Friday, August 17, 2012

Friendly Competition

In the dog eat dog world of television news, most people that work in the field know their competition.  Sometimes we let them borrow a spare battery if it's needed.  Occasionally we'll hold their microphone during an interview.  And more often than the average viewer might think, we interbreed.

Case in point: that's my smoking wife and I at the Federal Courthouse in Charlotte today.

We were staking out the same accused convict and anxiously awaiting his perp walk this morning when we paused for this picture together. 

The actual story is interesting, but I won't dive into it here.  What's worth taking a look at is the cameo that each of us made in the others story that aired this evening.

Kristy makes a cameo in my story here, at around the 1:45 mark.  She's trying not to fall down in those 4 inch heels.

Conversely, I'm the green streak sprinting through the background of her story here, about half way through the playout.



And it's not the first time an encounter in the field has occurred since our move to the Queen City.

That sunglasses wearing beauty standing next to Esmeralda Consuela (the name I gave my camera, it's a long story), is the aforementioned smokin' hot wife when she showed up to a press conference I was shooting at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department one lone Saturday Morning.

The wife was pulling a rare Saturday AM tour of the news world.

And a couple of months ago, we both showed up at the scene of a homicide in which a father had shot his son.

It was nice having her there, because those kinds of stories are the hardest to cover.



But as almost anyone who knows us is aware, we weren't always professional competitors.  We met and consequently fell in love while working at the NBC affiliate in Wilmington, NC. 

And we made a pretty good team in fact. 

This is the very last story we worked on together before moving to Charlotte.  It was the 4th of July Battleship Blast on the river front in Wilmington.  It was pretty spectacular in the fact that even though we were working, a large group of our closest friends came out to watch the fireworks with us, and it was a memory I'll always hold onto.

The saying that "behind every great man is a great woman" could never be more true than in the case of my marriage.  My wife is the reason I feel great.  She consistently encouraged me as I made my transition from production assistant, to director, and eventually to photojournalist.

Mrs. Yo! Cameraman! is a rare find indeed. She's the best thing about me.

So when people find out that my wife and I work for competing television stations, the usual first questions are something about "how I feel about it?", or "what it is like?"  And the answer is pretty simple.  I like my competition just fine.  Hell, they even pay half my rent every month.

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