Once, I was “CNN’s Waldo Jaquith.”
I was 16 years old, and I had weaseled my way into DJing for a commercial radio station in Charlottesville, Virginia. I often worked the morning shift on weekends, usually from 8am-2pm, or thereabouts.
One morning, I arrived at work to read in the daily newspaper that there had been a horrible accident at a nearby speedway the previous night. A car had launched off of the racetrack and into the audience, killing several people. A wheel flew off and decapitated another person. It was really quite gruesome. Just a few minutes after I settled into the morning shift, the studio line rang. It was CNN, wanting me to file a report.
Now, this was not the sort of station that carried a CNN news feed, or any news, for that matter. I assume that they called a Charlottesville station because it was relatively close to the scene, and this way CNN could have a man on the scene, as it were. Not wanting to pass up a the opportunity, I readily agreed. The CNN producer said that he’d call me back in 10 minutes, and that I could file the story over the phone.
I, of course, had absolutely no idea of what I was doing. In my sixty-second conversation with the producer, I attempted to come off as an old pro. This simultaneously got me the gig and prevented me from getting anything in the way of instructions. Somehow, I managed to establish for myself a thirty second length for the story, create a story pyramid like I had learned in English class in middle school, and fill in the facts from the newspaper. I read through my story a couple of times, timing myself with the big clock mounted on the wall over the ancient soundboard. All too soon, the phone rang. Without any pomp, I was told to file the story and pause for a couple of seconds when I was finished.
I read through my story flawlessly on the first try, to my great relief. When reading the final sentence, I realized that I needed a tagline, and, on the fly, I finished up with: “For CNN, this is Waldo Jaquith, with W—, in Charlottesville, Virginia.” The producer came back on the line, told me that they’d run the story within a few minutes, thanked me, and that was that.
I never did hear my story. But that was the time that I reported for CNN.