In 2003, the world was rocked by the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in which the shuttle broke apart upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, tragically killing all seven crew members. For one TV photojournalist, covering the disaster was a defining moment in their career, as they reflect on how taking a risk and learning to edit their own story that day changed their life forever. In this personal reflection, the author shares their experience covering the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, their struggles with PKU and anxiety, and how they cope with the memory of past tragedies. Ultimately, the author encourages readers to take risks, think of others, and never give up.
Over the last few months, I’ve written a lot about mental health. I’ve written about PKU. But today, I’m thinking about life, and how you sometimes can’t appreciate what you are going through until many years later. Today I’m remembering a major news story that I covered, and how actions I took that day had a trickle effect. I don’t know if I’d be doing what I’m doing today, both in video production and in PKU advocacy, if I had made different choices that day.
February 1, 2003
It was a Saturday morning and I was getting ready for work. I was a TV photojournalist at KTAL-TV, our local NBC affiliate. Being the weekend photojournalist meant I was at the bottom rung of seniority. But, if it was a slow news day then I knew the first couple of hours at work would be laid back. I pulled double duty. Besides going out to film news, if I was at the station I was sitting at the assignments desk, listening to the emergency scanners and reading press releases to see if anything would be happening that day. But, that morning, before I could even leave the house I got a call from the News Director. He was at the station, which meant something big was happening.
Space Shuttle Columbia had reentered the Earth’s atmosphere about 30 minutes prior to our call… and broke apart over our viewing area. Our region is known locally as “the ArklaTex”, and encompasses parts of East Texas, Southwest Arkansas, and Northwest Louisiana. The shuttle broke up over East Texas, and we were in the middle of the story. The News Director called me in about an hour before my shift began so that a reporter and I could get on the road.
That was 20 years ago today… February 1, 2003. But my mind immediately went back to one winter morning 17 years earlier.
I was 5 years old. My entire elementary school was gathered in the gymnasium, sprawled out on sleeping bags, eagerly anticipating the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. But the spirit of celebration quickly turned to shock, grief, and horror as we watched it explode live on national TV.
That was a moment early in my childhood when I was first confronted with the idea of death. And now, 17 years later, I was early in my career as a storyteller. Only this time I wasn’t a child watching the story unfold. I was an adult who had a responsibility to turn a story about this national tragedy, and put it on TV.
Chasing the Story
Some debris fell here in Shreveport. But we knew that the bulk of it would be to the southwest of us. We didn’t know the best place to go. It had barely been an hour since the disaster unfolded, and remember that this was 2003. We couldn’t get news on Twitter, see a story or reel on Instagram, or get updates on Facebook. All we could do was start driving toward the debris, or at least where we thought it would be. We had a choice… Either go to Nacogdoches, TX, or Toledo Bend Reservoir about an hour south of us in Louisiana. We were getting early reports of debris in both locations. We chose Toledo Bend.
That was a mistake.
But we did our best with the info we had at the time.
We had about an hour in the car to reflect and talk. Those were the days when photojournalists and reporters worked as a team to turn a story. And you spend a lot of time together in the car, so you get to know each other pretty well. The reporter I was with that day, Shawn, was a consummate professional with a reputation for being a serious journalist. We got along well.
I don’t remember our conversations that day, but I’m sure we would have been reflecting on what it meant to us personally. He was only a few years older than me, so we were both kids when the Challenger exploded. And that event certainly hovered in the background all day.
But, without a doubt, we were both excited as well. I don’t mean that we were happy about it. Of course not. But our adrenaline was pumping. Hard.
There’s a rush you get when you’re chasing breaking news. And that’s just on regular, everyday stories.
This was the biggest story in the world, and we were right in the middle of it.
We were one of the first news crews in the world to be responding to it. It would take time for the national media to send their satellite trucks and news crews. That’s when local TV news crews are essential.
We stopped at a gas station in Mansfield, LA. It’s not too far from Toledo Bend. We grabbed a few interviews with the locals, almost all of whom heard and felt the sonic boom.
All I could think about was what it must have been like for those astronauts in their final moments. One problem with being a storyteller – I have a vivid imagination. It’s an asset on most days, but a liability on days like this.
But mostly our story was uneventful. Yes, people had heard it, but I don’t recall anyone seeing anything. And we didn’t see any debris. The best we could do was shoot what I call “wallpaper footage” – shoot footage of the area around Toledo Bend to cover our story. But it wasn’t dramatic footage. As a TV photojournalist, you always want to get the best footage possible. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I knew that a photojournalist at WFAA in Dallas had been filming as the shuttle broke apart. I wanted to see some debris and film it, just to feel like we were doing our part in documenting the day. But that didn’t happen.
We soon learned that all of the real activity was happening in Nacogdoches, TX, where we almost went instead of Toledo Bend. So we filmed enough to turn a story but knew it wasn’t spectacular. You have days like that sometimes, but the professional storyteller in me was bummed that it happened with the biggest story in the world that day.
At the time, we didn’t have the ability to edit in the field. Again, this was a different time. This was long before you could record to a memory card, edit on a laptop, and transfer the files quickly. We were shooting on tape. Editing tape-to-tape.
Also, this was long before you could use your cell phone to go live on social media. Our only option in the news business at the time was a live truck. Our station didn’t have a satellite truck, which would allow us to go live from anywhere. It was also too far to get a live shot with a standard live truck – a truck with a 50-foot mast that rises into the air, sending the signal back to the station’s tower. You had to be relatively close to get a live shot with one of those trucks, and we were out pretty far.
So we drove back to the station to edit the story.
And it was then after the adrenaline had worn off, and we were casually putting together our story, that a decision I made – one simple decision – changed my life forever.
My Health and PKU
I should take a step back here for a minute and talk about how I was doing with PKU at the time. In short, I wasn’t doing that great. I wasn’t completely off-diet, but I was eating a basic vegetarian diet without tracking what I ate or drinking PKU formula. I had been told as a child that I might be able to go off diet someday, so while I didn’t eat whatever I wanted, I was way too relaxed with my diet.
And there were consequences. First, I was exhausted. All of the time. At this point in my TV news career, I worked Thursday through Sunday. On Thursday and Friday, I worked nightside – from 1:30 PM to 10:30 PM. On Saturday and Sunday, I worked all day – from 9:30 AM to 10:30 PM. Those days were a grind, and being a TV photojournalist is one part creative work, one part manual labor. So I was wiped by the end of the weekend. I was also a full-time college student. So I didn’t have a day off. Ever.
I was also depressed. By this point, I had only been in news for a year and a half but had already seen and covered some horrific stories. (I’ve previously shared how working in TV news affected my mental health, which you can read here.) And being the lowest in seniority on the photojournalism staff, I didn’t know what was in store for my career… how long I would have to work a rough schedule, and if there was any opportunity for advancement.
I stumbled into being a TV photojournalist. I had planned to be a filmmaker, but because of my relaxed PKU diet, my high PHE levels, and now the emotional stress of working in the field, hardly ever seeing my wife and the rest of my family, I felt adrift in life. Like I was living someone else’s life, just tagging along for the ride while someone else was in control.
So I didn’t have much drive or ambition in my career. I did what was expected of me, and tried to do the best I could, but I didn’t push myself to grow in my craft.
Taking a Risk
Normally, at that period of time in local broadcasting, a photojournalist would work with a reporter to turn a story. One part of the team was responsible for the technical and creative demands of shooting the story while the other would focus on reporting. And then, whether back at the station or in a live truck, the reporter would write the story and record their voiceover, and the photojournalist would edit the story.
But at that station, we didn’t have a large photojournalism staff. So we’d come back to the station and the reporter would edit their own story while we photojournalists were sent right out the door again on another assignment. So a year and a half into working in news, I had never edited my own story, or “package”. That’s a foundational skill in that industry, and I had not developed it.
Frankly, at the time I was scared. Could I handle the pressure of editing a story under a tight deadline? If you’ve ever seen an old movie where someone runs into the control room last minute with a tape that needs to air, that’s not made up. Happened all the time. I once got a tape in about 15 seconds before it hit the air, after having only 20 minutes to edit.
And what if I used a shot that wasn’t approved to air? Like something that was too graphic to air, but management didn’t clear it and I didn’t get the memo. Or what if I needed to use my own best judgment, and got it wrong? These issues are second nature to me now. But I was 22 years old, still new in my career, and unsure of myself.
I was timid and didn’t want to take the risk of pushing myself, trying something new, or worst of all, failing publicly in front of a potential audience of half a million people.
So when we returned to the station that day, I was nervous when Shawn asked if I wanted to edit. We realized soon after we returned that all of the focus was on Nacogdoches, so all we had to do was finish up our story, and we had a few hours to get it done. We were in for an unusually slow-paced afternoon with plenty of time to edit.
Shawn helped me, and the first full news story I ever edited was a story I shot about the Columbia Shuttle Disaster.
But what if I had said, “No, thanks”? What if I had not pushed myself and edited that story?
Later that year I moved to another station, and a required skill was editing my own stories. I was able to say “Yes” and show them the Columbia story on my demo reel.
Since then I’ve held many roles… TV Photojournalist, Satellite Truck Operator, Marketing Coordinator, Freelance Business Owner, and now Senior Editor/Videographer at a commercial production company.
I wonder how my life would be different had I not taken a risk and learned to edit my story that day. I certainly wouldn’t be capable of producing all of the PKU video content I’ve created since 2011.
The Perspective of 20 Years
It’s a weird thing to be talking about my professional development in conjunction with a national tragedy. But that’s the nature of the industry I’ve worked in. You see a lot of unforgettable experiences. The things that keep me up at night aren’t present-day worries about my job or family. It’s remembering stories from 15 or 20 years ago that I can never forget. Images seared in my brain that I see in my mind’s eye every single night. I don’t have nightmares anymore, but I rarely sleep straight through the night. It’s the result of living with chronic anxiety (again, I discussed all of this in greater detail when I shared my mental health story).
To this day, I still feel like I’ll get called out at a moment’s notice to cover a tragedy. And it’s always the worst at night since I was always on alert at the prospect of getting a call to go to a scene.
I just don’t sleep well.
So, frankly, it’s nice to have a positive memory that’s associated with a tragedy. It’s the only way I know how to cope… Look for the positive in everything.
Because I’ve witnessed and experienced so much heartache that only focusing on the negative would just be too overwhelming.
No one has the right to judge you, because they have no idea what you’ve been through in life. Now, it would be easy to focus only on how that applies to me and demand that others not judge me.
But I use it as motivation and inspiration to look outside myself, and never judge another. I have no idea what they’ve been through.
So, today I’m remembering the lives lost on February 1, 2003. But I’m also thankful for what I’ve learned that day and since…
Never stop taking risks.
Never stop thinking of others.
Never judge another.
And never, never, NEVER give up.
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