Let's Go To The Massacre!

Sometimes when I'm feeling nostalgic about my hometown, I bring up the following sports clip from a local sportscast that aired in the mid-90's.

Enjoy.



The frightening thing is that this guy now works in a major market and is a highly paid broadcaster. Yes, Matt Lorch found national attention in Miami, Florida as one of the first reporters to cover the "hanging chad" controversy during the 2000 elections.

From there, it was on to Boston, where he now sits as the early evening announcer for the NBC affiliate.

To be fair, small market television is filled with newbies who move up to larger markets, using stations like this CBS affiliate as springboards to better paying gigs. They cut their teeth with skeleton crews, shitty equipment, and poor training. There's a lot of errors on that ladder up, and thank god someone had the mindset to record this one.

It wasn't just concentrated with the CBS affiliate either. I remember the NBC station around this same time decided they would provide 24 hours of live news breaks on the hour. After midnight, they had one intern set up his own news breaks and I had the chance to watch the first live break of his professional career.

No video exists (as far as I know of, anyway) and it only lasted less than a minute, but the young man appeared to have a panic attack while on camera. It was so intense that I puposely stayed awake for most of the night just to see if he would eventually pass away on live television.

By the end of the week, he just blurted out his 30 seconds of news in such a rushed delivery that it was obvious his main goal was to just get out of the local break as quickly as possible.

As bad as that seems, it was better than the sweating, heavy breathing, deer in the headlight look of that first newscast.