Re: $no traffic
Nothing personal.
It's not about talent or ability or quality.
It's about money.
It's about which traffic service offers stations the best deal.
Some people have said it is pointless to do traffic reports on TV. Maybe there is not a great need for it, although it does provide an opportunity for maps, graphics and traffic cam pictures (whether useful or not). (TV types are suckers for anyting visual - pretty maps or pretty faces).
But the real reason is traffic reports make money. Traffic services sell time and they pay incentives to stations. It used to be a straight brokerage deal - traffic companies got avails to sell with their reports and stations got free traffic reports.
Now competition has raised the bar and often stations expect compensation.
Traffic companies have cut back on mobile units and aircraft and rely more on DOTs and police scanners. They also save money by hiring inexperienced people willing to work cheap and to work part-time (no benefits but who thinks about health insurance right out of school). There is also a good deal of turn-over, which affects quality and accuracy of traffic reports.
Bob Kelly is in a different situation: He works for CBS3 (not a traffic company) and he gets traffic info from both Metro Networks' Shadow Traffic (the same as most radio stations, including KYW) and he can use computer-generated maps and graphics from Traffic.com (a self-described "technology company" providing on-demand traffic data via GPS, the Internet and cell phones and able to promote its "new media" services via broadcast reports). Traffic.com is also responsible for the much-maligned UPN57 WakeUPNews which replaced KYW Newsradio on UPN57.
> It was a little weird not seeing John Valerio or Jason Lee
> during any of the snow coverage on channel 6, especially
> Valerio. Not to beat a dead horse, but I just don't get it.
> The guy doing traffic now is OK, but just OK. And Karen
> Rogers may be good doing weather or reporting, but she has
> no clue when it comes to traffic. In weather like this, you
> need your traffic people to know what they're doing. I
> watch Bob Kelly now.
>
