I love being in the “crossroads of the world,” in Times Square, New York City, where the news business seems to be at the very heart of the greatest city in the world.
To the south stands the Reuters building, looking down at the masses milling beneath. Standing atop the square is the old New York Times building, from which the ball started dropping each New Year’s Eve many years ago. In the middle, aloft on another building’s side, is the long electronic ticker tape of the Dow Jones news service, on which constantly gallop the top headlines of the day.
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It was this ticker tape I pointed out to my wife and friends two weeks ago, when we were in New York over the New Year’s holiday, and on which I, with shock, noticed the last few words of an item saying something like “. . . second case of BSE in Canada.”
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad news. Big bad news. I told my wife and friends that we’d better wait to see the entire headline come past again so we’d know what had happened.
We waited. After a few minutes we began chatting about what another case of BSE could mean, and when I looked up again at the ticker, I saw the same “. . . second case of BSE in Canada” end of a sentence going past.
Missed it again.
Everyone was starving, so to save myself from being beaten to death, we continued on to the restaurant around the corner, where we had been heading before seeing the headline.
But once we were done eating we headed back to Times Square, and this time I was patient enough to watch the wordstream until the whole headline came past again.
Yup, another case of BSE.
It was awful news, terrible to hear on holiday, but I have to admit it was exciting to see a story about a prairie cow make top billing on Broadway.
The next morning I gathered up all the local papers to see how they handled the story. I was surprised (and happy, for our sake) to see it treated as a bush league story, shunted into the back pages or chopped down into a minor story because of all the attention given to the tsunami catastrophe.
So while the story was big news for a few hours on the Times Square news ticker, it faded fast.
Now that I’m back in Canada, I’m castigating myself for not having the wits at the time to snap a photo of the headline sliding by in all the glitz and glamour of Times Square. That would have been a great shot for the Western Producer.
Now I’ll have to live with reporter shame for letting another golden opportunity slip by unseized.
