The world comes alive with news at :55!

As people debate the merger of the KGMB and KHNL news departments, those of us who come from radio, and who remember the days of more detailed regulation of news, recall a time when much of the decision-making in radio programming turned on how to avoid or downplay one's newscasts. In the late 1960s when I was a teenager, and therefore an avid radio listener, but not yet one who worked in the industry, it was an article of faith among rock station programmers that news was a "tuneout," driving listeners to tune to rival stations. Yet regulations of the day required all radio stations to do news. Some stations tried shouting the news. "From every point in the universe!" screamed KBOX, a Texas rocker, while CKLW Windsor, Ontario, did yellow journalism: "He took his genuine Louisville slugger and proceeded to bat out a thousand on his wife's head, she's dead," bellowed one newscaster who later became just another staid anchor on the all-news station across the river in Detroit. Others tried making the news more vibrant by doing lots of interviews and running a whole lot of actuality - sound bites - opening each newscast with an actuality right out of the news theme, then explaining what the story was. WFIL Philadelphia did this, and my second job was at WYRE Annapolis, which emulated that. The news department had three triple-slot ITC cart machines, which meant we could run nine actualities without reloading, and many times I did use one or more of the slots more than once in a five-minute newscast. Rock stations that wanted to play down their news image programmed their news at points of the clock other than the top of the hour, when the adult stations did news. The gimmick of 20-20 news - at :20 and :40 - originated on rock stations - and when ABC parsed itself into four different networks targeted at different radio formats, it was the rock network - American Contemporary Radio - that said, "The world comes alive with news at :55!" By the early 1970s when I was actually working in radio, the hot idea on rock stations was to program 15 minutes of news an hour between midnight and six, and none at all during the news. This was an outright evasion of responsibility, not unlike one Pennsylvania radio station that famously gave timechecks with the phrase "Safe-Driving Time" and then logged it as a minute-long public service announcement. Until then, radio stations were required to commit to some specific amount of news, public service and public affairs programming, with the implicit threat of having one's license assigned to someone else if you didn't do enough for federal regulators. But soon these regulations were eased, as were the restrictions on how many radio and television stations one company could own. When music-oriented stations were no longer required to do news, they didn't, though most quickly realized that they needed to do a little bit during commuting hours or it would cost them listeners. The most interesting side effect of music stations dismantling their news departments was the rise of stations that did only news. This started as early as the late 1960s with XETRA Tijuana, Mexico, serving southern California. Personnel from the station then replicated the format in Washington, D.C., Boston and other cities. WAVA Arlington, Va., the Washington station, discounting Tijuana as not part of America, billed itself as "America's first all-news station" when I anchored there from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 the station went music and the staff was laid off, but by then there were two other all-news stations in Washington, one of which still survives - I worked there from 1997 until I moved to Hawaii at the end of 2000 - and is now the top-rated station in the nation's capital. It's a question whether all-news would have grown into the powerhouse format it is today had music stations not been allowed to drop their news. Television is the career of my new life in Hawaii and until recent years I can discuss it only as a viewer, but it strikes me that when there were three networks doing evening newscasts American public discourse started from a uniform sense of what the facts were, and those three networks had bureaus all over the world. Today we have five networks like that - I'm counting Fox and PBS - plus several all-news networks - CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg and more - and additional alternative sources, the most important of which would be the CSPAN networks, not to mention news programming originated by political and religious organizations with broadcast channels. It is daunting to note that this multiplicity of news sources is nothing compared with the Internet, which has news spun with whatever slant one likes, allowing one to float through life without one's pre-conceived notions of the world ever being challenged. The radio news of my youth was marred by lack of reporting staff. Every station did news but most did it with one or two people, the ones you heard on the air, backed up by no one else. Modern news is the same only worse. The "letter networks" do more news programming today than they did in the 1960s but with fewer actual reporters. Newspapers and local broadcast stations across the country have smaller reporting staffs now than they had a generation ago, except for metropolitan all-news stations, some of which have substantially larger reporting staffs now. This is important and I will return to this theme from time to time. Most stories can be apprehended by a single reporter working for a few minutes but most of the really important issues of the day are more complicated than that and require - not a huge staff of investigative reporters - but a little extra time to actually learn the facts in depth. Any profitable news operation, regardless of medium, needs to consider how it will manage this. More later.

Comments

[Michael]

"The world comes alive with news at :55!" Stay tuned after this commercial break. It is now 10 past the Hour and our News begins.
Man dies. How, what, why, and when? Stay tuned for our next commercial.
Now, one does not need Radio or TV, you have online, News Tweets. Ipod, Iphone, I don't know of what else? No one reads the paper. Old days people needed to read the Newspaper. Till someone came up with a Charmin idea.

[AJ McWhorter]

These were more tv news promo based when I was a kid, but you don't seem to hear these anymore:

FILM at ELEVEN!!

or

"It's 10:00 Do you know where your children are"