Here’s how the media world has turned around in the past twenty years; when I worked for Hubbard Broadcasting, from 1985 to 1987, it was a big honkin’ player in the local media scene, with a market value of around $400 million dollars.
Today, Hubbard is valued around a billion dollars – and is a “ma and pa shop” in the great media scheme of things.
Their flagship TV station, Channel 5, has taken its ratings lumps – but it’d seem they’ve done something right. They were pretty universally acclaimed as having the best coverage of the bridge collapse last week.
Sarah Janecek, writing last week, sums up the plaudits:
KSTP TV started reporting on the bridge in its Wednesday six p.m. newscast with the first live chopper shot at 6:22. The station stayed on the air covering the story live for the next 25 hours straight. I cannot begin to calculate what that cost. Never mind the costs of the employee overtime, or the expense of keeping helicopters live in the air for 13 hours straight, there were no commercials. None. The first commercial break was a short one during last night’s ten p.m. newscast.
Old man Hubbard, himself, was in the news room Wednesday night, observing his hard working news team. At no time was cost an issue in terms of coverage. He just let his team run, and run, they did.
Janecek also be-kudoes the local citizen journalist community. Check it out.
When I watch the 6 or ten news, which is not often, I watch the #5.
They seem to be more dedicated to reporting the news. Kute11 is more concerned about feel good stories, Fox9 can’t wait to get what “news” they have that night out of the way so they can talk about football or American Idle or the Buzz and what’s Prince doing tonight. Channel 4 with DFL Don, wants to go in depth with more tired agenda driven globalwarming story.
So I like to watch the Number 5. The number five doesn’t hype the weather as much either. Which is good.
Speaking of weather, I used to work for a company formerly known as Kavouras (then DTN Kavouras, and now Meteorlogix). They make computer graphics systems for displaying weather graphics. Ch17 Aviation Weather, all those charts and symbols? That’s them. When Belinda stands in front of her big huge US map with all the blended colors and flowing patterns to show weather system trends? That’s them. Not sure if “Viper3D Radar” is Meteorlogix or not, that was introduced at Skare11 long after I left. I met Ken Barlowe one time when I was tasked with stopping by 11 to upgrade their SGI data crunching workstation from 512 megs to 1 gig of ram. He walked into the weather office swearing up a blue streak humorously because someone pulled a joke on him. It didn’t bother me, but it was rather eye opening since the only way I knew of him was his overly smarmy nice on-air personna.
Anyway, being in the thick of things relating to weather, they had lots of weather-geek people on staff that knew the weather personalities in town (at the time I worked there, it was Mike Fairboring at ch 4, Dave Dull at ch 5 and Karen Barlowe at ch 11). I was told that by far, Dave Dahl was the most accurate of the 3, because he was a meteorologist trained in broadcasting, while the other two were broadcasters trained in meteorology. This is all second hand and I had no way to verify, but the people who told me had been there a long time and knew their shit.
We quit watching 10pm news a few years ago. GSN had 70’s Match Game for a couple years from 10-11 and now it’s 00’s Family Feud with Richard Karn. Far more engaging than the news in this town.
Kavouras! I interviewed there, many years ago, for a gig as a tech writer for some kind of radar installation.
Didn’t get the gig 🙁 Looked like fun, though.
Bill, I love Channel 17 weather! I love it when the female computer simulated voice says “cloudy”! My 11 year old son loves it too! He always predicts when a different computer voice comes on. He’s say “Dad, the voice will change” and behold, the voice changes!
The graphics system for ch 17 was called the “Triton I7” (eye-seven, not seventeen). The system at Ch 11 (and ch4 for that matter) was called Triton RT.
Interesting bit of trivia: The software package for the “Triton RT” software (at ch 11, ran on a pair of SGI Indigos, 1 for number crunching, 1 for graphics rendering, and a Dell workstation for data storage) was originally called EarthWatch, from the company called Earthwatch, started by Paul Douglas.
I worked in “Field Service”. I would make a few trips per month to various locations around the country (unfortunately, the majority of which were to small boring midwestern towns) to TV stations or airports or other places that needed the system, and install it. When I was in the office I was hardware and software tech support for the external customers.