My son, a senior at NYU, moderated a panel on blogging and the changing landscape of journalism over the weekend, and the opening sentence of the accompanying article reads: "You don't want a job in media, honestly, you don't!" The above article is quite illuminating. Anyway, it got me thinking about my time in the TV news business - how much fun it was in the beginning and how awful it was at the end of a 27-year career.

My foray into TV news was timed pretty well. I was armed with a B.S. in meteorology from Penn State a few years earlier. I thought I could give TV weather a shot since so few people had degrees in weather (most were booth announcers or had a kiddie show, and had nice voices). So I applied to a small station in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. It was 1973 and there was virtually no weather technology when I started. We used big plastic-covered maps and drew on them with magic markers. That was it. I can recall, after about three years in the business, when satellite photos were first available, only the government was using them. I had to drive to the local National Weather Service office at the airport and steal hard copies of a photo. They got one every half hour or so on a big fax machine and would give me an old one. I'd take it to the studio and they'd shoot it with a studio camera and make a still frame, which I would put on the air full-screen and just talk about it. Sometimes I'd draw a front or high or low with a pen. No chroma key (that's where the weather person appears to be standing in front of the map), and that was our only weather effect.

News was shot on film and processed in a gigantic machine, then cut and edited by hand - actually chopped up and glued together. I recall walking through the newsroom with long pieces of film from the cutting room floor (there really used to be a cutting room floor!) attached to my shoes. About once a month the entire newscast was chewed up and destroyed by the film processor. Then we really had to scramble. Talk about rip-and-read! It was great fun.

Commercials were also on film - we had like six projectors with these tiny reels, constantly changed by the 'film op.' Now and then a director would scream, "There's a hair in the gate!" meaning a big ball of fuzz was caught in the projector and was, at that moment on TV.  Some guy would run like hell to remove it. National commercials arrived by mail, were aired for however long, usually a week or two, and sent back. By today's standards, the early '70s were the dark ages!

Over the years I saw the transformation of news and weather, from rip-and-read and plastic maps and film on the floor and hairy gates - to the whole complex thing TV news is today. With the burgeoning technology came more and more pressure, as the money and investment in computers and other expensive equipment exploded. As far back as the 1980s, a studio camera cost upwards of $100,000. Imagine the cost of upgrading from giant back-room tape machines to digital, and then high-definition. The fun of trying to hammer a newscast together, from bits of film and wire copy, slowly became less fun. To make matters worse, as I aged, a large part of my audience aged too. That eventually put them in a different, and not so highly regarded, demographic. The pressure to win back younger viewers grew and grew.  At the end I hated the business and hated going to work every day.

TV news didn't know it at the time, but all the technology was sowing the seeds of its own demise. Satellites gave us all the toys but also gave us dozens, if not hundreds, of other channels. All that competition, of course, diluted the advertisers' available money, with everyone clamoring for the same dollar. TV news was very arrogant back in the good old days, when there were just three channels. (I've been out of the biz for several years. Imagine the pressure now!) So there's no money in it anymore. Stations have no money to hire anyone, and if they do, they pay low-ball wages. It was a great ride while it lasted, but I would never advise anyone to get involved today. I'm often asked if I miss the business. My answer:  Nope - not a bit!  What I do miss are my first ten years. I'm afraid my advice to young people looking at a career in journalism is : "You don't want a job in media, honestly, you don't!"