Local television is always showing clips of news stories and flashing headlines during commercial breaks. When I realized that I had to do this assignment I picked one of the fist headlines I saw. I decided to write about the nightclub fire that happened in West Warwick, Rhode Island. This story was about the Great White Band that had pyrotechnics in their show and those pyrotechnics were what started the fire and caused a huge disaster. This story has been on all the local news channels for the past week and in all the newspapers. I decided to get my information from NBC ch.4, ABC ch.7 and UPN ch.13. I also did some of my work by logging onto the Boston Globe. I noticed extremely different things from each network and a huge difference in the newspaper.
The local news is not somewhere where I would look to get an extremely detailed report but I had to take time to look into it in order to get a comparison to other networks. When I was watching NBC's broadcast there was only thirty seconds about the fire at The Place. As the days went by I was expecting to get some more details about what took place inside the nightclub. All the network kept showing was other bands that had used pyrotechnics in their shows. Each day there was still only a thirty second segment about the fire. It seemed like the network was only interested in getting the story out of the way. I did not feel like they thought there was any importance to it. I felt like I did not learn anything from the ch. 4 newscast.
There was a change in reporting when I was watching the ch. 7 newscast. A minute does not seem like a long time to me but when a minute is used in a newscast it is something to notice. Just recently ABC gave the Rhode Island fire a minute in it's Sunday night broadcast. The network even sent a reporter over there to do some in person interviews. The reporter gave a lot of detailed information. Instead of giving plain facts like NBC, ABC gave forensic details, a death count and then even took the pyrotechnics to transition into a different story.
