The RKO years

It's impossible to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade each year without thinking back to two years I wish I could do over.  The parade at that time went down Broadway, and I worked on the 5th floor of  1440 Broadway, at the RKO Radio Network. Thanksgiving was a good time for our families to come into the sports department and watch the balloons go by at eye level  (The image above is the 1985 parade from the vantage point). I was usually working in the windowless newsroom, so I never really got to see the parade.

It was 1984 when I moved to New York. The radio news business was different then. There was a "nuclear core" of the industry. If you worked in the news business, you wanted to get to New York. It's what motivated radio newspeople in small markets all across America.

I'd worked at WHDH in Boston, which was the only dream in broadcasting I ever really had -- Boston -- but much of the newsroom was laid off in May, even though we were the #1 station in the market.  My old boss, Ed Bell, helped me get a "summer relief" job at WCVB in Boston, which at the time was known as the best local TV station in America. It was an honor richly deserved.

But I never felt comfortable in TV; I couldn't understand the entire "write to the pictures" method of writing, and I never could figure out the union duties and who could do what. In radio, you controlled the story from the beginning all the way to the end. It doesn't work that way in TV.

So when RKO's managing editor, Harvey Nagler,  called -- presumably at the behest of my old WHDH pal Nick Young-- I jumped at the opportunity to fly down to New York and check out a "WGA" position (Writer's Guild of America). Basically, WGAs called people and interviewed them, sliced up the tape, and sent it out to the anchors. Also involved was an editor's shift or two. No heavy lifting, really.

I was hired and we moved to New York where we were immediately depressed by the apartment market. We were moving away from families and New York then seemed far away from Massachusetts. I wish I'd known then what I know now.

I loved taking the train into the city, I loved the Empire State Building at night,  I loved being around the best of the best, and  I loved reading some of the finest writing I've ever seen come out of an anchor's hands, but while I thought $43,000 was a lot of money, in New York it was chump change. We couldn't really afford to do anything to enjoy New York.

On the second day of work,  RKO was reported to have double-billed advertisers in its 1984 Olympics coverage. It would have to repay it and everyone knew that money had to come from somewhere. Its owner, General Tire, was already known as a corporation that wasn't qualified to own broadcast facilities in the country (this was back when the FCC gave a damn about the character of the people who ran broadcast stations). Over the summer that number grew into the millions.

Every week, another story came out about the future of the RKO Radio Networks, given the collapsing finances of General. And I liked job security (which is why my decision to get into radio wasn't that bright to begin with). The stench of death was in the air constantly and I don't deal with that well, not being that optimistic a guy for one. Being a stupid 30-year-old with a new baby at home for another. 

When the layoffs start happening, Nagler called me into his office. I thought it was the end. "Are you worried about losing your job?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Don't be," he said.

Still, I sent resumes out. I wanted to go work at ABC News, but nothing developed. At the same time, I was working with people I admired tremendously. They were professional. They were fun. It looked easy for them. And I was out of my league.

A year later, just before 5 on a Friday night, a memo was circulated. We'd been sold to Dick Clark and the Transtar Radio Network, which distributed syndicated music specials. I, and a lot of other people, knew that they weren't interested in running a news operation (which was renamed the United Stations Radio Network).  they were interested in the satellite transponders RKO owned, and the affiliate lists.

In the spring of 1986, my father-in-law asked me to come back to the Berkshires to help start an FM station in a license battle the company was involved in. For two years, I'd heard some frustrated RKO anchors say, "I'd like to go back to run a small-market radio station," and given the opportunity now, it seemed like a no-brainer (it's the hardest thing in the broadcating business, I know now, but that's another story).

After I gave my notice, ABC News called and the news director said, "I just now saw your resume and I think we need to talk." But it was too late.

As it turned out, leaving New York has worked out well, and yet I regret I wasn't smart enough, good enough, or adult enough to be better at it.

A year or so later, we had a reunion on Long Island.  It was great fun to see everyone again. As we were leaving, Ross Klavan, an anchor I was saying goodbye to laughed at one point and said, "We were glad to see you go."

I laughed too, even if it was the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

And even though he was right.

How I inspired Ira Glass and kept my job for another week

Welcome. You've just been sucked into clicking on a link because of a pretty misleading headline that included a big name. I feel dirty about that and now maybe you do, too. I apologize, but it's a dog-eat-dog world out here in blogville.

The trip down memory lane I took this week has got me thinking more about my long road of working in radio. My guess is my radio career peaked some years ago and each day I become "that guy" that most young radio people encountered on their way to a long radio career: the guy with the long radio career that peaked years earlier.

Whatever. I can hold on like most other men in their mid- to late 50s in this recession that's claimed a disproportionate number of them,  which is to say: holding on tight and hoping to survive to work another day. Besides, I'm used to it. It's the way I started every day in broadcasting since 1975. Scared.

Some years ago -- 1996 -- I was in San Diego covering the Republican National Convention. Earlier in the day, I was in Balboa Park where a "Faith and Freedom Rally" was held. It's no big deal now, but back then it was one of the first public displays that the religious right had gained control of the Republican Party. The moderates were left out.

I was voicing a piece I wrote, noting that the event  was a metaphor for the party as a whole. After I finished  sending it back to my organization, a man standing nearby, who overheard it said, "that's the best piece I've heard all week."

I was flattered, of course, but I had no idea who it was and it wasn't until years later that I was told it was Ira Glass, host of the Public Radio's "This American Life," who is widely considered a god among public radio employees.

I'm remembering  this because a week or so ago, a flurry of "tweets" appeared in my account. It was from colleagues of my company who were in Denver for the Public Radio Program Directors convention. They were surprised when the speaker at the "benediction" gave me something of a shout out. The speaker was Ira Glass.




That sure surprised my colleagues. It surprised me, too. Frankly, there's something wrong with journalism when a 56-year-old man who's been doing it for 35 years is its "new face."  It's more than amusing, I think, that a group of colleagues went to Denver only to find out this "new face"  was the old face in a cubicle in the city they just left.

The reality, however, is that I'm not "the new journalism," I'm the old journalism I described in my previous post: just having a conversation with the audience rather than a sermon.  The "antique aesthetics" of journalism, as Ira Glass says, threatens to kill off broadcast journalism now. It's already killed off most of it in commercial media.

But, beyond that, there's a more disturbing reality: The "face of the new journalism" may well be the guy in a cubicle, working too long, and too hard, because he starts each day with the fear that this is the day he gets laid off.

The original posting that Ira Glass referred to can be found here.

It was 23 years ago today

It was a Sunday and I wasn't supposed to work. I was the program manager of WSBS in Great Barrington, still in the infant stages of trying to upgrade the role the station had in the community. I hadn't yet learned -- or proven -- that I make a lousy manager. I can do. I don't know how to make others do.

The leaves were just turning in the Berkshires, and the snow was just starting to fall. Snow on October 4th?

Like most small-market radio stations, we had a skeleton staff on duty on a Sunday morning. And by skeleton, I mean 1 person who wasn't a newsperson. So I went to work.

The snow got heavier, and soon, two other people, who lived just up the street, made it in to work to help out.

Then the branches started snapping, and the power went out all over the Berkshires, except at a small 1,000 watt daytime station. By now, I was on the air, using a model we'd used at WHDH in Boston years earlier. Open the phones and talk to people.

I recall one person who had a baby on a respirator,only the power was out. She called the radio station. Everyone was getting on the air. She told her story, a few minutes later, we had someone with a 4x4 and a generator on the phone, too.

At one point, Gene Shalit, then the NBC Today Show film reviewer, called from his home in Stockbridge. He had no other point, really, than anyone else who was calling. They were without power, trees were falling, and he wanted someone to talk to .

We continued into the night. When the sun went down, I kept the power up even though we were supposed to sign off at sunset. Nobody else was on the air. Eventually, I compromised and flipped on a smaller transmitter -- 3.9 watts, which -- because everyone was without power except for us -- boomed throughout the Berkshires.

It was radio the way it was meant to be, and the way it can never be again. It was the best day I ever spent in the radio business. It's why I still fume when the occasional public radio snob mockingly says "commercial radio."

My family -- Carolie and two-year old Sean (Carolie had yet to give birth to Patrick) -- were somewhere, but I didn't know where. Carolie is the daughter of a radio guy; she knew I had a job to do and she'd figure out how to survive. They huddled with some neighbors who had a wood stove.

It was 10 or 11 O'clock at night and the Berkshires were scared. And then, a power company truck came by the state highway out front, then another, and another, and another. They kept coming. The rest of Massachusetts had sent us some help. So I told southern Berkshire County that help was here.

As midnight approached, people were still calling. When they weren't, I pulled out the Old Farmer's Almanac and began reading stories. Finally, around 1 a.m., the Berkshires were asleep, and I signed the station off the air.

The next morning, I showed up at work, and there were flowers in the lobby from people, and I think people dropped baked goods by. They were still calling to say "thank you" to a small group of people who didn't let them down.

A newspaper in Pittsfield ran this commentary a few days later (written by Clarence Fanto):

Radio tends to be taken for granted by most listeners; they use it for hours every day but video usually occupies the spotlight.

Over the last few days, however, appreciation for public service provided by radio during an emergency has reached new heights in Berkshire County. For many residents on the day of the Great October Blizzard, the area's radio stations provided a lifeline for some, and the only link to the outside world for others isolated and marooned by the devastating storm.

With power out, phone service disrupted, TV sets disabled, those with the foresight to keep their portable radios powered with fresh batteries were able to gain reassurance from the knowledge that thousands of others share dtheir plight and, in many cases, were even worse off.

The surprise storm hit the region at a time (Sunday morning) when most radio stations are minimally staffed and are offering pre-taped syndicated, religious or ethnic programming.

Although most of Pittsfield's stations eventually rose to the occasion, Berkshire Broadcating Co. (WSBS in Great Barrington and WMNB in North Adams) deserves special recognition for quickly recognizing the severity of the storm and suspending normal programming in favor of continuous storm coverage.

As heard in an isolated South County cabin, WSBS provided what amounted to an emergency command post, taking calls from listeners who needed special help, interviewing utility officials, police, and others involved in the crisis, and providing invaluable updates on highway conditions, road closings, power failures and phone problems.

Although the Barrington station focused, and rightly so, on South County, it also offered information on North County via reports from its sister station WMNB and on the Pittsfield-Dalton area from its news director, Tom Jay, who happened to be in Dalton that morning.

The WSBS on-air team -- program director Bob Collins, Dick Lindsay, Tony Betros, Liz Chaffee, Nick Diller -- combined authoritative news gathering with just the right amount of folksiness and sorely needed comic relief. There were several phone calls from stranded New Yorkers who insisted they just had to reach the Taconic State Parkway Sunday afternoon. Collins and company gently coaxed them into the realization that any kind of highway travel would be folly.

Those who complain about Berkshire radio -- too many commercial, "conservative" music programming, an overly homespun approach -- must now realize that without the outstanding service provided by the county's station's since Sunday, more lives might have been lost, panic could have developed, and the sense of isolation experienced by many storm victims would have been genuinely overwhelming.

Stephen Fay, a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle, wrote this story:

Great Barrington -- Bob Collins was as blown away as anybody by the big snow, Oct. 4, which is a little odd since he had known it was coming and had planned for it six months ago.

Last May, in his capacity as program manager for radio station WSBS, he compiled a policy handbook, what he calls a "storm package," that established programming formats designed to serve listeners tuning in during any of four levels of meteorological disturbances ranging from rain-swollen rivers to, as he put it, "total paralysis."

Total paralysis is as good a description as any for the impact of the Oct. 4 blizzard. And through it all, from early morning to late at night, Collins' storm package (and voice) provided listeners in South and Central Berkshire County with information, weather updates, help, tips and, as the grateful Great Barrington Civil Defense director put it, comfort.

As a result of the station's fast and facile assumption of the role of storm-information center, it has become a candidate for canonization among the many listeners who lacked power, lights, phone, transportation and heat. It's not just that he station was broadcasting -- it was broadcasting valuable information in the form of itnerviews with utilities' spokesmen, current weather reports, cancellations, and sources of help and shelter.

"It may sound like nobility," Collins said, "but it was part of a plan."

Collins, 33, said he is no fan of what he calls "stream-of-consciousness radio." he likes to plan ahead and organize the station's day. When he first came on board last April, the station's music policy was DJ's choice.

"Lawrence Welk would be followed by Whitney Hosuton and then some old song by Walter Brennan," he recalled.

He worked at rationalizing the music menu, allocating so much time for oldies, so much time for contemporary. He weeded out some strange records ("the Ballad of the Green Berets" was an early casualty) and threw away all the elevator music.

Beyond that, he said, he has tried to make the station a part of the life of the community. Fundraisers for sick children, such as Jared's Jamboree and HUSTLE, the SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) auction, and the effort to raise money to bring a Spanish boy to the Berkshires received the station's cooperation in the form of live broadcasts and plenty of on-air promotions and public service announcements.

The news coverage got a little broader and more ambitious under Collins' direction. he's not exactly taking bows for that advance, because Collins, who gets his feelings hurt when criticized, has gotten his feelings hurt a lot by angry selectmen, irritated listeners and aggravated advertisers.

Interestingly, he's not all that comfortable with praise. The praise from many quarters that's been coming in since last Sunday ought to be shared with his colleagues, he said, and really should go to the electric company and telephone crews who worked without rest to restore service.

"We were just sitting in a warm room passing on information," he said.

His journey to that warm room at WSBS has been long and bumpy. Born in Fitchburg, the youngest of five children of an insurance agent father and housewife mother, he developed an interest in radio early on. He used to record records on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and then play the DFJ -- announcing the hits and providing patter between platters.

He earned a bachelor of science degree in mass communications from Boston's Emerson College and landing his first radio job right after graduation in 1972, selling advertising for a little station in Marlboro. He didn't like ad sales and wasn't any good at it, either. He lasted a week. He got a DJ job at a station in Southbridge -- a 90-mile round trip commute from Fitchburg -- working six days a week for $110 a week. Then he got a better offer from the Fitchburg station, WFGL, and had his baptism under snow during the big blizzard of 1978 when he was one of the only staff members to make it to the station. He learned the value of making the station accessible to listeners, he said, as he took calls and did what he could do to let people know what was going on.

That year, he took a newsman's job at WBEC in Pittsfield, covering City Council meetings and other events. It was a good period, he said, for he liked working with Bob Cudmore, George Bulgarelli and others associated with the station at that time.

But WBEC changed hands and job security became a questiion, he said, so he bailed out and landed at WUPE, another rewarding interval darkened only by the time he forgot to throw a switch while making a personal phone call, drowning out a Zayre's commercial with language that was somewhat unfortunate.

Opportunity, in the form of WHDH in Boston, knocked in 1981, and there he worked until WCVB-TV in Boston hired him to write TV news copy. He said he didn't mind the anonymity of the news writer -- "I've always been content to be Joe Nobody" -- but the caste system of the anchorman and on-air "news personalities" turned him off. He went on to New York City to work for RKO Broadcasting until his father-in-law, Donald Thurston, owner of Berkshire Broadcasting, called in August of 1985 and asked if he would like to bring his wife, Carolie, and 2-year-old son, Sean, back to the Berkshires. Thurston wanted Colling to try the new position of program manager at WSBS.

He took over last spring and, judging from the response to his "storm package," he's been doing OK. But there have been many tough moments -- an on-air retraction over a mix-up in the coverage of the covered-bridge hassle in Sheffield and complaints from listeners who say there's too much rock-and-roll, too many changes.

He takes the criticism the way he takes his responsibilities: to heart. Does he ever think about giving up and getting out?

"Yeah, all the time."

I sent the article to my mother. Her reaction? "You called me a housewife," she fumed.

Live from New Orleans

I haven't updated the blog lately because life is either work, which means you can find it on MPR's News Cut. Or life is building an airplane, which means you can find it on the Letters From Flyover Country blog.

But this weekend I've been in New Orleans for, ummmm, work. The boss said on Wednesday, "How'd you like to go to New Orleans to cover the Vikings game?" I actually didn't want to. I like the Vikings fine but I intensely dislike the cliches surrounding football games.

But it was New Orleans and I wanted to take a look at post-Katrina. And, I found out when I got here, it gave me the opportunity to explore this connection this city has with its football team, which is unlike any other.

I also got a chance to spend some time in the Lower 9th Ward and, as usual in this "go do what you do" assignment I got, met some really nice people.



I sat in the press box at the Louisiana Superdome and enjoyed the game, despite having to miss watching overtime and the last four minutes of regulation because I had to get set up down in the media facility for the post-game news conferences.

I'd have loved to have Sean or Patrick with me for an event like this (and, of course, Carolie), but this is a work assignment. Still, I made sure I followed the advice Terry Bradshaw gives when he recounts a critical Superbowl play during his career. "I said to myself, 'Stop, and realize where you are,'" he said, just before he gave the ball to Franco Harris to win the Super Bowl.



I think back often to working those early days in Southbridge, and Fitchburg, and Pittsfield and if you'd told me then I'd be in New Orleans to meet nice people and cover an NFC Championship game, I'd have rained on your parade.

Retirement still seems like a good deal to me; I'm on the downside of the career and all. But I've still got the greatest job in America.

But when you're on assignment -- especially when you're on assignment alone -- you work all the time. I put in a 15 hour day on Saturday and 20 hours yesterday, and that's OK; I love working and feeding material to the blog and back to MPR. But when I looked at the Web traffic stats this morning (I'd told the boss there's no online audience at MPR on weekends and he said that's OK), all of my stuff got beaten out by some webcam of a bear giving birth to a cub.

And that's what keeps one's head on straight in this business. You can always be replaced by a pregnant bear.

Here's my radio piece from this morning:

Art of the interview

I got some nice coverage of a tour of college campuses from the magazine of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. It's on page 14 here.

Bob at work: Denver

Just to prove that I am, indeed, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, I submit this photo. My stuff appears on News Cut. There's a lot of it there -- 28 posts as of this morning -- including the levitating wizard. And last night I met the guy on whom the Radar O'Reilly character is said to be based.

Let's see CNN give you that kind of coverage.

This is the first national political convention I've covered strictly as a print (Web) guy and so far I think it's gone pretty well. I had back-to-back 21-hour days Monday and Tuesday and today I'm hoping to slow down a bit.

I did do a little radio, but that was just me having fun.

This stuff is hard work under occasionally frustrating conditions, but that's part of the fun. You start each day with a blank page. I'm not looking forward to the Republican Convention in St. Paul (I'll take one day off -- Saturday -- maybe), but then again, I never look forward to assignments until they're actually underway.