Forget digital cameras. Last Thursday, the hot commodities in newsrooms were backup generators, charged-up cell phones and good old fashioned shoe-leather. Newsrooms across a region ranging from Ottawa, Canada, to New York City, became campgrounds for TV and radio journalists who couldn't, and probably wouldn't, go home. Indeed, as NBC's Brian Williams was broadcasting the bulletin that the Northeast had been hit with a massive blackout, in the background the emergency alarm at 30 Rockefeller Center was clearly audible. The biggest frustration, said Randal Stanley, news director at Cleveland's WKYC-TV, was not within the newsroom, but outside of it. "We wondered who we were talking to besides ourselves," he said.
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