To say I was nervous is an understatement. It was only the second time I had run a major story. I had never been to Perugia. And I had covered neither the trial nor the appeal of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Covering the result of their appeal was a big deal.
By rights it should have been the formidable Patti Partee. She had been across the story from the start and had wanted very much to be there at the end. But sadly she died the week before.
There I was, in a beautiful medieval city with the clock ticking down to verdict day. There were lots of things that needed organising, but there were four priorities:
- Getting a truck to the right place
- Making sure radio outlets got what they needed
- Making sure the TV and radio backgrounders were done
- Making sure the verdict, when it came, could be understood.
The truck
The BBC World Newsgathering planning team in London had done a deal with the US network ABC allowing us to use the second path on its truck whenever we needed it for tape-feeds and TV lives. But it soon became clear that there was a problem. Instead of having a view of the doors to the court, the ABC truck looked out over the beautiful hills of Umbria.
The distance between the court and the truck was only a five-minute walk at most, but it might as well have been a million miles away. Use this location on verdict day and we would miss all the action.
Priority number one: to find a way of broadcasting live and in quality from the court. Thanks to the heroic efforts of our fixer, Carlo Catalognia, we got a high-speed ADSL line installed in super-quick time. It cost us a couple of hundred euros but it meant we could do broadband V-point lives from the court. It looked good and was great in the run up to the verdict, but it was not the total solution. V-point technology can be temperamental at the best of times.
The last thing I wanted was for us to drop off air during the highly pressurised moments when Amanda Knox's appeal verdict was announced. We would need a truck outside the court to see us through the day.
Money is tight in the BBC and it is spread across a number of different departments. World planning only had the money for a TV truck on the day of the verdict itself. For the operation to work, other bits of BBC TV news programming were going to have to help. A call to Kevin Bakhurst, the boss at the BBC News Channel, secured a promise to help pay for a truck if the coverage ran for longer than a day.
The truck arrived early in the afternoon before verdict day - we had already used our hire car to bag the ideal spot for it outside the court. After a few initial problems (the generator blew up), the truck was up and running. The TV team had a good, secure live position. The radio gang put their satellite dishes on the roof and turned the front seats into an ad-hoc studio. And we used the ADSL line we had fitted to surf the wires.
The translation
We knew that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were going to address the court in Italian on the final day of the appeal. And the judge, when he delivered the outcome, was bound to speak in Italian too. We wanted to broadcast all three of these statements live, so we were going to a translator at BBC Television Centre, preferably one with knowledge of the Italian legal system. I sent out an early email asking for help - and Anna Williams at BBC World and Driss Mekkaoui booked someone for us.
But that wasn't quite the end of it. On the morning of the outcome we got a heads up that it was going to be far from simple to understand. The judge was going to speak in code. Mention the number 530 and he would be talking about acquittal. The number 533 would indicate he was talking about conviction. And then he would talk about A for murder, B for rape and so on. This was going to put a lot of pressure on our translator and on our wonderful anchor, Luisa Baldini. I talked things through with Luisa and spoke at length to the translator, going through each of the possible outcomes the judge might come up with.
The translator went away to do some more research of his own to get things clear in his mind. I then spoke to the editors on duty at the News Channel and BBC World to brief them on what to expect and talk through how we would like to play it when the judgment came. The moment itself was still adrenalin-packed. I am glad we prepared for it in the way we did.
The radio correspondent
When I arrived in Perugia, the reporting team was made up of Daniel Sandford, who would mainly report for network TV, Luisa Baldini, who would do live and continuous outlets, and Matt Cole, who is employed by the regional news service. As it stood, there was not going to be anyone dedicated to providing material for BBC Radio 4, 5 Live or the World Service.
After some negotiation and lobbying by the radio stations, it was agreed that Matt Cole would get some production help and that he would become the news correspondent for all outlets once the story broke. Ahead of verdict day, Matt pre-prepared a couple of versions of the generic minute news piece that he would file as soon as the outcome was clear.
All he had to do once the result was out was check the copy for accuracy and tweak a few lines. This saved precious minutes when the pressure was on. We rigged a second m4 onto the roof of the truck, allowing Matt to be on air with one station while his producer, Imogen Anderson, patched guests through on the second line.
The backgrounders
While I was working on the logistics, the reporting team and its producers worked on the backgrounders that were cut and cleared a day ahead of the expected verdict. Luisa spent the best part of a day re-reading her notes and preparing what she would say on air at the time of the outcome. Something which stood her in good stead, as she single-handedly sustained the output for the best part of an hour before the judge even started to speak.
When the verdict came, both the translator and Luisa got it right on air straightaway. Thanks to our spot next to RAI and Mediaset, we were able to grab a live interview with some of the key players in the case. Luisa, with her producer Jenny Mossblad close at hand, kept going with several hours of raw but compelling broadcasting. Daniel and his producer Bruno Boelpaep and camera team Maarten Lernout and Anthony Stafford had an hour and-a-half after the verdict to cut a strong piece for the BBC Ten O'Clock News. Matt Cole and Imogen Anderson did not stop broadcasting. Thanks as well to our truck operator, Shane Adams, and our live cameraman, Andrea.
But none of it would have worked nearly as well without the lovely, clever and funny Carlo Catalognia who fixed the unfixable every step of the way.
Wietske Burema is Europe producer for BBC News, based in Brussels.
