Local news columnists covering broadcast activity?

[kenglish]

Seems like every day, my newsfeed aggregator has stories about various layoffs, moves and changes all over the country, with most of them coming from the news media in the local markets . A lot of them are even regular newspaper columns.
I know that the Salt Lake market hasn't had a specific "radio columnist" since Lynn Arrave retired from the Deseret News years ago.

Does your market have a dedicated columnist who reports news of the local radio and TV stations?

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Dedicated radio and TV reporters are a thing of the past at most modern newspapers. As far as that goes, dedicated beat reporters are a thing of the past, too. I remember an era -- around 10 years ago -- when there were dedicated government, education, business, investigative, and features reporters at my local newspaper. We even had a once-a-month radio & TV column from a freelancer. Not any longer.

I did see quite a few stories about the iHeart layoffs in January in mainstream outlets. I assume we'll see some ink about the recent round of Entercom layoffs, too, but it may be hard to find underneath all the other Coronavirus stories.

 

[gr8oldies]

Major stories about local station sales, format changes or morning show changes get covered, but no dedicated radio/TV column since the one we had died several years ago. I'm sure that wasn't his only job.

 

[TheBigA]

Dedicated radio and TV reporters are a thing of the past at most modern newspapers.

That's funny. What's a "modern newspaper?" A lot of the most respected radio & TV reporters still exist, but not at newspapers. Robert Feder was a well respected newspaper writer. When he got fired, he started his own site, and continues to write on Chicago radio.

 

[CTListener]

My first newspaper job, in the late '70s, was at a small Southern daily in a city of 10,000 with one other media outlet, an AM radio station. We weren't allowed to write stories about it, or even mention its call letters in stories in which it was peripherally involved, because it was our lone competition for local advertising. I remember mentioning the station's football play-by-play announcer in a story once, referring to him as Joe Blow of KXYZ -- in print, having gone through an editor, my reference was to Joe Blow "of a local radio station." Wouldn't even acknowledge that it was the ONLY local station!

 

[PTBoardOp94]

A modern newspaper is delivered without any paper at all!!

 

[boombox4]

Modern newspapers? They're on their last legs, aside from maybe the ones in the three biggest metros (NY Times, LA Times, maybe one of the Chicago papers, and perhaps WSJ and USA Today).

People get their news on social media, their favorite political blog / "news" aggregator, and the like. The day of the columnist, for the most part, left us after the Great Recession.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Charlotte has almost always had a radio-TV columnist in the years I have been reading The Charlotte Observer. Maybe that's why I got so interested in the subject. The last one retired several years ago and we don't have that kind of coverage any more. I get my news from here.

 

[boombox4]

Here in the Seattle area the last radio (or media) columnist I recall was in one of the two major papers, the one that went online only. I think his column disappeared some time during that period -- it was when the 2008 recession hit, or thereabouts.