OK, I'll admit it. I'm a narcissist. It runs in the Phillips family. Recently I was doing some ham radio type emergency communications as a result of the WTC incident for people like the Red Cross. As I write this page its now some 2 months since life has returned to "normal" and I have stopped doing the work. Out of the blue I get a phone call from a local TV station here in New York called Fox5  whom wanted to do a story on the unsung heroes of the 9-11 disaster.

Somehow they thought that the ham radio operators had saved the day by getting messages through to agencies and families where the professional systems could not. This of course was only partially the case but not wanting to miss an opportunity to wave the Ham Radio Flag myself and my friend Charlie, N2NOV, agreed to do the interview.

They had plans to interview us at "Ground Zero" to try and put some sort of urgency into the story but the police wouldn't let us in there (predictably - duh!) and so we had to do it on the street. So I spent about half an hour being interviewed by some girl called Andrea Day whom kept telling me what I did only for me to tell her that we (radio hams) didn't do that. She was getting most frustrated. I think in the end she realised that there was not really a story to be had. Anyhow, she pressed on and got some goofy shots of me and an interview. I have been doing many interviews lately, mainly for BBC Radio Shropshire (its a long story) and so I've got the hang of talking to the journalist in such a way as they can edit the conversation afterwards without cutting any syllables out or making me sound odd. The other thing I have learnt is "the sound bite". In the UK we call it a "vox pop". It seems that I have acquired this skill from my journalist father (nature or nurture? I'm sure I did a paper on this in college). The trick is to say something that will ensure that you don't end up on the cutting room floor.

Now it should be noted that the Fox5 10 O'clock News is not exactly gripping viewing. In an hour of programming the news takes up about 10 minutes and then the rest of it is taken up with "dog bites man" stories. The night before our story aired they had a full 5 minutes about a Barber shop whose neon light was keeping his neighbors up at night. Out of half an hour of interview I managed to get a total of 2.17 seconds of air time! To view the bit that I was in click here. To view the full 1 minute 17 second  item click here.

So as it turns out Andrea Day's brother lives in the same street as I used to live in when I was at home in Slough (there's an oxymoron somewhere in there). Small world huh.

© & ® Mark A Phillips, G7LTT 1998/99/2000/01
This page was last updated Friday October 08, 2004 23:18 Eastern Daylight Time