Remember - You Get What You Pay For!

I am not, by nature, a pessimistic person.  In fact, I tend to be quite adroit at compartmentalizing the bad things in my life and leaving them in a dark hole to be ignored for as long as possible, so I can focus on lighter fare, such as vacation planning or watching reality TV.   When I'm busy working at one of my freelance news jobs, it's easier to ignore the fact that I have no long term career prospects. But when I'm not working, it's easier to dwell on the fact that news reports point to a rather dismal future, at least in the short term. 

Two articles of note in today's news are conspiring to open up my "bad things" compartment.  First, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is giving a pretty glum assessment of where the nation's employment picture is heading.  Bernanke says "the best thing we can say about the labor market right now is that it may be getting worse more slowly."

And from that broad assessment, we go to another article that points specifically to my profession, journalism.  A new study finds that fewer than half of Americans say they would be willing to pay for news online, and that those who would pay - would only cough up three dollars a month for it.

In essence, Americans believe they have a God-given right to free access to news - and really, who can blame them?  The cost of news coverage has been borne by advertisers for hundreds of years, and consumers have never had to worry about that burden.

But because of the internet, ad dollars have been splintered into tiny pieces, and the news business model is irrevocably broken.  The degradation of the news business is well underway.  We've all heard about the sorry state of newspapers.  Just this past week, the Washington Times began to brace for a new round of cuts, and the Washington Blade - DC's voice in the gay community - shut its doors after 40 years in business.  

And then there's broadcast news.  Many -  if not most - local TV news operations have made significant cutbacks in recent years.  Some stations have discontinued weekend newscasts altogether.  More radio stations are dumping their news operations every day, and many of the newsrooms still operating are doing so with much fewer resources. 

With less competition, those news operations that are still in business are suffering from a lack of competition, leading to a new level of mediocrity in reporting that is being accepted as an industry standard.

And this is not just happening at a local level.  Network broadcast operations are making severe cuts as well, finding ways to sound and look healthy in hopes that the consumer won't take notice.

The sad thing is that most consumers WON'T notice - at least for awhile.  News on the internet seems to be thriving.  The problem is that most of that internet news is taken from the very same traditional media newsrooms that are in danger of collapsing. 

You don't want to pay for your news?  Just remember this truism, because eventually it will play out.  You get what you pay for.

Another Bump On The Road To Hell

You've seen plenty of entries on this blog fretting about how newspapers and radio are dying a slow and painful death. Well, let's not leave out the third sign of the apocalypse, OK? The Washington Post reported today that Channels 4, 5 and 9 here in the DC area have formed a cooperative TV pool service, so that when mundane news conferences or ribbon-cuttings are held, just one station can bother to send a camera, with all three stations sharing the video from the event.

Won't this further homogenize the news and make all three stations look alike? Yes. With only one station in attendance, won't that discourage the gathering of sidebar stories, and won't the discovery of news stories suffer because only one reporter might be on hand to ask questions? Yes. Won't this just give the stations even more of an excuse to watch the bottom line instead of focusing on creating better TV news? Yes it will.

It is jaw dropping to consider how quickly local journalism in this country is going to hell. Even just a couple of years ago, being a major market counted for something. TV reporters had camera operators to work with. Radio stations had real news staffs. Newspapers had real beat reporters. And consumers received actual news. All of that is going, or is already gone - even in the Nation's Capital.

I am not looking to point fingers, and it's pointless to blame the economy. The news business was heading in a downward spiral long before the stock market tanked. The Internet has changed the world in far more many ways than I could begin to discuss here, but somehow, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Demand for information is at an all-time high, while the consumers making those demands are also demanding to get all of this information for free.

Push is going to HAVE to come to shove at some point, people. TV and Radio news stations are not really gathering news any more - They are regurgitating what the read in the papers. And the papers have cut their staffs so thin that they are only covering a fraction of what they used to cover.

There is no corporate financial incentive right now for station owners to crank out expensive news product when they can rely on other sources to do investigative work and enterprise reporting, then steal it for themselves. As long as the stations can throw something up on the air that resembles news, that's really all they care about.

But mark my words... The day is coming when there will be another Katrina, or God forbid - another September 11th. People are going to need more information than the crippled TV and radio and newspapers can deliver. And very suddenly, there will be an outcry that will get some newsrooms rescued from mothballs. I truly believe it will take that kind of need to pull the news business out of this decline.

The young adults who are really just now getting married, having families and getting mortgages - in other words, becoming news consumers - are the same people who grew up as teenagers getting all of their music for free on Napster. They are the same people who feel they have the God-given right to receive whatever media they want - and to get it for free.

They say the customer is always right. But they also say you get what you pay for.

To Paul Harvey... Good Day!

Doesn't it just figure that I blew my best nugget of Paul Harvey material just a couple of weeks ago on the Michael Phelps story? Timing is everything, which just goes to prove that when my ship comes in, I'll be at the airport!


There's not much I can add about the passing of Paul Harvey, except to say that many people of my generation have heard the name "Paul Harvey", but still don't really know who he WAS. My generation, of course, was the first to abandon the AM radio band, where Paul Harvey was largely heard.


For those of you in the dark, then please allow me to tell you that Mr. Harvey was the idealized grandpa you never really had... The master storyteller who worked every word - every syllable and every breath - to improve the flow of the story he was telling. He could express in five words what it would take any other human 15 words to say.


Too often, we blow off people who are older than us - we don't have time to consider their wisdom - or we want something new to look at. I worked at WMAL for all of those years, and for ALL of those years, people were asking when Paul Harvey was going to retire. Well, now those people have their answer, don't they?


I REALLY think people wanted Paul Harvey to retire because they secretly knew they'd never be as good at what he did as he was.


I met Paul Harvey only one time - on the inaugural cruise of the first Disney cruise ship - the Disney Magic. The radio studio on board that ship was being christened in Paul's name, and we had him on WMAL as a guest. This would have been in 1997, so Paul would have been 78.

He seemed frail even back then, and he had the aura, at least to me, as being somewhat like a silent era movie star. Even as the temperature pushed 90 degrees, Paul wore a leather bomber jacket, a sailing captain's hat, and an ascot. Yes - he wore an ascot! Paul's wife, Angel, was resplendent in canary yellow. It was like having Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell the Third with us... First class passengers riding in steerage with the rest of us.

Paul was about as gracious as he could be - and he seemed genuinely thrilled to be meeting other radio professionals.

Mrs. Harvey died less than a year ago, and it come as no surprise to anyone that Paul was not long for the world. After all, he spent half-a-century on the radio talking about how much he loved his wife.

I can only imagine how Paul would have delivered his own obituary in his own unique style... "Doctors in Arizona say Mr. Harvey died of natural causes. But in actuality, he really died (long pause)... of a broken heart.

Paul Harvey... Good Day!

Some Work Days Are Just Better Than Others!

I've been writing and producing and managing news budgets for 25 years, and on most days, if we're lucky, we find one or two good stories to lead our newscasts, with the rest of the stories kind of filling up the news block. But every once in a while, you hit the mother lode, and you get a veritable cornucopia of stories that are so interesting and so compelling that you can't wait to get your newscast on the air! Today was one of those days...

Now, mind you - when I say "good stories", I don't necessarily mean "good news" news stories. In fact, it's fair to say that, from a story-telling perspective, really good stories usually constitute "BAD news". Michael Phelps is a very good "good news" story, but when I'm writing a newscast, I'll take a good compelling bizarre BAD news story any day of the week!

Here are some of the compelling stories I had the pleasure of writing today...

• We had the guy in the Baltimore County jail who was found tied up in his cell with the word "rat" scratched onto his back, a towel stuffed in his mouth and a spoon with a note attached to it shoved up his rectum. The victim had recently been caught wearing a wire in the jail, but corrections officials won't tell us why he was wearing a wire.


• We found out that the guy who drowned his three children in a Baltimore hotel room last spring had told investigators after his arrest that he is evil and should be put to death. We also found out that he had timed his children's drownings with a stopwatch.


• We had an actress from HBO's "The Wire" being arrested for marijuana possession at her home in Baltimore. The cops forced themselves into the woman's home and found a bunch of pot, including two blunts. They were under court order to drag the woman to court to be a hostile witness in a murder trial.


• We had Tropical Storm Fay, which is now measuring its rainfall on Florida in feet instead of inches after 4 days of drifting over the Sunshine State.


• We had Barack Obama playing peek-a-boo with the media over his choice for Vice President.


• We had the guy in Western Maryland who is holed up with his pregnant girlfriend in a motel room. He's wanted for theft and burglary in four states and he's kept the cops at bay for two days now. The cops used a police robot to try and deliver a pizza to the guy last night... but the guy just threatened to shoot the robot.


• We also had a landlord in Carroll County who shot at, and then pistol-whipped, one of his tenants when the tenant showed up to pay his rent.


• We also had the federal government cancelling a program that was set up to encourage illegal immigrants facing deportation to turn themselves in. The Feds dumped the program when only 8 people out of an estimated 30,000 illegals in the test area signed up for the deal. The feds say their program of surprise raids on illegals while they sleep works better... uh, DUH!

Interestingly enough, with news like this, today was the first time in two weeks we did NOT do a single story on Michael Phelps... The newsroom I've been working in has not, to my knowledge, received a single e-mail raising or criticizing our coverage of the Phelps story... But in a period of two hours this morning, we received about 5 complaint emails on the stories I've listed above! This tells me that these stories - for better or worse - generate passion and capture the imagination of our audience. We are creating word pictures that our radio listeners can actually see... And what they see disturbs some of them. That's OK... Some of these stories were very disturbing. Disturbing and memorable. And they made for great radio!

R.I.P. Radio

Recently, my former colleague, Chris Core weighed in on the reason he (and I) were let go at WMAL... And now, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher is offering an expanded obituary for the radio business. I wish I could say I believe Fisher is being overly pessimistic, but from my current seat, he seems pretty darn on point to me!

You can read the entire article here, but here are a couple of passages that pass awfully close to my heart:

In the easy decades of a tightly constricted mass media, there were three TV networks, monopoly newspapers and a handful of radio stations in each place. That lack of choice meant that much of popular culture was middle-brow in ambition and middling in quality. But the nation was guaranteed a common conversation about music, politics and nearly every other aspect of life.

The challenge for all media now is to find a path back to mass, while retaining as much as possible of the freedom and access that the infinite range of the Internet promises.

The programming on the radio these days does not light a way toward that goal. Music radio seems superfluous -- a selection of tunes nowhere near as varied as what iPod users choose for themselves, and without the added value that knowledgeable and entertaining DJs once provided. With the strong exception of public radio and a handful of all-news local stations such as Washington's WTOP, radio has largely gotten out of the news business -- too expensive. And the local talk programs that once made it easy for a traveler to figure out his location without ever glancing at a road sign have largely given way to Rush Limbaugh and a legion of imitators.

And there's more...

The next decade or more will be a transitional time, as radio, like newspapers and television networks, forswears allegiance to any one means of distribution and declares itself platform-agnostic. Those media that, like the record industry, cling to old technology and a collapsed business model will see their futures crumble before their eyes.

Radio, shedding talent as fast as it loses audience, is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the younger generation. Yet most Americans still listen to something for much of the day. Radio could be the way into those ears, but only if it invests in creating compelling reasons to be there, only if it grabs hold of us the way the voices of past decades connected to the loves, pains and dreams of young listeners. As always, the future lies in the past.

The future lies in the past? Maybe THAT's why I've been obsessed with my college choir lately! Is there any money in singing four-part harmony?