lbates said:
Grant Chester is superb. You need to reread what I wrote. I said "very very few exceptions" Count Ellie Hogue, Lance Ligess, and the Departed Scott Crowder as the others.
You forgot JIM RYAN, perhaps the hardest-working reporter in local radio...who also covers plenty of stories for ABC Radio. Forgetting one or two slights the whole group--and I don't know a bad one in the bunch, no matter who writes their paychecks. Add Rick Hadley, Freda Ross-Findley, Bob Leonard, Amy Chodroff, Susan Darwin, Randy Williams, Christopher Landers, John Pendolino, Bob Crowley, John Scott and Dan Lewis to that list. Bryan Lundberg, Steve Cumming, Jack Hines, Dan Potter, Mike Hambrick and several others have passed through the doors there during my tenure, and all are top notch as well.
Yeah, of course, I'm going to be biased...but after five years of listening to these folks and working with them every single weekday, day in and day out, over weeks, months and years, you get an idea of how well folks do their jobs, and if their efforts are credible and responsible and accurate...and this group accomplishes that and then some. And you don't see any newbies or kids running the show there, or "warm bodies" filling up space--these are all experienced reporters and anchors. Let me tell you a story about the 19 yr old kid who worked at traffic and now anchors overnights at KRLD...fresh out of ABS and maybe 9 months of on-air--doing traffic reports--before hiring on at KRLD. Sure, I'm all for giving people a chance, but I'd rather get my news from someone who's lived it, gets it, and understands what I need to know about it. Even with the best pipes in the world, rip-and-read just doesn't cut it.
Rick Hadley emailed me five years ago right after the "Russ Incident," and wanted an audition tape. I laugh now at how green I was then, and how un-ready I was for a job in the news dept there...but, five years later, and literally 50,000 traffic reports later, I still have doubts that I could hang with the big dogs at WBAP. That's a job you work UP to...you don't sign on hoping to get experience or just to have something pretty on your resume. You have to be ready to be one of the best.
Understand, too, that ABC could have dumped out of any news effort at WBAP 14 years ago when they took Rush away from KLIF and began building a talk-heavy format...but they didn't. Having two strong news stations going at it actually makes the product BETTER. That's what that long-lost concept of "competition" generally does.
