For those of my colleagues (past and present) in the media industry, you'll always hear "all mics are hot at all times". This means, that if you're around any kind of microphone, you should assume it is ALWAYS on and that it is ALWAYS broadcasting over the air.

During the Noon Show today, it was "all cameras are hot at all times", as you can see what this means by watching the video clip.

In the past few months, we have made a huge change in how the station operates during a newscast, mainly to help facilitate our transition to High Definition during our local newscasts. While that transition to local HD has come and gone, the way our newscasts work has changed dramatically in the past few months. We no longer have people that need to push our cameras around in the studio as we are now running with robotic cameras. In the "old days", our directors would have to manually push the buttons on our control board to make things happen. Now, with robots and an all digital facility, our directors go through our shows well ahead of time and put in codes to make the robots do the work. Trust me, that is simplifying a very complicated process, but if you haven't seen it, you probably would be confused if I tried to explain it here.

Okay, back to my point about "all cameras are hot at all times"... normally, our weather segment starts off with a little animation that shows and says "From StormTeam 7...", that did not happen this time around. I was in the process of making fun of two co-workers for talking during the commercials while in the studio. (fyi, we all commonly chat during the commercial breaks as a way to make sure we are doing okay on our time, etc.)
Well, as you can see, I'm holding my finger in front of my mouth in a "shhhh" motion to Des and Randy who are about 10 feet away and well away from the camera. This is probably one of my bigger gaffes on air in my many years of broadcasting.