I don't know why I'm jumping into this, but...
> We aren't getting any help from Albany or
> Washington to keep the transmitters humming, and neither are
> WNED, WNYC, WAMC, WSKG or WCNY. We're all raising our own
> operating money for our radio stations and have to build our
> own facilities (and in our case didn't even get a dime from
> public sources to build the digital TV plant we brought on
> line). It makes a difference. The community licensees depend
> on the community, period.
There's a little more to it than that - there is, in fact, some state and federal grant money that's gone into the DTV conversion (and the upcoming digital radio conversion). At WXXI, there are specific programs (much of the educational programming, and the Reachout Radio reading service for the blind) that are funded by directed grants and by contracts with state agencies. There's certainly grant money funding the interconnect that's going in among the state's public broadcasters. (Bob is correct that the day-to-day operations of WXXI's radio and TV signals is funded entirely by members and underwriters.)
I'll gladly defend all of those, though. Among the things we're doing with our DTV bandwidth at WXXI is providing what amounts to a private video stream for local emergency providers, at no charge. The technology we're developing at WXXI could eventually be used by emergency providers around the country. Seems like a pretty good payback for a small public investment to me.
It's also important to remember - and very often forgotten - that in a sense, we taxpayers all subsidize the advertising on commercial radio and TV outlets, in the form of the tax writeoffs granted to businesses for the money they spend on those ads.
That wasn't really the point I wanted to make by jumping into this thread, though.
Bill's references to the "elitist" public broadcasters just simply don't ring true to me, and I say that as someone who's worked both sides of the fence. Pretty much everyone I work with at WXXI has spent time working in commercial radio or TV. We send our kids to public schools, we drive rusted-out used cars, and I'm pretty sure none of us snacks on Brie and chablis between newscasts. I suppose the WBFO and WNED folks might live a little higher on the hog, but I doubt it.
We do indeed have very nice new studios, as do WNED and WRVO - but they only came about after many years of making do with very old, downright decrepit facilities. I've never worked in a nicer plant than the current WXXI radio, but I'd also have to go pretty far back to think of a more rundown studio than our old digs.
In fairness, WHAM has new studios, too, and at the end of the day, while our styles may vary a bit (I don't think Bill Lowe gets to use 29-second cuts in his morning newscasts), we're both out there covering the same news conferences and sitting through the same long (and often deadly dull) meetings. Elitist? Not from my perspective. (But hey, I only work there.)
What I'm really not clear on here is exactly how Bill thinks one gets a job in radio. When I look around town - both on the commercial stations and the noncomms - what I see are a lot of people who have paid some very serious dues over a very long time to get where they are. Bob Lonsberry got where he is not just on the basis of his politics (though they certainly didn't hurt). He got there after years of newspaper drudgery, and he stayed there by virtue of being one of the hardest-working people anywhere in the business. Name a bad shift, and Bob's worked it, probably while working two more gigs at the same time. He makes it look easy. Believe me, it isn't.
In fact, I can't think of one person doing radio news or radio talk in Rochester who hasn't worked a whole string of cruddy jobs at (or below) minimum wage on the way to the "big time," or made huge personal sacrifices (moving alone to a strange city across the country) just to get that first break. And I guarantee you that all of them (present company very much included) were rejected a lot more often than they were hired along the way. It's not a question of applying at four places and being turned down. It's a question of applying at 40, or 80, or 100, before that big break comes along. I got my first paying job in radio news, back at WCAP in Lowell, Mass., by sending tapes and resumes to every radio newsroom in Massachusetts and most of New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well. If I remember right, only two of them even called me back.
It was a terrible field to try to break in to then, and it's only getting harder. The newsrooms that provided a "farm team" back in the day - WCGR in Canandaigua, WBTA in Batavia, WCJW in Warsaw, and so on - are either gone or reduced to one-person operations. If I'm counting correctly, there are a grand total of seven people in all of western and central New York employed full-time as radio talk show hosts. That's a hell of a tough club to break into. It's a little easier to get into TV, where there's always a need for producers and assignment editors, but even that's a challenge these days with the shutdowns of newsrooms at WNYO and WUHF and so on, which put some very experienced people back out on the job hunt, chasing perhaps 150 TV news jobs here and fewer in Buffalo. How many radio news jobs are there, total, in Buffalo and Rochester? I count about a dozen in Rochester, one in Batavia, one in Warsaw, and I'm guessing perhaps 20 on a good day in Buffalo. Those aren't good odds.
Don't get me wrong - there's a reason those of us who work in the business put up with all of this. When you finally get that break, and when you get behind the mike or in front of the camera, there's no greater feeling in the world. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have worked where I've worked, and I wouldn't trade it for a desk job in a million years. But it's been a long, hard slog to get there for me, just as it's been for the other professionals who post here - and for all the good people I know (some of whom also post here) who still love the business but don't work in it anymore, whether by their own choice or otherwise. There are probably more talented radio people out of work, or severely underemployed, at any given time than there are actually in the business. (Cf. Neaverth, Danny.)
If you don't feel like you're getting much sympathy after what looks, from what you've told us so far, to be a pretty minimal job hunt given the realities of the business today, perhaps this helps to explain why. <P ID="signature">______________
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