Vehicle chases on highways, shootings, dense columns of smoke due to a fire, explosions detonating… The record that Eliana Moreno kept on her Instagram account is a faithful reflection of ten years of “incredible coverage” from the air in Los Angeles. The handle “Eli in the heli” is even a kind of nod to her devotion to reporting last-minute events aboard a helicopter for the NBC and Telemundo networks.
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Her last coverage was this Tuesday. Moreno died when the helicopter from which she was reporting on a crash between a pickup truck and a city bus crashed. The pilot of the aircraft, George Marciniw, who preferred to be called Jorge during Spanish reports, and a passerby also died in the incident.
“She worked for about 10 years as an ‘air reporter.’ She was incredible in her coverage. She worked more the afternoon-evening shift, but sometimes she also joined us on the morning newscast. And, when we had her, we felt the difference,” says EL PAÍS Balbino Avilés, a well-known journalist from Telemundo 52, recalling the usual live handoffs between studio journalists and field reporters during a newscast.
They liked working with her because she was an expert at narrating and explaining events after nearly a decade of reporting news. And, also, for her ability to quickly report in both languages. “She finished with us and in 10 seconds started reporting” in English, adds Avilés about his “always smiling” colleague.
Graduated in Journalism and Political Science from Chapman University, she used to share information with her colleagues and respond to their messages. “She always answered me and always shared where she was flying over,” like the day he wrote to her just before traveling to El Salvador and she replied: “Have a good flight Balbino! We are flying over Santa Clarita right now.”
“I’m going to post it now (the message), because today the one who has to wish a happy flight is me. (…) She left informing, doing what she loved.”
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A woman reporting from the air, in Spanish
Moreno joined the local Telemundo newscast after a kind of slip. One day, while reporting live, she slipped a word in Spanish and, thanks to that, she was offered to expand to that language the last-minute news coverage she did for NBC, recalls Avilés.
“Imagine, a woman reporting in Spanish from the air (…) Eliana was a woman very proud of her Latin roots, despite Spanish not being her first language,” he details about the journalist from Orange County, south of Los Angeles.
The fatal accident in which she and pilot Marciniw lost their lives reminds us of the risks some journalists face in their daily work. This incident was especially tragic because it happened practically in the middle of live coverage. In the studio, newscaster Collen Williams reported what was happening with visible distress.
“We learned it was a news coverage helicopter, then we were informed that we lost contact with our team and we just received information that NewsChopper4 fell shortly before 7 p.m. in Chatsworth,” said Williams. “We will take a few minutes to process it,” she added, affected.
Hours have passed and the impact of what happened was still strongly felt in the newsrooms of both networks. “Those of us here, on this side of the microphone, reporting in her case, understand what it is,” says Avilés.
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