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Alaska I'll be leaving Alaska soon...

oh no point. i just remembered seeing that building a few years ago passing through Rawlins. when i saw you were moving to Laramie it reminded me. IDK, i guess I thought maybe you knew something about the Rawlins cluster, and would comment on it.

id rather not...... just google jan charles gray, the owner
 
Congrats, on being back

What was your Up's & Down's in Alaska?

I know it's brutal in the Wintertimes, But Beautiful in the Summertimes

You have to get used too Day & Nights in the Lower 48
 
Way to go Paul...gotta love having contacts in the industry. Maybe I should bribe local radio groups to hand me their old equipment 😁
I was hoping you would've ended up in ID or western MT, two of my favorite places...
We are looking at the Boise Napa area ourselves. CA is too expensive, with even the sales tax being about 60% highrt than Idaho. I spent over $7000 in CA sales tax just for the website purchases last year.

Any advice for the area as a place for WorldRadioHistory's home?
 
I have to ask....Do you miss Wheatstone?

I mean, kinda.. its certianly nice but thankfully... we didnt find ourselves in a situation where the routing to a different source or studio in an emergency became an issue.

We have some good back ups and redundancy here.
 
Cozy, small-town lifestyle? Emmett probably. Highway 16 gets you right into Star/Middleton/Eagle, and soon enough will expand to I-84. Construction has been ongoing.
Traffic on I-84 between Nampa and Boise can be bad on weekdays during AM/PM rush hour. Eagle Road is often backed up big-time as well. I did not like driving in Meridian at 5PM on a Friday.
 
I think you like AI a little too much, Paul.

Do we need to form a support group called "Artificial Intelligence Anonymous"? šŸ¤”
 
People have asked what my job is like here in Laramie.... and it's kind of like being News Director & Operations Assistant.

I still do the afternoon show on Hits 106 which I dearly love doing. But I was brought back to help out in a few areas. Our 4 stations will have syndicated morning shows while I do the news/community interviews/road reports on all 4 signals.

With owning all 4 signals and the only LOCALLY owned and LOCALLY FOCUSED media we have a responsbiility and ability to ramp our efforts on local news without resorting to if it bleeds it leads or being clickbaity.

95.1 focuses on Cheyenne, 102.9 forgets Laramie even exists. We have no local TV stations and just one local news paper.
There's alot of opportunity given this circumstances and lots available to focus on now that I'm back here Full time and news is my is one of my big focuses.

Check out our news website, County5 and our community calendar, Laramieevents and you'll see the serious uptick in what I've done since I've been back and that's just scratching the surface.

Road reports? Not exactly traffic, like you might think but mostly details on issues with area highways because of weather or accidents. Though if we are made aware of issues on local roads wether immediate short term or long term closures, we report on those.

I do make valiant efforts to suss out and cuiltavate/write/originate news stories, community event info and find people to interview for our community connections interview segment every morning.

As for that "operations assistant", I do alot of the stations in house audio production. I do do almost all of the work for our news and community calendar websites.. AND, I do whatever Shawn asks.. lol.. Usually, it's stuff that needs to be done that he doesn't have time for because he's busy frying much bigger fish.

I also get to help with nerdy operations stuff like discussing future plans for the stations including programming, format stuff and I'm sure i'll be helping at some level with the move of the Appaloosa stations into the Hits 106 facility. I don't do heavy lifting, but I'm sure I'll be doing some stuff.

The focus is not on quantity, but quality in all that we do while also not being first but fair and accurate when it comes to news. And not burying ourselves in 8-9-10 go go go non stop work days (Well except owner and boss Shawn... hes always working.. 99 percent of the time, harder than any of us employees)

We have fun and we try to laugh every day. I've been involved with Hits 106 for 7 1/2 years, all thanks to Shane Toven introducing me to Shawn in Summer late Spring 2018 after I was fired from 97.5 The Hound by text on a Saturday morning. I worked from home in PA for 6 months, lived in Laramie for 2 years full time then continued to work for Shawn remotely in Alaska for 5 1/2 years.

and now I'm back home again. Funny how life works out sometimes. It was NEVER on my lifes bingo card to end up in Laramie and I never figured it would be such a wonderful place.
 


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