Loyal... Or Stupid?

I can't tell you how many times over the years I remained at my post in the newsroom when the building's fire alarm went off... I stayed mostly because we had a LOT of false alarms, and it was a bigger pain in the ass to leave than to stay. On a few occasions, I actually stayed because the top of the hour arrived and SOMEONE had to do the news. But I never had the decision to make that the guy in this video did. He kept on reading the news, even as his studio was bursting in flames!


Loyal... or stupid?

WMAL - The Way It Was

The picture you see here has special significance to me - This was the exact air staff in place when I arrived at WMAL in 1982. I rescued this photo from the trash can, along with several of WMAL's hard-earned Peabody awards, during an office swap about 10 years ago. I managed to get the Peabodys (Peabodies? nah.) to their rightful owners, but I saved the photograph, which was framed in a 1970's vintage burnt orange picture frame, for myself, and it spent several years hanging in my office. When I left WMAL, I deeded the photo to the station's de facto historian, Chief Engineer David Sproul, and he was kind enough to scan a copy and forward it to me. The people you see before you made WMAL the top station in Washington for most of the 60's, all of the 70's and about the first third of the 80's. I was lucky to be a part of the team back at a time when people would have KILLED to work at WMAL. In columns, from left to right, top to bottom, Bill Mayhugh, Felix Grant, Ken Beatrice, Frank Harden, Jackson Weaver, Tom Gauger, John Lyon, Chris Core, Ed Walker and Bill Trumbull.

Good News For One Of The Good Guys!

A quick beachfront shoutout to my friend, Paul Duckworth, who decided late last year that he was going to end his 35-year love affair with radio, and retire as the Operations/Program Director at WMAL. Paul told us all at the time that he was going to "try" to stay out of the radio biz, but he didn't seem too convinced it would work. Well, his suspicions proved correct. Paul's retirement didn't take, and now, three months later, Paul is going back to his old job at the big 630. That's right - he's replacing himself! I've been warned by Paul and many other radio lifers that leaving the biz is easier said than done... We shall have to see about that. But in the meantime, WMAL is better off to have Paul back... and for the moment, anyway, Paul is no doubt happy to be resuming his affair.

THIS JUST IN! - Yesterday's News!

Happy weekend, folks - Yes, even those of us in the world of the unemployed still enjoy weekends... That's because the wife and kids are around to help pass the time. I spent some of my time this morning reading the Sunday Washington Post magazine, and the wonderful article that lists 209 once-commonplace things that have become obsolete. Here's a choice example of something that has gone by the wayside, thanks, in this case, to the internet -

Doing Nothing at the Office
b. 1853 -- d. mid-1990s

The 20th century's best minds might have brought us many wonders fantastic (Decaf soy lattes! Shoulder-fired missiles! Plastic!), but what is truly stunning is the number of office hours Americans clocked during those same years doing . . . nothing much. Taking a cigarette break could sometimes nudge the minute hand a little. The water cooler was also created for this purpose. And paper clips. But in those many empty moments between tasks, much time was spent staring into space.

"When I started in the early '80s, there were word-processing centers," recalls attorney Howard Gutman, a partner at Williams & Connolly. "A 120-page brief could take two hours, and one mistake and you'd have to do it over again. Printing places would vie for business by having beds and food. If you were a young lawyer, sitting and waiting there really was your job."

Idle time's death knell was the Internet, which created a way to fill every moment while giving the appearance of productivity. The joys of making wastebasket two-pointers and using Scotch tape to extract nasal blackheads pale when compared with the minute-hand-massaging possibilities of Craigslist and YouTube.

According to Nielsen ratings, the average American visits more than 2,000 Web pages a month while on the clock; surveys by Vault.com suggest that close to 90 percent of workers spend part of their day doing Internet browsing that's unrelated to work.

This last factoid, of course, means that most of you are reading this at work... on the internet... the place where many more of you are now getting most, if not all of your news.... the place where advertisers are spending more and more of their dollars, at the expense of radio. Which explains all too well why radio news has joined the list of the obsolescent! Hmmm...