On The Media: Psychic Tips, Media Frenzies and Texas

From On The Media.org:

The New York Times tweeted “Up to 30 Dismembered Bodies Found Near Houston, Reuters Reports.” CNN covered the story. ABC News tweeted it. Several other news organizations piled on to make the gruesome story international news.

One problem: the story wasn’t true.

Bigger problem: it was really really not true - it was all based on a tip from a psychic. Bob Garfield looks into how this crazy media frenzy went down.

Radio Newser Gets 'Wheel' Deal

After an extensive search following the passing of legendary voice Charlie O'Donnell, Wheel of Fortune has selected Jim Thornton to succeed him as the show's announcer. The announcement was made today by the show's Executive Producer Harry Friedman.

"We are delighted to welcome Jim Thornton into the Wheel of Fortune family," said Friedman. "Jim's rich, friendly voice and engaging personality are a great fit for our show and its tradition."

"This has been a lifelong dream, and to be able to follow in the footsteps of a legend like Charlie O'Donnell is truly humbling," said Thornton. "Being selected as announcer for Wheel of Fortune is a huge honor. Now I just have to make sure I don't call out the answers to the puzzles when my mic is open!"

Fans have already heard Thornton's voice as one of the guest announcers during Season 28, and he will take on the position full-time when Wheel of Fortune begins broadcasting its 29th Season on September 19.

One of the most popular and distinctive voices in Southern California, Thornton has been a part of KNX 1070 Newsradio since 1985 when he provided traffic reports with the syndicated traffic service, "Metro Traffic." He then became a fulltime traffic reporter during morning drive for both KNX and CBS2 News, before taking on his current role as host of the afternoon drive newscast in January 2005."

In his hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, Thornton began his broadcast career in 1983 at WOWK/TV while attending Marshall University. A year later, he moved to California and by 1989, he had his own morning show on Magic 94.3FM in the San Fernando Valley. Then, in 1992, Thornton became a "Hot Country" disc jockey for Westwood One Radio Networks, hosting live music from coast to coast. From 1995 to 1999, he was the voice of Channel 13, KCOP-TV in Los Angeles.

NY Tabs Have Fun With Heat Loss

Clarence Clemons Stroke Update

Clarence Clemons, hospitalized in Florida after a stroke, has had two brain surgeries but is "responsive and in stable condition," according the authoritative Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band fan website, backstreets.com, reports Jay Lustig of The Star-Ledger.

Also, Carolyn Gusoff of Fox 5 News has reported that Clemons is paralyzed on the left side of his body, though backstreets.com quotes a "close friend" of Clemons as saying: "He was paralyzed on his left side, but now he's squeezing with his left hand."

It was first reported last night on the showbiz411.com that the saxophonist had suffered a stroke at his Florida home and was seriously ill. That news has since been confirmed by several sources.

Showbiz411 added today that members of the E Street Band "were advised to get down to Florida as soon as possible."

Clemons is an original member of the E Street Band, and the oldest member of the band, at 69. He is someone whose importance to the New Jersey rock 'n' roll scene can't be overstated, and who is utterly irreplaceable.

His big, immediately recognizable saxophone wail is one of the cornerstones of the E Street sound. Songs such as "Born to Run," "Badlands" and "Jungleland" wouldn't have sounded remotely the same without him, and his larger-than-life personality always has given him a central role in the theatrics of the band's stage shows.

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From backstreet.com:

The latest out of Florida has Clarence Clemons in better condition than anyone expected, a close friend tells Backstreets: "Yesterday, it did not look good at all. Today... miracles are happening. His vital signs are improving. He's responsive. His eyes are welling up when we're talking to him. He was paralyzed on his left side, but now he's squeezing with his left hand. This is the best news we've heard since [the stroke] happened — it's nothing short of miraculous. The next five days will still be critical. But he's a fighter."

YNN Buffalo To 'Beef Up The Product'

Time Warner Cable’s YNN—Buffalo’s 24- hour news station — is going to bolster local coverage with community bureaus, a satellite truck and a 30 percent increase in newsroom staff, according to a story by Jane Kwiatkowski at buffalonews.com.

“The Buffalo channel is the largest market in upstate New York,” said Ed Buttaccio, news director for YNN Buffalo and YNN Rochester. “We are beefing up the product with more resources to be allocated here. We launched 26 months ago, and we’ve grown steadily since then.”

Bottom line? More news content will be produced by YNN’s Buffalo newsroom, which also staffs the community bureaus in Jamestown, Niagara Falls and Batavia. The Buffalo newsroom now has 35 news gatherers including assistants, reporters, anchors, producers and managers, according to Buttaccio.

YNN (Your News Now) launched in Buffalo in March 2009 with 19 people on staff.

YNN’s format is modeled on the hour news wheel used at other Time Warner news channels, including NY1, which focuses on the five boroughs of New York City. A weather report kicks off each hour, followed by top local news, a “from the floor” business news report and the “world beyond Western New York.”

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TomzTake: 'Beefing up the product' what a concept!

The WTOP “Glass-Enclosed Nerve Center”

Morning Anchor Mike Moss

From Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post

WTOP (103.5 FM), Washington’s most popular and lucrative radio station, recently made news itself when the FCC approved its sale to a new owner.

The station was the jewel in a $500 million deal involving 17 stations bought by Minneapolis-based Hubbard Broadcasting.

But the only change may be the name on the license. Hubbard says it has no plans to mess with success.

WTOP (website) has sat alone at the top of Washington radio ratings since July 2009. It dominates the coveted rush-hour peaks, both a.m. and p.m. And in March, it overtook top-40 powerhouse KIIS in Los Angeles as the biggest revenue-generating station in the country, sucking $57 million from advertisers in a region that is barely a top-10 market.

“We plan to change absolutely nothing,” says Ginny Morris, Hubbard’s president.

That will be a relief to Jakaitis and the 102 other reporters, editors and producers who staff Washington’s biggest radio newsroom. But it comes as no surprise to industry analysts.

WTOP reporter Kristi King prepares a report. For 20 years King has covered general assignments for WTOP, 12 years of those during the 4 a.m. to noon shift. "I love my job and feel blessed to do this," she says despite the fact that she has to go to bed at 7 p.m. every night to get up at 2 a.m. Astrid Riecken / For The Washington Post


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'Morning Jo' Denies Pitching CNN

UPDATE:

The NYPost story was addressed on Monday's Morning Joe and Scarborough provided about as strong a rebuke as one could imagine, claiming that the NY Post reporter Claire Atkinson “chose to lie.” Both Scarborough and Brzezinski were clearly perturbed by the NY Post report.

Report: MSNBC's Joe & Mika openly pitch CNN

MSNBC's morning duo of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski wasted no time buttonholing Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes at the Newhouse School journalism awards lunch early last week.

According to a posting by Clair Atkinson at nypost.com, the "Morning Joe" hosts, who just lost their executive producer, Chris Licht, to CBS News, made a tag-team pitch about moving their politically oriented coffee klatch to a morning slot on CNN. Scarborough and Brzezinski are rumored to want a bigger platform than the one MSNBC currently offers. They've also reportedly drafted super agent Ari Emmanuel to help them get one.

The two were hosting the June 7, Newhouse School's journalism awards lunch at the Plaza Hotel, where their current boss, Comcast's Brian Roberts, was given a special achievement award.

Roberts couldn't be there because he was picking up the $4.4 billion gold medal at the Olympics TV rights competition in Lausanne, Switzerland. Roberts' dad and Comcast founder, Ralph, stood in for son, quipping,
"Brian is proof that nepotism is a good thing. I have five kids and each one does their own thing."

Scarborough denied the pitch and said it was all just a joke.

"Mika and I had nice conversation with a CNN executive who joked that we should bring our show to CNN. We laughed, exchanged pleasantries and left the event. Mika and I plan to work at NBC for a long time."

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Study: iNet Radio Listening 'Little Effect' On Broadcast

Internet radio listening spread to 39 percent of all U.S. broadband households by early 2011, and smartphones account for a significant portion of their Internet radio listening, a Parks Associates survey found.

According to a posting by Joseph Palenchar at TWICE.com, among the adult Internet radio listeners surveyed, 96 percent of respondents listen to Internet radio on a computer, 45 percent listen on a smartphone, and 15 percent listen on a tablet, Parks found.

The survey also found that a lot of Internet radio listeners listen a lot. Among listeners who listen via desktop or laptop PC, 23 percent listen for more than four hours a day. Among smartphone listeners, the percentage that listens for at least four hours is 16 percent, and among tablet users, the percentage is 25 percent.

The study defines Internet radio as including pure-play Internet radio stations as well as AM/FM broadcasts simulcast over the Internet.

Internet radio's rise has had "little effect on broadcast radio listening time," Parks also found. Among Internet radio listeners, 20 percent still listen to four or more hours of broadcast radio, and the other 80 percent listen to broadcast radio for a total of one to three hours.

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Opinion: New ESPN Book Reveals Level 5 Leadership

From Charles Warner, The Media Curmudgeon

Last week a new oral history titled Those Guys Have All the Fun: The Inside World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales hit book stores and Kindles to well-deserved favorable reviews.

The reviews I read concentrated on sexual harassment capers, narcissistic personalities such as the ultimate bad boy Keith Olbermann and bumptious Chris Berman, and boozy parties and escapades – in other words, all the fun stuff that will appeal to sports fans and ESPN addicts (of which I am one).

Woven artfully into the warp and woof of sexual harassment, self-absorbed personalities, and protean drinking is a business story about a startup with little chance of success that was rescued by Getty Oil and some brilliant, hard-nosed executives such as Bill Grimes, Roger Werner, and Steve Boornstein. These visionaries had to cope with often clueless, penny pinching, visionless, egomaniacal old-style media executives, epitomized by narcissist-in-chief Michael Eisner when he was head of Disney, 80 percent owner of ESPN.

The old-style media executives Grimes, Werner, and Boornstein had to report to were domineering, Type-A credit hogs such as Stuart Evy, Herb Granath, and Michael Eisner – prototypes for a current crop of Type-A, greedy media moguls such as Barry Diller, Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves, and Mel Karmizan (the short list). The media for these moguls is a bong for personal enrichment – it’s all about them getting rich.

But in Those Guys Have All the Fun, a new type of media executive emerges, what Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling management book of all time, Good to Great, would refer to as Level 5 leaders.

Level 5 leaders typically are insiders who come up through the ranks of the company, have a compelling modesty, give credit to others, and are superb listeners. Collins writes that Level 5 leaders build “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will,” and that they “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed they are incredibly ambitious — but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.”

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Fargo's WDAY Radio Is Back On Air

WDAY 970 AM, Fargo, ND,  is back to nearly full power after it lost two of its three radio towers in a major Memorial Day wind storm.

A story by Dave Roepke at inforum.com report General Manager Kevin Weaver says engineers are done boosting the signal and bolstering the structure of the one remaining tower, meaning there won’t be any more time off air.

“It’s near full power,” he said. “I don’t think any of our listeners will notice a difference.”

The news-radio station, owned by the same company as The Forum, had one tower crumpled and another snapped off at the top by the high winds that struck Fargo-Moorhead May 30.

It went off air for nearly three entire days, from 9:30 p.m. on May 30 to 5 p.m. on June 2, broadcasting only via the Internet, Weaver said.

Ever since, it occasionally had been forced to go silent as crews reconfigured the remaining tower to transmit a more powerful signal to make up for the felled towers, Weaver said.

All of the station’s signal strength, approved to be as strong as 5,000 watts, will be coming from one tower until the others are rebuilt.

Weaver said the station got special federal ap­proval to use its remaining tower to transmit nondirectional signals at night. Typically, its three towers only send a signal in one direction after nightfall, he said.

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Orlando Non-Com Warns Of 'Devastating' Results

From Hal Boedeker, Orlando Sentinel:

Orlando public broadcaster WMFE says it needs to sell its TV station quickly or the consequences could be dire. 

In a comment this week to the Federal Communications Commission, WMFE has answered 525 objections to its selling TV station Channel 24. WMFE reveals that its “cash reserves are limited and most have already been consumed to sustain WMFE-TV over the past few months.” 

WMFE adds that a delay in the sale “would be devastating to the surviving entity.” 

WMFE has said it plans to sell the TV station for $3 million, put the money in an endowment and concentrate on radio. Coincidentally, WMFE 90.7 FM will start a fund-raising drive Monday.
The FCC must approve the transfer of Channel 24’s license from WMFE (which is called Community Communications Inc. in the papers)  to Community Educators of Orlando Inc. Listed as president of Community Educators is Marcus Lamb, president and CEO of religious broadcaster Daystar Television Network in the Dallas area. 

WMFE also answers complaints about the TV sale, noting that just 45 percent of the 525 objections come from people in this TV market. 

WMFE stops offering the PBS lineup on June 30. WUCF, a partnership of Brevard Community College and the University of Central Florida, will air the full PBS lineup beginning July 1.

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Your Career: Goals Force Choices

Everything You’re Told About Setting Goals is Wrong

From Jeff Haden, bnet.com

Most people fail to reach their goals — and then beat themselves up for lacking the willpower, drive, and persistence to achieve their goals. 

If that’s you, stop.  Now.  The problem isn’t a lack of willpower or drive; the problem is how you’ve been taught to think about goals. 

For example, did you get to work on time today?  Did you get the kids to their activities on time?  Did you get dinner on the table and cut the grass and do the laundry and all that other stuff?  Of course you did.  Why? 

You didn’t really have a choice. 

That’s the main problem:  Most goals give us a choice. 

Tasks are what we have to do. Goals are things we want to do.  That’s why we fail to achieve goals.  We make it to work on time because we have to; punctuality is non-negotiable.  We don’t make it to the gym because we don’t have to; we can negotiate, if only with ourselves, and make other choices. 

Other poor goal setting advice?

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News Anchor Drops the F-bomb On Live TV

Anchor Holly Pietrzak of WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Va.

Radio Doomsayer Harold Camping Suffers Stroke

Harold Camping, the Doomsday radio preacher who sparked international media attention by predicting the end of the world last month, has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke at his Alameda home Thursday night.

According to a story by Josh Richman, Rick Hurd and Mattias Gafni in The Oakland Tribune, the 89-year-old radio evangelist and president of the Oakland nonprofit Family Radio was taken by ambulance from his house Thursday night, a neighbor said, but his well-known, gravelly voice that led many believers to donate millions of dollars to his cause may never be the same.

"He had a stroke, it was on his right side," said the neighbor, who declined to give her name but said she and her husband helped and comforted Camping's wife, Shirley, as the drama unfolded Thursday night.

Her husband spoke again with Shirley Camping on Friday. "His speech appears to be a little bit slurred but otherwise he's OK," the neighbor said. "(Shirley) said he was doing good "... and the only thing that's affected is his speech."

Charles Menut -- the regional manager for Family Stations Inc., Family Radio's parent company, and the station manager and chief engineer for an affiliated station in West Orange, N.J. -- posted a Yahoo group message early Saturday morning reporting Camping's stroke to Family Radio supporters.

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The Sunday Funny

Rodney Dangerfield