Editor: Elizabeth Sanchez
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-4389-9012-5

Click Here To Purchase Watercooler: Behind the Scenes and Off the Record, the Untold Stories from Broadcasters

Elizabeth Sanchez, author of Watercooler: Behind the Scenes and Off the Record, the Untold Stories from Broadcasters is the host of the PBS TV show A Place of Our Own. Sanchez has received many Emmys for her investigative journalism work. She has also received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, The Radio and Television News Association, The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and is a recipient of a Golden Mike Award for best newscast.

With Watercooler, Sanchez, in addition to her own memoirs, has amassed a splendid compilation of autobiographical essays contributed by twelve of her colleagues, some of whom are household names such as best selling author, television host, and award winning journalist, Rita Cosby and award winning reporter for the ABC affiliate in Chicago, Sarah Schulte. Others may not be as well known, however, all pretty much illustrate that you need a great deal of guts, patience, perseverance and hard work to succeed in the business of broadcast journalism.

As we read some of these essays, we notice that it is not unusual to be expected to work holidays, weekends, nights, twenty-four hour days, have very little time off, and even broadcast from some very dangerous neighborhoods. Some of these stories are laugh-out-funny, such as the one recounted by TV host/producer Stacy Case, who recounts that one evening, when she was co-anchoring a news broadcast in Greenville with her husband, she and he both had a bout of giggles. According to Case, she was laughing so hard that she couldn't stop herself from passing gas that was clearly audible on the air. Other essays deal with some of the horrors that broadcasters experience such as Hurricane Katrina as recounted by Rita Cosby, the siege of Sarajevo as witnessed by Barry Petersen, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 as reported by Elizabeth Sanchez as well as her story about Susan Vaughan Smith, who killed her children in Union, South Carolina. Kristine Lazar, an Emmy-award winning reporter reminds us from her own personal experiences that the most valuable lesson in her career as a television reporter is that the people she reports about are not just news stories but also human beings. They have hopes, fears, dreams, and plans. To be a good reporter is not just to recount events but also to give the victims and their families the respect they deserve. Also included in the group of memoirs is an interesting interview conducted by Elizabeth Sanchez with Dr. Laura Schlessinger whom she admired since she was a little girl.

Although some of the stories seem surreal at times, they are, for the most part, written in a down-to-earth style contributed by broadcast journalists who know how to spin an anecdote well enough that it never becomes trite or uninteresting. Reading these essays makes you feel that you are eavesdropping on real conversations in perhaps a café setting. For anyone contemplating going into broadcast journalism, this is a must read.