Today, we find that a least one Miami TV station is relying heavily on the Miami Herald to find stories to fill their air time.
Here's how the
1) Scan front page of the Miami Herald.Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:01pm: Miami Herald posted a story on its website on Miami Beach Memorial Day preps by staffer David Smiley.
2) Find an interesting local story.
3) Assign a reporter and photographer to the story.
4) Air the story on 6pm news as if it's your own.
5) Don't bother to tell your viewers that you shamelessly stole the story from the Herald.
The story was featured prominently on Wednesday's front page.
The Herald's Smiley reported that Beach officials and police are preparing for the four-day weekend by....
In a strange coincidence, Local 10 News led their 6pm Wednesday newscast with a report that appears as though it was....positioning "license plate readers that use multi-angle scanners to record vehicle tags will be placed along the Julia Tuttle and MacArthur causeways to record just about every car that drives into South Beach."
Click to enlarge.
...closing Ocean Drive and stationing "cameras that see up to a mile on four towers placed where officers can rewind and view video. The towers will be stationed in Lummus Park, on Collins Avenue and on the east end of the Lincoln Road Mall."
...staging "a DUI checkpoint from 8 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday on the MacArthur Causeway, east of the entrances to Palm and Hibiscus islands."
..."[police] also will have license plate readers on the Julia Tuttle and MacArthur causeways, which will swipe the information of every car making its way to Alton Road."
..."Ocean Drive will be closed and four camera towers will be set up between 5th and 15th streets. The cameras can record video and zoom in up to a mile away."
..."a DUI checkpoint will be in place on Interstate 395 from the Friday before Memorial Day until Saturday morning."
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 8:35pm: The Miami Herald posted a story on its website by staffer Douglas Hanks on a Medley company that stores and digitizes corporate paperwork.
The story was featured prominently on Thursday's front page.
The Herald's Hanks reported that at the Recall storage facility in Medley...
And, in an eerie coincidence, Thursday's 6pm newscast on Local 10 featured a video report...the warehouse now contains roughly 10 million files and 500 million pieces of paper. They fill 90 rows of shelves 30 feet tall, running the length of two football fields.
...employees employees must press the top of their hands to a scanner that identifies them by the vein patterns in their upper wrists.
...Healthcare Data Solutions, a Miami company, estimates it has converted more than 1 million pages of medical records into digital files for doctors throughout the region.
Reporter Todd Tongen sprinkled his piece with these facts that came directly from Hanks' story...
More than 10 million files, making up more than 500 million pieces of paper, are stored there. [...]There are more than 700,000 boxes of material in a warehouse that is two football fields long.
...Employees can't even get in unless they pass through a coded biometric security lock that scans the backs of their hands.
...The facility has so many medical records in storage that anyone who has seen a doctor or a dentist in South Florida likely has a file there.
The other move they have is they report a story about someone being injured or something similar. The next two to four broadcasts they run that same story then the anchor very often says "We just checked" and then state something to the effect of nothing has changed. I suspect they never check.
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