 Aloha and welcome to Working Together, where we discuss changes to the work environment and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the conversation. You could call area code 415-871-2474 to speak with us live in the studio, or you can tweet us at atthinktechhi. On our last show, we discussed the changing work environment for knowledge workers. Specifically, we spoke with a college professor who was now a member of the gig economy and learning his livelihood, teaching one course at a time for a number of universities. Today we'll be talking about another profession that has undergone significant changes in the last few years. The news industry, broadcast and print journalism have changed radically over the last few years, and these changes have had a tremendous effect on media workers at all levels. Joining us today live via Skype from WIOZ radio in southern Pines, North Carolina is Steve Biddle. Steve is a long time on air radio personality with a very interesting story to tell about his experiences with the changing media industry. Hi Steve. Hi Cheryl. Thank you for taking the time to join us. I understand it's late at night in North Carolina now. Well it's nine o'clock. Okay, it's not terribly late, but it's significantly later than it is in Honolulu. Well I'm glad you could take the time to be with us. My pleasure. You actually, before you get into your story of the impact the gig economy has had on you professionally and personally, could you tell us about your Hawaii connection? Sure. I worked for KIKI radio from 1978 to 79, and then later on I went across the street and worked for what was KDUK, K-Poy FM, and worked there for a year. So I lived in Honolulu for two years from 1978 to 1980, and I have regretted leaving ever since. I just had a wonderful time then. But yeah, it was a good time. I still have contact, as you know, with a lot of people in Honolulu. At KIKI, I was known for a reason, because there's a story behind this, I was known as Rusty Crane. And then I switched back to my real name when I went across the street to K-Poy FM. Why did they call you Rusty Crane? Well for some reason they don't like my name. And the station was owned by a man named Jim Gabbard at the time, who was based in San Francisco. And I don't remember whether it was he that decided this or one of the general manager, but we were sitting in the office one day and deciding we had to come up with a new name. And at that time, I had read Cyburns. And they said, Rusty, how about a name Rusty? I said, okay, Rusty works. And then there was a building going up across the street and a crane was sticking out of the top of it. So I said, I know, Rusty Crane. So that's how I became Rusty Crane for a year. Many people still know you as Rusty around here. That's true. So you left Hawaii and you got into more career opportunities in broadcast media. Right. But in the last few years, there have been some fairly significant changes. Tell us about those and about how they affected you. Well in my life, I went to work eventually in public radio at WPSU at Penn State University. And to be honest, frankly my heart just wasn't in public radio. I did it well. I didn't do the NPR style and everything. But I guess my heart just wasn't in it. And I didn't have any luck getting back into commercial radio for a while because the radio industry had changed significantly. We had, for a number of reasons, which we can get into later, but it had changed so much, it was very difficult to find a job. And to make a long story short, we can go into as much detail as you want. I wound up doing a number of other things for a while, while I was still part time in radio. I became a certified hypnotherapist. I drove a taxi later on. I drove for Uber a year or so ago. And I had one job where I was driving school buses across the United States from the manufacturer in High Point, North Carolina to Pacific Northwest every week. And it was just very difficult to find a job on radio. One of the things I had done for years on the side was to do radio production. Produce radio commercials, do voiceovers, narration, things like that. And when the price came down on equipment, when everything went digital, all of a sudden everybody had a home studio. So there was a lot more competition out there and the pie was divided into a lot smaller pieces. So it has been a rough time for the past, oh, probably seven to eight years. And then I went through, went through divorce and everything which also doesn't make things any easier. Radio industry has changed significantly for two major reasons. One of them is computer automation. And one of them is regulations which now allow large companies to buy pretty much as many radio stations and TV stations in one market as they want to, which is allowed for the proliferation of companies like Clear Channel, Cumulus. And those companies, which will just buy up everything, fire half the staff and they don't, as local broadcasters, we always felt the mission to serve the community, become involved in the community, go out and do things in the community, and to program to the people that we were supposed to program to. But the large companies have cut out a lot of that now and you can hear go across the country and radio songs the same pretty much everywhere you go, which is unfortunate. Same rotation. Every 12 songs is the same one and they start all over again. And frequently the same people. Yes, that's true. Syndicated shows are kind of a huge deal. Yeah, pardon me? Syndicated shows. And what they call voice tracking. I could sit here in my home studio and voice track a show on a radio station in Los Angeles and it would sound like I was there. And this is what a lot of stations do now. And they even do that for local newscasts. I worked at one point part time for a company called Virtual News Center and supplied newscasts, local newscasts to radio stations around the country. And at one point, during the long sad story, I was living while I was at a job in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I was living in a windowless room in a comfort inn in Green Castle, Pennsylvania, and doing local news for a radio station in Anchorage. And people who would listen would think I was right there in Anchorage, but no, I was in a motel room in Chambersburg, Green Castle, Pennsylvania. And this is very common in radio news. Which would be worse, do you think? Being in a one room, a windowless comfort inn in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, or being in Anchorage, Alaska? I mean, which? I guess each has its pros and cons, I guess. I think probably at that point in my life, being in the windowless room in Green Castle was worse. I think being in Anchorage would have been at least more of an adventure. So you've had to really reinvent yourself sort of a number of times, not only in terms of your broadcast career and having to be willing to change formats across different stations throughout your career. But you've also had to reinvent yourself, really, across professions, right? Because you had to become, in order to drive school buses across the country, you had to earn the appropriate licenses. Right, a CDL, commercial driver's license. Type A, type B? I had a type B. Oh, fantastic. There's work here. If you ever decide, I can hook you up, as a matter of fact. Oh, right, I'd love to come back. Yeah, you want to drive trucks in Honolulu? We've got work. I have a Class B. I can't drive the big rigs. Oh, OK. I can drive school buses and any buses, actually. So if there's buses to drive, I'd love to do that. We can. I'll send you the link. Sounds good. All right. So when you were going about this process of discerning how you were going to reinvent yourself, what sorts of things did you think about? Because I know at one time you had mentioned that your financial situation had become so challenging, well, I don't want to tell you tell how challenging it became. It still is. It still is? Oh, yeah. OK. So tell us about that. And tell us how you decided that it was bus driving and Uber that would replace, say, production work or the other types of broadcast work that you had been doing. Well, some of it was not so much reinvention as it was being in the right place at the right time. I wound up in High Point, North Carolina back in 2011. I had my breakup with Penn State was I lost my job. There are a number of us lost our jobs at the same time when there was a funding cut. And I found myself sort of out in the cold. And I went back to Orlando for a while. I think, OK, well, this is where I grew up. I'll just be here. I've gone through a divorce. And I wound up in Orlando for a while where I worked in public radio on what had even at the beginning was understood to have been a temporary thing, hosting all things considered in the afternoon. And then I went back to North Carolina. My mom was in hospice at the time. And so I decided to stay there in North Carolina until she passed. And then I was offered a job which paid very, very little anchoring news for a chain of six radio stations in southern Illinois. And I went out there for a little while. And meantime, I got married again. And I had some heart problems. I wound up back in High Point. I had no health insurance because I couldn't afford the company's health insurance. The pay was abysmally low. But it was a job. And you kind of grab onto anything at that point. So I went back to High Point, North Carolina, where my sister lived and my mom and dad were. And my wife and I stayed there for a number of years. And I met somebody one day, a church who suggested that I get a CDL. And he knew somebody that was a school bus instructor. So I went up and took the school bus driving classes and got my CDL and started driving actual children for a while, middle school kids. And did that. Oh, really? And like, uh-huh. Oh, the stories I've got. I bet you have. But Thomas built school buses, are manufactured in High Point. And they have companies called Driveaway Company that I went to work for one or two of those at the same time and would take the buses from the manufacturer in High Point out to the bus dealerships, primarily in Seattle and Portland with occasional trips to Oklahoma City and Houston. But primarily, Seattle and Portland, to the point where it was every week, I would leave High Point usually on a Sunday morning or a Monday morning, drive up through Tennessee, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and points west until I would get to either Seattle or Portland, drop off the bus, get on a plane, fly back, pick up another bus, and do my laundry, pick up another bus the next day, and then drive out again over and over and over again. And it was okay for a while. But after a while, you don't even know what day it is. So that came to a halt because I wanted to go back to State College, Pennsylvania. I'd started considering that home. So in fact, there a year ago. And I had been doing freelance copywriting and commercial work in my studio for this company, Muirfield Broadcasting here in Southern Pines. And I really had come to like them very much. And I had visited here once or twice just to see the folks that I'd been working with. And back in January or February of last year, one of my friends here said, hey, we've got a rare opening during the morning show if you'd like to do it. And it's on AM. And the guy that left is 70 something years old and he decided to retire. And it's what they call an adult standards program, which is Frank Sinatra Perry Como. The stuff I started playing when I first started in radio in Orlando in 1972. So it's kind of old home week, but it's part time. Well, that's nice. Listen, Rusty, we need to go to break so that we can let our viewers see some of the other fantastic programming we have here on Think Tech Hawaii. But hang around because I want to talk more about the radio industry. Can you do that? Absolutely. Awesome. We'll be back in two minutes. This is working together on Think Tech Hawaii. Okay, I'm here with Brett Overgaard of the Faculty of the School of Journalism and the Department of Communications at UH Minoa. We've had a number of shows. We have a movable feast going on. And we talk about journalism. We talk about language. We talk about communication in general. And we talk about the effect of that on the country and on individual people. Brett, it's so good to be able to discuss this with you in our movable feast. Oh, it's my pleasure. This is a great opportunity. You'll have to come back again and again, okay? Deal? That's the deal. Brett Overgaard, I'm Jay Fidel. We care about everything. Thanks. Hi, I'm Marianne Sasaki. And I'm here today to tell you about the Women's March on Washington on January 21st. It's an incredibly significant march in which both men and women are gonna stand up for women's rights, women's reproductive rights, and all the rights we've accrued over the past 40 or 50 years. There's also gonna be marches in each city, on each island, there's one in Oahu. I urge you to join a march and stand up for women's rights. Welcome back. This is Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia. And joining us live via Skype from WIOZ Radio in North Carolina is longtime radio personality and former Hawaii DJ, Steve Biddle. Hi, Steve. Hi, Cheryl. Good to be here. Thank you for joining us. You had mentioned before the break some of the personal issues that you experienced. So what I'd kinda like to do now for the second half of the show is pull back and look at the changes in media kind of from a broader sort of macroeconomic perspective. And it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the vulcanization of the media has not been universally a good thing. I mean, on the one hand, without this vulcanization, you and I would not be doing this at this very moment. So it has permitted people greater access to media than ever before. But it's also allowed the profitization of particularly news. So we don't have specific news anymore. Now it's more sort of infotainment. And there's a real focus on really appealing to the extremely small niche markets that seem to have a particular political stance or a particular way of viewing the world where people are not necessarily interested in learning about the other. They're more interested in shutting out the other and maintaining life in whatever bubble they're living in. Can you tell us about your experience with that? Well, my experience has really been more of an old radio guy who watches everything slipping away. I mean, the same thing has happened with newspapers. When people have changed their sources of news, and newspapers find themselves dying everywhere. And the same is true of radio, particularly AM radio. Because now there are, well, we talked earlier about corporations taking over radio stations by the hundreds. One of the things they did was they slashed local news coverage, they slashed people being at the radio station 24-7. Now, I'm assuming a lot of folks know about this, but when you listen to the radio, if you listen any time after nine or 10 o'clock in the morning, chances are there's nobody actually on the air. It's a computer running the whole thing and they're voice tracking. They're just recording voice tracks that go in and the computer sticks them in where they're supposed to be. And there may be no one there, except in the sales office. That's true. And that's a shame because what people used to do would be to, if something was going on in town, you flip the radio on because you knew that somebody there would know what was happening. That's what the emergency broadcast system was built on, isn't it? Exactly. Doesn't it say in the little blurb, when you hear the siren turn on your radio for additional news and information? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's funny you mentioned that because we have had, in the last couple of years, we've had horrific storms, power outages, tsunami warnings, et cetera. And I don't know if you remember Perry and Price? No, I don't think so. Okay, Michael W. Perry and Larry Price. Oh, Michael W. Perry, I remember, yes. Right, so they are still on KSSK and they're the only ones that can go live in their station. So whenever there's an emergency, we kind of, we tune in to what we now call among my friends and family, the Perry and Price Parade of Pain. Because people call in and they say things like, I can't get my car out of the parking lot and I need to evacuate. Is somebody driving past Kukui Street and can you give me a lift? I mean, it's those kinds of things. And it's good that people are able to access assistance by using broadcast media, but the reality is what would happen if Perry and Price couldn't get to the studio and there was nobody and nothing but dead air? And people rely on social media now more for things like that, Facebook and Twitter and everything else. But again, it's one of those things where the juxtaposition of corporate takeovers of many, many stations and this ability to do everything by a computer and the internet hit at the same time, approximately. So when radio companies like, well, like Cumulus and Chikler Channel and the other big ones saw the opportunity, they said, okay, radio stations are not just profit centers. That's it, bottom line. And took the essence of radio away. And so that's what has happened to it. And at the same time, people had the ability to tune in satellite radio. They had the ability to carry 10,000 songs in their pocket now, which we never did. I remember the first Walkman I ever saw was a cassette and it was Larry Bertleman that had it in Honolulu. And we all said, oh, it's incredible. He used to do the, when I was on K to UK. I remember. He did the surf report on my show and he came and said, you gotta see this. It was a Walkman, right? A Sony Walkman? It was a Sony Walkman. There you go. You could put 10,000 songs on your phone and carry it around in your pocket. That's true. But even years ago, they should have known because every survey, every listener survey said, why do you listen to the radio? The overwhelming response was poor companionship. I mean, people would say music, sure. But they listened to disc jockeys, they listened to news, they listened to what was going on in the community. It was somebody there and that feeling's gone. Yeah. Well, I guess Delilah is still on the air live. She's still out there, yeah. Yeah, she is. One of the things that has changed that has really sort of caught me unawares is the idea that particularly as we become, as we are consumers of news and of news information that we are no longer able to look at just say one station or one newscast or one newspaper to get a balanced view of what is really happening in the world. I mean, the days of Walter Cronkite and Bob Seavy are gone. There's just nobody, there's nobody I trust anyway for the complete news package. Well, and you just hit it using the word consumer. That's how news companies now view us is as consumers. Not as people who need to be informed and well, not so much entertained but informed and kept in light. If you watch television news now, there's a lot more junk than there used to be on it. I'm surprised here in North Carolina, we have a TV station in the state capitol in Raleigh, which is really excellent. They do a terrific job and I feel, this is rare, you don't see it very often. But the thing that really gets me, and we talked about this one time earlier, is that news has become more of a profit center than anything else. They've made that into a profit center. And it used to be when I first got into the business that radio news was sort of sacred. You didn't touch it. It was objective. We were very proud of being objective. And it was what you listened to. It's where you got your information and you could trust it. And it just no longer is that way. And there are so many outlets, so many places that people can get their information from. Well, look at fake news. We've been hearing so much about recently, fake news. I battle it every day. I'm one of those people that when I see fake news pop up on somebody's Facebook page, I ferret the stuff out. And I say, no, this is fake. You should put these things up. Because they don't irritate me. But it's changed a great deal. As we said before, there are several companies which provide local news for radio stations that they're not anywhere near. And I know there's one in Honolulu who does that. Yeah, I know of a couple. How do, well, let's shift then. And we're going to now use your expertise to educate consumers of news product in order to pick and choose and get the most reliable news coverage. What would you recommend that consumers look for in their news media to make sure that they're getting as objective of you as possible of the various industries? That's sort of a tough one. Because I don't really know anymore. What I try to do is to take a look at things that even try to get out of my bubble, because we all have them, and read things from sources all over the place. One thing I would like to make people aware of, though, is to watch out for the fake news. It's pervasive. And it spreads like a, well, it goes viral, as they say. And the thing to do is if you see a news story that sounds somewhat incredible and you feel tempted to post it again, look and see if it's coming from other sources as well. Look at the source. For instance, there's a site called abcnews.com.co or something, which has nothing to do with ABC News. But they have a logo that looks sort of like the ABC logo. And it's fake. It's just lies, or what they think of as satire. But go to the mainstream media and down from there. I mean, sure, look at things like Politico, Vox, The Hill, National Review on the conservative side, and New Republic on the liberal side. And if you have the time, try to just absorb everything that you read from all of them. Because really, anymore, that's the only way to do it is to read a variety of things. Listen to a variety of things. Yeah. You're right, because I'm glad you mentioned both the liberal and the conservative. Because the other aspect, I think that people may find challenging is that, number one, broadcast folks tend to take only one view. There are very conservative providers of news information, say Fox or other periodicals. And then there's the more liberal view from, say, MSNBC. Yeah, MSNBC or maybe some of those others. And you know what each of those talking heads, what their political stance is simply by where they work and the issues that they talk about. And that seems new to me because, well, we never knew who Walter Cronkite voted for. Or which candidate Bob Sebe supported or any of the other radio folks back in the day. If we knew who they were supporting, they weren't doing their jobs right. And instead now it's, we need to heat up the base so that these folks will be mobilized to wanna leave that channel right where it is. And so that we can sell laundry soap and toothpaste. But not only that, but people mad. At least up until a few years ago, it seems to me that news outlets were at least pretending objectivity. And more and more they're just letting that fall by the wayside and going into advocacy journalism one way or the other. And there are those that say that's healthy. I mean, that's the way newspapers used to be a hundred years ago. There would be a newspaper that was on the Democratic side, one on the Republican side, and they were very unabashed about it. I don't know how I feel about that because anymore, again, and especially since Trump was elected, I've noticed this, people are just abandoning all pretense of objectivity. So it's really, there's a lot of buyer beware out there. You're right. You know, Steve, our time is rapidly coming to a close. And I think 9.30 is right around the time the pub's open in North Carolina. So we- It's right around the time I go to sleep. Oh, okay, what? No. So we thank you for joining us. You've given us a lot of good information about how to really be smart consumers of news information. And you've helped to sort of erase many of the misconceptions that we have about folks in broadcasting. So thank you very much. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. All right, you take care. You too. So that wraps us up for today. I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia, thanking you for joining us on Working Together at Think Tecawaii. We will see you in two weeks. Aloha. OK, Rusty, I owe you big, man. Oh, no, this is fun, Cheryl. I loved it. This is great. I hope it was OK.