That chase/stand-off I wrote about lasted until 3:30 AM this morning. As you'll recall, KNBC Channel 4 decided to cover it live during their 11 PM news and I'm guessing they guessed it would not last long; that while they might have to cut a bit into The Tonight Show to broadcast the resolution, it wouldn't be by much. The anchors kept saying, "We're going to stay with this until its conclusion, then show The Tonight Show." There is some pad in their overnight schedule and they could have delayed Mr. Leno and then Mssrs. Fallon and Daly for maybe 15 minutes, aired their shows in full, then made up the time on the other end.
But the story didn't end…and it also didn't get that interesting. The suspect crashed his car…where a tree blocked the helicopter shot so they couldn't even show us that. Then as police had him surrounded, he just sat in the car, surrounded by police. It wasn't an interesting thing to watch and the reporters didn't have much info on the suspect…so it became a pretty boring story and there was nothing to say about it. Whoever was making the decisions at KNBC finally decided to bail on their coverage. I don't know why they didn't air Leno and Fallon in full then bump Carson Daly's show but instead they joined Leno in progress, aired the last 20 minutes of his show, then ran Fallon and Daly as normal. I wonder if they would have made that decision if Jay wasn't going off in a few months.
So around 12:15 AM or so, they announced they were ending their broadcast coverage and shifting it over to their website. I'm guessing that part of that decision was due to their helicopter running low on gas but part was probably the realization that the story might not end for a long time and might never get interesting to watch. It seemed to take about 15 minutes before their coverage began streaming on their web page but it was okay to miss that chunk because nothing had happened. The suspect was still in the car, we still didn't really know anything about him and the police had him surrounded.
Nothing continued to occur so after a short time, they shut down their web coverage and announced they'd cover it in the morning on The Today Show. So much for bringing us the story until its conclusion. Their reporter on the scene, a gent named Gadi Schwartz, reported via occasional Tweets thereafter…and for the next several hours, they pretty much consisted of telling us that nothing was happening. Finally, around 3:30 in the morning, the suspect started to get out of his car with a gun, police shot him and he was transported to a hospital. Because KNBC's helicopter was long off the scene and their on-site reporter and camera crew had to be held some distance from the suspect's car, they didn't even get good footage of the shoot-out. By 4:30 AM when they could finally report the outcome on their early-morn newscast, they still didn't know who the guy was or exactly what was going on with him.
In short, what happened was that the folks at KNBC heard there was a police chase during their 11 PM news and thought, "Hey, this will be interesting" and they decided to cover it live…and shortly after they began covering it, it became uninteresting for about the next four hours. I'm not faulting them for their decision to cover it; just kinda fascinated by the various choices they had to make about when to give up on it and what to do about the programming they were preempting. Betcha from now on, they'll be a bit less likely to promise to stay with one of these stories until it's resolved.