News Pooling


April 6, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. It's, say, 10 o'clock. Do you know where your local radio newscaster is? You hear him on your station, but in fact he could be anywhere. In commercial radio these days the phrase "local news" is more a term of art than an actual description. Thirty years ago it was different. Stations up and down the dial had their own local news departments engaged in eager combat with print and TV reporters for scoops on all the traditional beats. But when news and public affairs requirements fell, one by one, during the first wave of broadcast deregulation in the 1980s, many stations cut back or dropped their news all together. Lately it's starting to sound like the good old days, but it's not. On the Media's Paul Ingles reports.

RADIO

ANNOUNCER: Stocks ended the day down yesterday. The Coyotes beat the "Canucks" 6 to 1 last night.

PAUL INGLES: It's just past 7 on a recent Friday morning commute into Phoenix, Arizona. Scanning the dial for local news, a curious thing happened.

BOB McCLAY: I'm Bob McClay. KCTK-960 News.

PAUL INGLES:Newscaster Bob McClay is heard wrapping up a newscast on one station at the same moment he's midway through a newscast on a competing station down the dial.

BOB McCLAY: A U.S. marine pilot based in Yuma had to be rescued after ejecting from his....

PAUL INGLES: Scan further, and you hear him on a third station that morning.

BOB McCLAY: I'm Bob McClay at the new Talk 1190 News Center. Here are the stories making news in Arizona this morning.

PAUL INGLES: Newsman Bob McClay, a big man with a big voice, sits in a tiny announce booth from 5 to 9 each weekday morning in the News Center that any Phoenix radio station can call its own. The Metro Networks Phoenix Bureau near the Scottsdale Airport. Once a Metro traffic reporter, McClay is now Phoenix News Bureau chief and is anchoring for 3 stations this morning, taping some newscasts, doing some live. A flip of a switch opens a line to each station. Other reporters are doing the same from similar booths that line the perimeter of the noisy newsroom. Computer work stations, police scanners and two-way radios are everywhere you look. [BACKGROUND POLICE SCANNERS & 2-WAY RADIOS] McClay seems to get all his news from Metro's own newswire that shows up on his computer.

BOB McCLAY: Basically I'm going to do one newscast starting at 20 to, and then as soon as I close off from them, KMYL's waiting for a feed, so I'll just flip them up and start doing their newscast. But it's all made so that it's--the, the listener has no clue that we are not in the radio station; they think it's, you know, the radio station doing the news.

PAUL INGLES: So in Phoenix it may sound like the days when a dozen stations were competing for local news scoops, but it's not. Ten of the 12 commercial stations airing local news have it piped in from the same source -- Metro News's 7-person staff in Scottsdale, and it's the same thing in almost a hundred top U.S. markets. Metro Network started as a traffic reporting service in the '80s. With helicopters, planes, mobile crews and cameras already in place, the company began using them to cover spot news and deliver headlines in the mid-90s.

MARC FISHER: Metro Networks came along and backed into this -- surprising even to our own executives--

PAUL INGLES: Marc Fisher of the Washington Post who wrote a radio column for 4 years and also covers radio news for the American Journalism Review. He says the deregulation that relaxed ownership rules and allows large media companies to buy up more stations created a niche for Metro's news experiment.

MARC FISHER: When they found out that there was indeed a market for news and that you could distribute news to stations just the way you do traffic reports, and so stations would not only not mind but would actually savor the savings that they would get.

ALLEN SUMMERS: What's it worth? Well [LAUGHS] - I don't have to pay the salary of a newsman or a traffic guy.

PAUL INGLES: Allen Summers is production chief at Metro client KXAM in Phoenix.

ALLEN SUMMERS: If you're going to go to a broadcast school and get somebody they're going to get 8 bucks an hour but you're also going to get sound like an 8 bucks an hour. Well I don't want to sound like 8 bucks an hour. I think I can give up 15 seconds to have 2 guys that sound professional quality.

PAUL INGLES: The 15 seconds Summers refers to are the short ads that Metro anchors read at the end of each report.

ANNOUNCER: This news is sponsored by Monty Mailer [sp?]. Look for Monty Mailer's jumbo red, white and blue envelope arriving in your home.

PAUL INGLES: Last year Metro Networks mailed in over 50 percent of Westwood One's one hundred million dollar annual profit. So a successful business model for sure, but how does it rate journalistically?

BRIAN BARKS: To be perfectly honest, we don't see Metro really as, as a competitor.

PAUL INGLES: Brian Barks is news director at KTAR, one of two commercial stations still doing local news but not using Metro in Phoenix. To his ear the load of stations Metro's staff carries compromises the product.

BRIAN BARKS: You know I don't know if it's win-- call it window dressing or, or whatever. Kind of like how ma-- Hawkeye Pierce WOULD say on MASH --it's, it's kind of like you know meat ball surgery. It's-- you know cut it up and get it on the air.

SHANE COPPOLA: Yeah, I, I completely disagree with that.

PAUL INGLES: Shane Coppola, who oversees Metro Networks for parent company, Westwood One.

SHANE COPPOLA: If you look at the, the dollars that we spend today - the infrastructure that we have - it, it's incomparable to anything that was ever there in the past. No single station or even single cluster of stations could afford to put up 3 helicopters in New York City. No single station could afford to put two street reporters on the street, you know, basically 24/7 here in New York like we do for WABC 770.

PAUL INGLES: Metro now has 90 local bureaus in nearly all the top media markets, each one staffed with an average of 6 people drawn from a pool of reporters or disk jockeys laid off from other stations. Some folks were re-assigned to news from Metro Traffic. Their work is guided by a bureau chief like Bob McClay in Phoenix, but McClay's directions are guided by client station program directors who can dictate to Metro the length, style and overall content of the newscasts.

BOB McCLAY: You know some stations-- don't want any police news. Others that we've had here-- if there isn't enough blood and guts in police news, make something up! [LAUGHS] I say that jokingly but-- they want -- the more the merrier! They want the crime stuff!

PAUL INGLES: While Metro's extensive traffic infrastructure may give them an edge on covering breaking police and fire news, it puts fewer resources to what McClay called, quote, "the boring state government stuff." Metro chief Shane Coppola says most stations don't want it; nor do they want in depth investigative reporting. So Metro offers little or none of either in most cities.

BOB McCANNON: At some point we have to recognize that the news business is different from making chicken wings at Tyson Chicken.

PAUL INGLES: Bob McCannon heads a national media literacy project in New Mexico. He and other media critics blame deregulation and consolidation for the current state of local radio news.

BOB McCANNON: What we're getting is a commodified product which doesn't express the multiple concerns that citizens have in any given community.

MARC FISHER: The advance of the Metro Networks concept is a major strike against the basic foundation idea of journalism in this country which is the idea of a marketplace of ideas.

PAUL INGLES: Columnist Marc Fisher.

MARC FISHER: There is no marketplace of ideas when virtually every station on your dial is offering news to you from the same newsroom collected by the same person with no variation and all of it driven by a central deceit which is the idea that you are getting different newscasts on different stations. No one ever tells you that it's really the same guy sitting in the same room, sometimes using phony names so that he appears to be a different person on each station.

PAUL INGLES: As to the issue of many stations sharing one news source, the Metro folks say most listeners don't find out, and those that do don't seem to change listening habits as a result.

MARK MAYFIELD: I think it's more important that people just hear the news.

PAUL INGLES: Mark Mayfield, recently laid off from his production job at a Phoenix rock station, is now a Metro news and traffic anchor.

MARK MAYFIELD: You know, if, if they hear me on a couple of different stations-- well then - hi. Do you know? It's me again. It just seems like it's better - better to inform than not. This is the best that you can expect right now.

PAUL INGLES: For On the Media I'm Paul Ingles.