The Elephant In The Room With News 92

[rogergray]

Just a quick observation. The original story concept was the cost to cities in policing the protests. Neither politics or the balance issue come into play. It is a money story involving someone from the city or HPD. Calling either party therefore, is lazy and pointless unless spin is what you're after. In addition, the answers from either party will be completely predictable.

 

[gabigley1]

***Instead of sending their own reporters out to cover local news; they wait for the newspaper or TV people to decide what the most important stories are.***

That is nothing new in Houston TV and radio. I know from personal experience that from the 70s through the 90s news directors at KTRH and other radio stations would cut stories out of the morning papers and pass them out to those in the newsroom with the word "Reaction?" penciled at the top. "Enterprise journalism" was a foreign concept. Nobody had the time, or didn't want to bother with it.

Over that same period, I could read the morning paper and point out to my wife which stories we could count on seeing on the evening local TV news. I was rarely wrong. And they still do it.

Would this also apply to Joe Izbrand, KTRH News Director in the 90s? Joe was a old neighbor of mine, growing up in San Antonio in the 60s and 70s.

 

[FilioScotia]

Yes it does apply to Joe Izbrand. I did two terms at KTRH -- in the late 70s under News Director Ben Baldwin, and again in the late 80s and early 90s under Melanie Miller and Izbrand.

Baldwin was a nice guy and I liked him, but his only effort at "directing" the news was to hand out copies of morning newspaper stories with "Reaction?" penciled at the top. After being away from Houston for ten years, I came back to KTRH in 1988 and found that nothing had changed.

Neither Miller or Izbrand had any idea how to "direct" news without using the morning paper as their assignment editor. They would have been lost without it. Most of us out in the newsroom never complained because it's easy to get reaction to a story.

In defense of that approach, we had to work that way because in a heavy news wheel format like KTRH had back then, "Volume" is the number one requirement. Reporters had to produce at least two stories a day, and, get this: We had to produce three versions of each story for use that day, three more versions for the next morning, and three more versions for the weekend news blocks to use. Nine versions of the same story, before we could move on to our next story, so we just couldn't spend a lot of time on every story. We had to keep the news wheel turning.

It was a real sweatshop. Miller, Izbrand and GM Laura Morris were always cracking the whip, managing with intimidation and keeping us in fear of losing our jobs. I left KTRH forever in 1991, burned out and suffering clinical depression, so I don't know how their successors worked. However, if you listened to KTRH during the day, most of what you heard were reactions to stories in the newspaper.

Every one of those former KTRH people now at KROI News92 can verify what I've just written.

 

[mrbeasley]

I think the last real news director KTRH had was Garvin Berry. At least he had a real news background, having retired from Channel 13. I think the retirement check was a little too thin; so he went back to work in radio. He was fairly demanding; but, having worked there, I don't think it was quite sweatshop that it became, later, under Morris.