displayed last night. They had to think of a plan B without any warning and there seemed to be absolutely no sign of any panic whatsoever which makes their performance all the more admirable. 

Finally, here's one last thought. I think I and many of my peers could benefit from some sort of a training event where we have to be put in a position when we have to respond to an unexpected event taking place around us (whether that is video clips failing to play, breaking news coming in or other forms of technological failures impacting upon the running of a news bulletin). The whole purpose of this blog post is to be retrospective in a constructive manner and I hope those of you reading this will appreciate that all of us who work in journalism or any other related field can always learn from events where things go wrong.

Preparation is always key, but having a plan B can sometimes be very useful too.