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The 6 AM news blooper that saved our whole newscast that one time
Our anchor flubbed a teleprompter line about a lost cat and called it a 'lost cow' live on air, then the chyron glitched and showed the weather map from 2009 for like 8 seconds. The producer was screaming in the earpiece but the anchor just kept going, and somehow that mistake made the segment feel more human and viewers actually called in saying they liked it. Meanwhile the exact same week, our competitor had a perfect newscast and still lost the ratings slot. Is there a case for embracing the glitch, or was that just a lucky blip? Anyone else have a mistake that worked out better than the clean take?
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adam91921h ago
That teleprompter fail with the lost cow thing is weirdly perfect because it does two things at once: it makes the anchor look like a real person instead of a robot, and it gives the audience something to talk about. I've seen this happen with a local morning show in Tampa back in like 2016 where the traffic guy accidentally read a viewer's birthday shoutout as a traffic alert, and the phones blew up with people laughing about it for days. The clean newscast from your competitor losing that week makes total sense to me, because nobody remembers a broadcast where nothing went wrong. There's actual research on this, mistakes create what they call a "pratfall effect" where people like you more when you screw up in a small human way. So yeah, I'd say lean into it a little, not by planning fake bloopers but by not freaking out when real ones happen. That 8 second weather map glitch probably did more for your ratings than a month of promo ads.
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