As Emily Rittman, another local blogger and KSPR reporter, so aptly named her blog, TV people are indeed people too, and I’ll show you a good example of that in just a second.

Let’s set the background here:

Stephanie Stricklen is a reporter and anchor for KGW, the NBC affiliate in my old stomping grounds of Portland, Oregon. She’s one of the better anchors on NewsChannel 8 in my humble opinion, and it’s kinda odd that I first remember her as the reporter who had interviewed me at Rainier High School after a gun scare in 2000.

Who can forget those floods we had here in Missouri last week? They were simply devastating for scores of people. Homes lost, property damaged, but that all doesn’t compare to the lives that were lost. In a video link I am about to provide, Steph is reading the script from a VOSOT of the flooding during a 4:30 AM newscast, and then it cuts to a heart-wrenching soundbite of an Ohio firefighter who tried to rescue his wife then lost her.

Then…well, I’ll let you see what happens next.

With the video still rolling, and Steph being the only anchor in the building at the time (she described the whole thing in her KGW blog), you just hear about 10 seconds of dead silence while she tries to compose herself.

The way she maintained her composure and professionalism was a testimony to how well she does her job. But the emotional moment in and of itself was a perfect testimony to the fact that the news does affect the people who report it just the same, if not more, than it does the people who watch it.

(And for those of us photog/editor types, that’s exactly why we put at least 25 seconds of pad video at the end of the story.)