One of WCCO-TV reporter Darcy Pohland's best friends was listening to the police scanner Friday at Fox 9, as usual, when he heard Pohland's address mentioned.
On Monday, Fox 9 Managing Editor Kelly Huffman was back at work, where monitoring the police scanner for possible news stories is part of his job. Huffman, who formerly worked with Pohland at WCCO, is understandably brokenhearted over what he heard.
A heavy-hearted sigh was all Huffman could muster at first. Then he said: "It was awful. It was horrifying. I can't even stand to think about it."
Insiders at WCCO told me that Huffman heard Pohland's address, followed by her apartment number and then specifics that indicated his friend had died.
Pohland, who passed in her sleep, had missed work Thursday and had not been feeling well earlier in the week when she fainted in the newsroom, according to various reports.
Her death brought out the best among broadcasting rivals. "I got a very kind note from Bill Dallman [Fox 9 news director, saying] if there was anything that they could do to help us through this, they would be happy to," WCCO-TV news director Scott Libin said Monday. "And the same was true of the message Tom Lindner [KARE 11 news director] left me. And I spoke with him because he asked me to give him a call back." A WCCO insider said that Channels 11 and 9 also had crews at Channel 4 early in the afternoon working the Pohland story, although Channel 5 did not.
I was trying to figure out why it looked as though KSTP.com took a long time to post something on Pohland, whose unexpected death was the biggest story in the metro Friday. "Well, I don't know," Libin said, "but I will say I got notes: a very nice and prompt e-mail message from John Mason [KSTP assistant news director] and I got a voice mail from Lindsay Radford [KSTP news director], who wasn't even working on Friday, so I certainly heard from them both, and they were both quite kind and supportive. I really appreciated it." Perhaps the absence of Radford was the reason for KSTP's sluggish online response, although Pohland's death was part of Friday's 11 a.m. newscast. Libin had to recall from memory what his broadcast colleagues said because, "I had to empty my deleted items; it was a busy day for e-mail."
The response from his colleagues wasn't unexpected. "It was unusual in the suddenness of Darcy's death," Libin said, "but I got similar responses from our competitors when Bob Rainey died, when Bill Carlson died, and I even remember as far back as the death of Scott Greenan, our helicopter pilot at KSTP [where Libin was formerly news director], many years ago. We are competitors, but we have a great deal of respect for one another, and I think generally kind of like one another."
