philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Hi everyone -

Yep, I’m here. At yet another horrible, senseless, tragic attack… this one aimed at 14 year old girls. It’s just so sick. And as a soon-to-be-parent… far too easy to imagine being in the middle of this story.

I was in bed Monday night when the phone rang, around 11:30pm.

“Something’s happened in Manchester at a concert,” my boss said. “Can you pack a bag and get into the office?”

Now, I had recently made a stink about how as a pregnant woman I should still be allowed to keep doing my job and working and travelling, etc, until such time as I feel too physically uncomfortable to do so (typical feminist stuff… hehe), so I wasn’t on terribly firm ground to whine about the fact it was midnight and I was pregnant and tired. Instead, I rolled out of bed, threw some clothes in a bag, kissed Ollie goodnight, and headed to the bureau.

As these things always go, at first we had no idea if it was a big deal. There were lots of tweets from concert-goers saying a balloon had popped or a speaker had blown… so I was frankly expecting to be turned around once I got to the office.

But no… within the hour it was pretty clear we were looking at heavy casualties and that this was no accident. So I bundled into a car with Mark Phillips, cameraman Anthony Wood, and a driver, and we headed up to Manchester. We listened to the radio the whole way up, so the four hour trip was a wakeful one, and at 5am we rolled into town and navigated through closed roads to get to our hotel. I told the guys to get 2 hours of sleep and prepare to leave at 7am to start shooting and broadcasting. So the two guys got 2 hours of sleep.

But as soon as I nodded off, about 20 minutes after hitting the pillow and calming down my fizzy brain, my boss called to tell me about some great interview on the BBC. Then 30 minutes after that he called about locations for our live shot. So I gave up, took a shower, begged at the front desk for a pre-dawn coffee, and started the day.

We had set up our live shot close to the arena, behind a police barricade. Nearby was the Premiere Inn, where people escaping the concert hall had turned up for the night. In the chaos of the attack, families had been split up, and no one was sure who had been hospitalized/killed or simply was missing. And with the train station affected, transportation out of Manchester had been at a standstill, so groups of teenaged girls who had come in from out of town were stranded.

As the sun rose, people wandered out of the lobby in a daze, still wearing their concert t-shirts and previous night’s makeup, facetiming their family members, or in the case of one woman I saw, collapsing on the sidewalk in hysterical tears.

We began our morning of live reports on no sleep, standing in the sun with a case of water, a few cups of coffee and a stack of granola bars. At midday a car pulled up with some police officers - and they opened the trunk and started pulling out carafes of coffee, boxed sandwiches, potato chips, Cadbury snacks, and more cases of water. Apparently Mancunians had been turning up in droves to feed the cops, and the police had more than they could handle, so they were passing on the love. I have to say, in my 14 years at CBS, that’s never happened. The people in this town have been some of the nicest, most generous and tolerant, that I’ve ever come across. It has been the one truly bright spot in a very dark week.

In any event, Day One was a long one. I had woken up at 8am on Monday morning and didn’t get into bed until 1am Wednesday morning (Nugget was not happy.). And our anchor had flown in from New York, so it was a hectic, non-stop work day.

Yesterday we spent some time digging around in the neighborhood of the terrorist, and bounced around as police raided different buildings around the city, looking for anyone connected to him. (The bomb he used was fairly complicated… so it’s expected he at least had some help.) Information in stories like these comes at you from all sides, and not all of it is true, and there are too many journalists here, so we all end up running around in circles and pointing our cameras at each other. Chaos.

But today, after a solid 6 hours of sleep (and feeling very much human again), Mark and I covered the moment of silence at the makeshift memorial growing in one of the town squares. At 11am, the church clock chimed, and there was total silence as people prayed… shut their eyes… cried… stared at the mound of flowers, candles, and balloons that has grown over the past couple days. After about a minute, applause rippled through the square, with shouts of “We love you Manchester!!”. Then everyone started singing the ‘90’s Oasis song, “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Next to me was a young man in a motorized wheelchair, singing and crying. Nurses at the clinic in the square stood in the windows on the third floor, watching and hugging each other. If you were in that square and you weren’t moved to tears, your heart is made of concrete.

We’re currently at our hotel, working, waiting for something else to rush off and cover. But a big part of tonight’s story is the blowback from intelligence leaks coming from the US. After all these terror attacks, there’s now quite a sophisticated network of intelligence-sharing among allies… the UK/US alliance being one of the strongest. But this week, the UK shared information with their US counterparts, who turned around and leaked it to the press. So the US press - including us - reported the name of the attacker before UK officials made it public; and the New York Times was given classified photos of the bits of the bomb used in the attack… also not public. It’s a delicate balance between reporting news and compromising an investigation, and the UK is coming down hard on the latter side of the argument. But in the absence of information, there is often panic and misinformation (who did this?! Are there other people out there waiting to do it again? What happened to my family member? etc) so you can make an equal argument for the former.

In any case, these are complicated times we live in, journalistically.

Thanks for checking in with me, and for watching our (sleepless) work… with any luck, I’ll get home over the weekend. And as Ollie pointed out to me on the phone, as I was preparing him for the fact that I may be stuck here for a while… this could be my last big assignment before maternity leave - when the Overseas Diaries will go on hiatus. 😉

Miss you all… hug your loved ones. I’m patting nugget now.

Xxxx

E

Attached: cops at the arena, giving us lunch and candy; scenes from the memorial