They’re juggling dogs, kids and spouses to do the TV news — live, from their living rooms
Midway through a quick tour of his slapped-together work-from-home setup, WSOC-TV (Channel 9) investigative reporter Joe Bruno snaps his fingers twice and calls to his dog Dansby, then stoops over to pick him up.
“He has made some appearances in the background of my shots occasionally,” Bruno says, chuckling, as he hoists the boxer-beagle-pit bull mix in his arms. “If you look when I’m live, typically he’s over near that yellow chair wandering around.”
As a setting for “reporting-live-from” shots, his living room is a jarring change of pace from a place like, say, on the side of I-77 covering the toll lane project; but yes, amid the coronavirus pandemic, his living room simply will have to do.
Indeed, this is the new normal for Bruno, for dozens of other television journalists throughout the Charlotte area, and for thousands of their peers across the country, as their professional and personal lives have quickly become intertwined in unexpected ways amid their scrambling to cover one of the most complex and rapidly changing stories in generations.
Here’s how a handful of Charlotte’s most high-profile TV news personalities have managed in the age of the coronavirus to deliver news and information to viewers — often, now, directly from their home to yours.
Brigida Mack, Fox 46 Charlotte anchor
Back in the pre-pandemic days, Mack — who joined Fox 46 morning show “Good Day Charlotte” in January — would cozy up on one of two matching sofas right next to co-anchors Page Fehling and Jason Harper.
But over the past few weeks, they’ve gotten further and further away from each other.
First, as social distancing became a recommendation, the show started a rotation that saw two of them in the studio — seated “farther apart” on the couch, Mack says — and one in the newsroom. Then, as it occurred to them that they were “really not far apart enough,” they started rotating so that the two in the studio were on opposite sides of it, and the third anchor was part of the show via a live feed from their home.
Two weeks ago, though, as social distancing became virtually a requirement, their bosses mandated just one in the studio, with the other two co-anchors joining remotely from home. So now they’re each in the studio for one week, then out of it for two.
Under this new system, she says, she prefers working at home. “It’s actually kind of nice to just walk downstairs and be like, ‘Oh, you’re at work!’” While there’s a bit of a jury-rigged feel to her set-up (which is built around a bar cart with a stool), she has the advantage of a husband with a news-photography and -videography background. “My lighting,” she says, “is bomb.”
She still can’t quite believe it, though: “After all of the things that I’ve covered in nearly two decades in the business — hurricanes, earthquakes, severe weather, winter storms — I never thought I would be going live from home in the middle of a global pandemic.”
As for being in the studio now, it’s kind of eerie, she admits. Maybe even a little post-apocalyptic.
“No floor director, no other talent, nothing,” says Mack, who is the one there this week. “Normally we would have a camera operator who would also double as the floor director. But we don’t have anything. The director comes in to lock down the shot, then they go back into the control room.”
“It does take getting used to — especially for morning news, which is a little lighter, where you vibe off of each other’s energy. That energy isn’t present in the same way anymore. It’s still there, but ... it’s different.”
Brad Panovich, WCNC-TV meteorologist
Ask Panovich about his home studio, and he’ll start geeking out pretty quickly.
“I gamed a lot growing up, so I built my own computer from scratch,” he says, “I’ve got this Intel i5 chip, but it’s one you can overclock. So I’ve overclocked it, and got 32 gig of RAM in there and a 6-gig video card. I have a three-monitor display on my desk. I have a big Yeticaster mic. Then we also have fiber at the house, so my internet connection is amazing. It’s just a really, really nice setup.”
It’s so nice, in fact — for everything from live-streaming to editing high-definition video, but also for useful high-end weather tricks like tracking storms — that after Panovich did a pretty-much-technically-perfect test run from his home on live television, his bosses at WCNC had some very straightforward feedback for him: That’s great! Don’t come back.
So since March 18, he’s done all of his weather reports (for the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. weekday newscasts) from home, mostly in that studio but occasionally in the middle of his backyard, “when the weather’s nice.”
Pretty much the only place he’s gone besides the grocery store in the past two weeks is Sam’s Club, to purchase a TV that he positioned behind him just over his shoulder, to display graphics. And pretty much the only difficulties he’s had have been of the completely non-technical variety.
“I basically told my kids when this all started, ‘Hey guys, you can’t be yelling and screaming, because you never know when I might be on TV.’ And they honestly have done a really good job,” says Panovich, who’s been with the station since 2003 and has a 10-year-old son (Kyler) and an 8-year-old daughter (Kinley).
“But I think the hardest part’s been for my wife (Tammy). She does not stay up very late. So when I’m in here broadcasting at 11, 11:30 at night, and she might be wanting to go to bed, she’s gotta listen to me do the weather. I mean, there’s a big barn door I can close, but it’s still right next to where our bedroom is. So I’m sure she’s like, ‘I can’t wait till this is over.’”
Molly Grantham, WBTV News anchor
The problem, says Grantham, isn’t her almost-9-year-old daughter Parker, who’s pretty good at disappearing into her schoolwork.
It’s her 5-year-old son Hutch.
“Like, here he comes right now,” she says. Then to him: “Yes, sir? I think that looks like a bag that you would put something in. An umbrella bag. Like a long bag. Hey, I’m on the phone, can you please go somewhere else for 10 minutes? Thank you very much. And then you can sit and listen to my call at 10 o’clock, OK? It’s a video call. You’ll like it. OK? Thank you.”
She knows she’s not alone. She knows thousands of parents are out there around the region trying to get work done as small children pester them with questions and issues and requests with almost pathological frequency.
“But yeah, that,” she says, turning her attention back to her caller, “is the problem.”
This summer, Grantham — who has been a part of WBTV’s news team since 2003 — and her husband Wes will be adding a third kid into the mix: She just hit the six-month mark last week, and is due on July 13.
And as a proactive measure, due to the fact that her pregnancy puts her at an increased risk for severe illness from the coronavirus, her bosses have relieved her from anchoring early-evening shows for the duration. Instead, during the afternoon, she works at a built-in desk in a hallway off the garage (Parker often sits and does her schoolwork there, too, right next to mom), reading scripts, readying content, and talking to sources.
Then around 8 p.m. she heads into the newsroom — where by that time there are no more than five people in the entire building — and solo-anchors the 11 p.m. newscast.
“I am glad that the station did it. I mean, I understand why. It’s just — you know, you’re sitting at home trying to cover the story of the generation. And you find ways to do it. But in some ways, you want to be there,” she says.
“And then again, in some ways I want to just wrap myself in bubble wrap.”
Joe Bruno, WSOC-TV reporter
Unlike most of his reporting peers, Bruno isn’t just doing much of his work from home right now. He’s doing all of it from home.
That’s because he had done an in-person interview with Dale Folwell shortly before the North Carolina State Treasurer tested positive for COVID-19, and upon hearing that news (on March 25), Bruno elected to self-quarantine at home for a period of 14 days, he says, “out of an abundance of caution.”
The photographer Bruno worked with on the assignment that day is also self-quarantining, though neither has shown any symptoms.
And so, lacking pretty much anything else he feels is worth doing while stuck inside his house, he just gets up every morning and immediately starts hitting refresh on the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services website, checking his inbox for updates that he can post on Twitter, and setting up interviews on Zoom, FaceTime or Skype.
He goes live from ... somewhere in his house, it just depends ... during WSOC’s weekday newscasts at 5 and 6 p.m.
“My fiancee, she kind of helps me out with arranging live shots,” Bruno says, laughing.
He’s reported live from the dining room, with the TV in the background. He’s reported live from the living room, with the TV in the background. He’s reported live from the kitchen, with a window covered by blinds in the background.
“There isn’t too much creativity, but we’re making it work somehow. ... Oh, and my dog loves to just run up and down and jump onto my bed and jump off my bed, and I know — it was after a Governor Cooper press conference once that he just decided to start doing cannonballs off the bed. I’m not sure if viewers heard it, but I certainly could hear it as I was talking.
“I mean, I have so much respect for people who are working from home and have kids, because I can’t imagine the difficulties that they’re running into as they try to do all of this.”
Morgan Fogarty, WCCB-TV anchor
Last Thursday, for the first time in her roughly 15 years as an anchor for WCCB, Fogarty anchored the news from the office in the home she shares with her husband Jeremy and their two children.
Or, at least, it’s “the room that we call the office,” she says. “But it’s really just sort of like a catch-all for everything that we don’t know what to do with in our house.”
To get the makeshift home studio ready, she hauled a nightstand out of her bedroom and put it by her chair so she could set down her laptop, and also removed family photos and other personal items from the bookcase that would appear in the background, replacing them with more-neutral decor — art-focused coffee-table books, a big pineapple vase, and a crown-shaped accent piece (as a nod to the Queen City).
“I knew if I put stuff back there that made people go, ‘What’s that?,’ then no one would hear a word I said.”
Meanwhile, a couple other things happened last Thursday night that were new: One, her son Sawyer, 8, and her daughter Sadie, 5, were still awake when she went live at 10 p.m., eavesdropping from upstairs; and two, Fogarty was nervous — not because her kids were listening, but because “I just wanted it to be smooth. I mean, I want us to be perfect every night, and I want that now more than ever, because this is truly about people’s health.”
It mostly happened without a hitch. But it was, for now, a one-off: She says the station was just making sure it could be done, and done seamlessly, in the event the county becomes locked down even more tightly than it already is.
So for the time being — though editorial meetings are done via conference call now, and most interviews with sources are conducted over Skype, Zoom or FaceTime — Fogarty is still going into the station at night, to lead the 10 o’clock newscast and then the 10:30 talk show “The Edge.” For both shows, her regular co-anchor Drew Bollea is patched in from outside of the building, while either Kelli Bartik or Zach Aldridge from the sports staff stand in front of a separate camera 20 feet away. (A skeleton crew is also in the studio, to run the cameras and the teleprompter.)
“It’s been a running joke every winter season that when everyone else gets snow days, we in TV news still have to come to work, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stay home for a snow day and do the news from our homes?” Fogarty says. “And now here we are, under circumstances none of us could have ever imagined — and don’t want.
“We miss being with each other, as teammates, in the newsroom. We miss being in face-to-face contact with the communities we serve. We miss it all — just like everyone does.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "They’re juggling dogs, kids and spouses to do the TV news — live, from their living rooms."
