I’ve read a couple of times that these fancy new Maffin-approved “integrated newsrooms” do not make the mistake of assuming the Internet is IE6 and are fully equipped for things like Skype calls. They use Skype on shows like Spark, which makes sense, but I also saw John Lancaster doing a remote from Niagara Falls using Skype:
I assume they couldn’t get a microwave truck down there, or it borked or something. Image quality wasn’t great, but YouTube has proved that isn’t much of a deterrent as long as audio quality is solid. Except it wasn’t. This is Lancaster talking:
Add this to the fact that Lancaster makes more speech errors than any reporter in the country (stumbling over himself in every segment) and this Skype thing seems like less of a good idea. (It isn’t Lancaster’s fault he stumbles. Everybody does – read Michael Erard’s Um... to learn why. He just does it more than anybody else.)