Brian Williams Visits Chicago

Marcus Riley, NBC5 Street Team (video)

It’s a pretty big day here in the NBC5 newsroom. Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News, is in Chicago today and will be anchoring the newscast from the Shedd Aquarium (5:30 p.m., NBC5).

It always amazes me to see the amount of work that goes into a production like this. On the second floor of the NBC Tower, we have a department that works exclusively for the network, but there was at least that many people in Williams’ entourage today — executives, promo people, photographers, producers and more.

Part of his day was spent here in the newsroom meeting folks, and shooting promos with our main anchors, Warner Saunders and Allison Rosati. I’m sure we’ll have the video outtakes online soon, because at one point they were laughing so hard that they had to bag one of the promo teases altogether.

I was in line to do a podcast interview with Williams, but as the afternoon wore on, my 10 minutes turned into five, and then possibly two. I managed to squeeze in 3 1/2, despite the frantic gestures from various news executives to “wrap!” I must say it’s rather nerve-wracking to try and flawlessly read your intro and conduct an interview with one of the Big 3 — someone in the same lineage as Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and various other journalists I’ve emulated throughout my career. Check out our interview below.

---

Click here to listen to our podcast interview.

---

About these ads