EPEric's Blog

I'll try to add to this throughout the day to give you a little behind the scenes of the day as we cover the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It's about 12:15 right now... I've been in the office for about 45 minutes.... about 2 hours earlier than usual. We're getting crews out the door for tonight. Brent Campbell is covering Obama. We'll get help from our sister stations in St. Louis and Chicago to cover the Clinton headquarters in Indiana. Leah Beno, Angela Rodriguez, Nicole Ferguson and Caron Myers are on the governor's races and Chad Tucker and Roxanna Haynes are covering Kay Hagan and the local races.. especially the bonds in Guilford County. Neill and Julie will lead the coverage from the studio with Bob Buckley and Melissa Painter helping out. FOX News anchor Shepard Smith will join Neill and Julie at about 10:45 tonight. We'll also have Elon University's Dr. Hunter Bacot with us to add some perspective to the voting. It will be interesting to see if we get a runoff in the Republican race for governor.

It's a little after 1pm. Julie Luck has just arrived. She's going through her binder with all of her notes about the races were are covering tonight.

It's just after 3pm now... we're finished with the afternoon editorial meeting. All of the crews are just about in place. Bob Buckley is practicing with our new tool called News Navigator. You've probably seen us use it with varying degrees of success over the last few weeks. It has the ability to work with a touch screen and we're able to build some different types of map based graphics with it.

It's starting to get a little hectic. All of the crews are now sending back their scripts and video from the field.

We're through the early newscasts. So far, so good technically considering how many crews we have out and how many of our partner stations we're trying to coordinate with.

Talk about your ultimate TV set up... here is what our producer sees during the newscast.

As of 7pm our reporter from our sister station in Chicago says to expect Hillary Clinton to give her speech in Indianapolis sometime after 9pm. We'll stream it and bring you a live report in the 10pm news.

Update:  8:30pm

The Newsroom is really buzzing now.... we have people from news as well as sales and finance and interns buzzing over computers... entering the returns into our system that puts them on the website and on-line.   Lesa Layno from our assignment desk puts all of the races together.  She does a great job.  It's very tedious work.   Our Operations Manager Timmy Hawks and I are busy working the phones talking to satellite trucks and the crews in the field.. so far we've kept it to the organized chaos level.  The timing of victory and concession speeches will really dictate how things go from here on out.

 We're expecting Kay Hagan just before 9pm and we'll try to stream it live on the site.