It’s a few minutes before the 6:00 pm broadcast and Marselis Parsons is shrugging himself into his jacket (it hides a soda spill) and straightening his tie.

I’m sitting next to reporter Brian Joyce, in the Channel 3 newsroom, at one of five editing units working on his Champ sighting story slated for the “Sally" block, the last few minutes of each broadcast. (It was named after a long forgotten reporter whose invariably dreadful stories always ended up in that slot.)

We hear the broadcast begin. Joyce is spinning a dial with one finger—first this way, then lightning fast the other stopping at a particular frame. Here’s where he will add a piece of soundbite to his master tape. He has two minutes to fill and 50 minutes to do it in.

The editing machines are stacked in two metal shelving frames with three machines for tapes, two on the right for taping from and the one in front of the reporter being taped to. Monitors top both stacks. Joyce’s hands fly across the editing board, I can’t keep up with them. His finger whirls the frame dial, bang, bang. He hits the fat black dial again, pushes other buttons. “There, got that one.” He turns to me.

“You’ll see in a minute why I’m going two seconds ahead of myself on these.” His voice, put on another tape earlier, is in the lower editing unit. A picture will come up while he is speaking and then he cuts to the person speaking on the tape. It overlaps precisely when he plays it back.

“In television reporting, you write for the pictures. You have to know what you have on tape to be able to write your story. If you don’t have pictures, you don’t have a story.” He turns back to editing. His finger continues to whirl and spin. Through the earphones I hear the voices from the tapes jabbering so quickly that they sound nitrous-oxide induced.

“If you want to watch the broadcast, you’d better go out there now,” he suggests. I tiptoe into the broadcast room, a vast warehouse-size room filled with sets—the news desk, Across the Fence, You Can Quote Me complete with last week’s coffee cups, the Lotto—and props displaced from what is now the temporary newsroom. Two cameras are aimed at Parsons and Sharon Meyers at their familiar news desk. She is leaning to her right and from my angle looks like she might fall asleep. Actually, I realize, she is looking at a monitor of the show off to her right. It’s part of her weather corner and at a difficult angle for her to see from her seat at the main desk. They are watching Alva Taylor live from the Grateful Dead concert. I can’t hear Taylor, but Parsons is asking her questions and laughing at the responses, so obviously he can hear her.

Andy Goodrich, one of the video cameramen, joins me and asks if I would like to visit the “bridge.” We silently climb stairs high above the sets to the control room filled with people bent over boards filled with knobs, push/pull levers, lights, sliding buttons, monitors (lots of monitors), the scroll machine for the camera’s prompter and more. He explains each person’s function in whispers. As I watch the teleprompter, I’m amazed that anyone can read the misspellings! But the reporters (Parsons, J.J. Cioffi, et al) do. Since they wrote it, they must know what they wrote. Personally, I want to grab a pencil and edit the tape as it scrolls. I don’t dare move.

When I first arrived, with each introduction I was greeted with, “Gee, why didn’t you come next week, when we’ll be in our brand-new newsroom?” The temporary newsroom is the former prop room and looks like the back end of the warehouse with desks neatly lined up in three rows. Marselis Parsons, Will Mikell and George Wilson (producers, as well as reporters) are in the first row behind everyone. In front of them come the reporters with a computer terminal in each position. Fans are everywhere to try to alleviate the suffocating heat. At least the air is moving.

Natalie Borrok was asked to “take care” of me until her computer training class at 2:00 pm (new newsroom, new computer system) as her story had fallen through. E-mail comes up on her screen, “Julia from the TA is here ... be nice.” We have a good laugh and she corrects it to “Her name is really Kitty...” She says that George Wilson (the noon news producer) has written this to “warn” everyone. To a one, the people I meet at WCAX are nice. Maybe it’s the e-mail. Maybe not. There aren’t any raging, or otherwise, egos that I could detect.

I was told that at 2:00 pm things would pick up. So a few more reporters and crews showed up. Then at 3:00 pm, a few more. This wasn’t a grand rush. Someone is always reminding me that this is a quiet day. By 5:00 pm finally things were beginning to hit a “feverish” pitch—fingers flying across keyboards, quick changes at the editing stations—all seemed to be choreographed quite well. Okay, a bit hassled, but not ridiculously so. Producers and reporters hover over Parsons desk checking line-up and making sure all the stories were correctly filed.

Mara, an intern, is putting a story together. Joyce helps her add the finishing touches. The only loud voice I hear (ever) is Parsons calling across the room to Mara looking for her story on the computer. She hadn’t filed it yet. Oops. She hurries over to Parsons to tell him, then back to Joyce for help. He finishes her story, grabs the tape out of the machine and hands it to her with instructions to get it into the computer—quickly. She does, with moments to spare.

Joyce tells me that anytime you see “File Tape” written over a film clip, that’s a piece from Sylvia Sprigg’s archives. Her domain is thousands of broadcasts on tapes neatly labeled and stacked. She can find snippets of tape from years past and get them to the reporters in minutes. Need a bear? A famous person? Ask Sylvia. Broadcasts are kept on one set of tapes; the unused video is kept for years on their original tapes, just in case.

At the end of the broadcast I asked Parsons what he thought about it.

“You win some, you lose some.” He shook his head. “There are stories other stations got that we should have, but we have some they don’t.” He smiled. “I guess it works out.”