Podcast Transcript

It’s a real honor to be asked to be the guest speaker in a video production or media class. And, as I prepare for the next speaking engagement I have, which is at Kent State University coming up in a few weeks, I get to speak to video production students; and I was trying to collect my thoughts and come up with what the topic is gonna be and there are a lot of challenges in our business. There’s a lot of opportunities, especially for young creative ambitious filmmakers and media students, there’s just a lot of exciting things happening. A lot of challenges of course, like many industries, but I was trying to collect my thoughts, trying to come up with what am I going to talk about and how does a person who’s been in the business for 27 years, a person who likes to tell a lot of stories, keep a group of young enthusiastic video production students engaged? How do I keep their attention and how do I tell stories that don’t serve me as “listen to how great I am”, but serves them as “this is something you need to know, this is something you can learn from my experience. Learn from my mistakes.” So I was reflecting and frequently when I’m reflecting I think of the beginning of my career, I go back to when I was first starting out in the business. And I feel very fortunate that I was able to land an opportunity at a local TV station partly through their Co-ownership of the local radio station. There was a TV station in Kent called TV 29 low-power station and it was a part of a radio station that’s still there called W NIR. A 100.1 FM, the talk of Akron. And when I was a senior at Stowe High School, and this is spring of 1992, the low-power TV station used to carry high school football games. And I was, at Stowe high school, the video production person. I was the school videographer. I was in the high school media program. We produced a weekly TV show, it aired on all the TVs in every classroom. We had the channel one system, which by the way is where Anderson Cooper got his start in media when he worked for channel one, it was a high school news broadcast. So this TV system at Stowe high school carried that program, and then following that we ran the local news, Stowe Student News. It was a ton of fun, and the Stowe high school marketing Club wanted to produce a TV commercial to air during the Stowe Cuyahoga Falls football game. So of course they came to me and asked if I would produce that commercial, and I did and it was great. It was a well done program certainly for a high school student in 1992. Probably shot on VHS, let’s say it was a pretty nice TV commercial. What happened was the Account Executive, the person selling the airtime at TV twenty-nine was also a person who sold airtime for wnir radio, and he came out to the high school to pick up the commercial. I wanted to meet him and I talked to him. His name is Curt leoben’s Berger and Curt and I had a real nice conversation. I learned a lot about the media business in the brief discussion we had in the school office and I didn’t think a whole lot of it other than “wow it was nice to meet somebody in the media business.” That was kind of cool and it was fun to produce the commercial. I went back to class and about maybe a week later I get a message, a phone message in class that would had been written by the school secretary and a runner had run the message into the classroom. And I looked at the piece of paper and it said “call Bill Klaus, the owner of wnir radio. He would like to speak with you.” And it had the radio station phone number on it. I thought wow this is exciting, so I call over there and what he was looking for was a high school student to intern come out basically to work at the station, and of course at that time, you know, I didn’t understand the idea of low-power television and local radio. That interns can frequently be a source of inexpensive labor. What had happened was the station management, the owners, were fairly impressed with the commercial that we had put together and they asked Kurt who’s this high school student that did this and that’s how my name came up. Ben, they reached out to me at the high school and next thing I know, I’m on the phone with the owner of the station and he’s telling me that I could come out there after high school and do an internship and I jumped all over this. I thought this is gonna be great, this is wonderful, this is what I want to do with my life. I was thrilled so, I would go out to Kent, which was about a 10 or 15 minute drive. It was the town next to Stowe Ohio. Easy drive across the campus at Kent State University over to WNIR radio and my job at that time was to write traffic reports. And in 1992, of course to come up with a traffic report you had to call all of the police dispatch on a special phone number and ask them if anyone had reported accidents. If the police were responding to any emergencies on the highway, then you had to go to the typewriter and you had to write the traffic report for the news anchor to read online or online to read on the air and long before there was an online. This is a spring of 92 and I would go over there and I would do this from 3:30 to 6:30. In the for the afternoon Drive which worked out just perfectly and then of course I’d come back to the high school and work on the TV show. And you, know my grades weren’t super spectacular, but boy I embraced the media work and did all this and I was probably getting a D or an F in science but I was living the media dream and having a blast. And as part of doing the traffic reports, on wnir radio of course, the TV station, TV twenty-nine was just down the hall and what the station owner was basically trying to explain to me was do these traffic reports do the internship and when you graduate high school and you turn 18, my birthday is very late in the school year so I didn’t turn 18 until May 21st, end of my senior year. So he said once you’re 18, you can work at the TV station because we need you to work till midnight. So I landed the job of working at TV 29 because I had interned writing these traffic reports and just waiting til the time was right. So I learned at an early age they’re just gonna park you somewhere, they’re gonna give you some experience and when the opportunity opens up, off you go. So I actually really enjoyed the radio side of the business far more than I even expected that I would. I was into television, I still am, I love video production, but I loved radio. I really enjoyed learning how the newsroom worked, how radio broadcasting worked. This station was on air all day as a live news talk call-in station. It was a talk format, still is, and just a great time working there. There was this midday announcer, the great Howie Chizik, and he would do the 10:00 to 3:00, the midday shift and he would see me at the time. He knew me from writing the traffic reports, but then when I landed the job at the TV side he would see me in the TV control room area and he didn’t remember my name, but he would always call me mr. television executive and he would say “hello mr. television executive” and the booming radio voice that he had and I thought “boy I would love to be a radio broadcaster. I would love to have a voice like that,” and an opportunity came up. Frequently those of us who worked at the TV station were asked to fill in on the radio side doing overnights. And overnights at wnir radio were relatively peaceful and quiet and a great way to earn a few extra dollars and I shouldn’t even say this but I believe in 1992 I was doing all this work for minimum wage, and let’s say that that was $3.85 an hour. At that time it was something like that and I was instructed not to say anything to anyone around me because there were a number of people who were on interns from the local college, maybe from Kent, maybe from the University of Akron. There were quite a few I remember from the Ohio Center for broadcasting, might have been even that the Connecticut school of broadcasting then. It became the Ohio Center for broadcasting now the Ohio media school, but at any rate, in 1992, #3.85 an hour was minimum wage, but it was more than what the interns were getting paid so I learned another lesson. There was “don’t talk about what you’re getting.” Now you know in terms of compensation I learned all these lessons very early during this internship they were really teaching me, and I think it’s possible while school is important and the diploma and the tuition and all of that is very important, but it’s possible that you’ll learn just as much if not more in these real world experiences. And I think that’s what I’m coming to as I figure out what I’m gonna talk about and want to change my presentation. Change it up a little bit for the college students to keep them engaged. They don’t need a lecture, but is there something I have to offer here? Is there some story I can provide? And here’s what I was thinking, as I was thinking back to my days at WNIR, radio and TV 29 and being the wide-eyed young TV professional, I suppose mister broadcast professional. I remembered a time when I had the opportunity to do my first overnight on WNIR and working overnights means you’re the only person in the building. And being that it’s an all talk format, you could actually sit back and relax simply playing back the reported talk show of the day. So let’s say we were gonna run the mike reagan or mike gallagher or one of the national talk shows. Those shows were recorded during the work day on a reel-to-reel machine and then your job as the overnight person it was to playback the show. Let’s say they’re three hours long and your job is to play the tape back and then insert the commercials which were all on these carts which were like, for most people in broadcasting know what a cart is but they’re like an 8-track tape that has a 60-second spot on it, and so the one hour two hour three hour reels of audio on these giant. And the reel-to-reel machine might have been an hour-long show or an hour-long segment. So during the commercial breaks that you would play off of all these carts you would switch out the reels. The station had an alarm so if somebody went off the air just like I paused just there for a second, but if you paused for too long as the on-air broadcasters the on-air announcer there would be the dead air alarm and that was telling you that the audience that was not getting any sound. That the transmitter had somehow stopped or the equipment had stopped or somehow something wasn’t right. So my first opportunity to do overnights on radio on WNIR, it’s about three o’clock in the morning and the person who normally had this job somehow landed incredible tickets to a show at blossom, and I don’t remember what that show was, but it was probably Metallica or some rock band that he really that you know, I mean I would like to go see Metallica. That would be fun, but at any rate he really wanted to go to the show. I was covering his shift and so he knew that if I screwed this up it would reflect on him and he knew it was my first time and he had trained me. I go into the studio and I’m having a great time. I’m playing the show and three o’clock in the morning the dead air alarm goes off. The reel had stopped! The reel-to-reel machine continued to turn the reels returning the tape. I was moving through all of the levers and the and over the reader but there was no sound coming out somehow, probably the record had failed. And so I had a real with half of a show on it and at that point I had no idea what to do, so I started grabbing the carts and playing commercials and I mean I’m in the world’s longest commercial break. I’ve now played ten commercials in a row, and then I decide I’ll come on and read the weather because part of the job, and this was probably the most fun of the whole gig, you go on and you read the weather at the top of the hour in between the reels. So I got to be on the air going you know hey it’s gonna be partly cloudy tomorrow as a high of 80. And you know I’m 18 years old. I’m trying to find my broadcaster voice, which it really I still don’t have, but I had a blast trying. So I read the weather and then I start playing more commercials and as you play a commercial you have 60 seconds to run around the studio and figure out how to solve this problem. So I’m thinking “do I just grab another show?” So I’m looking, I don’t know where the other shows are. I only know where Mike Regan and the Mike Gallagher show are. I don’t know where any other shows are and it this must have been maybe 4:00 in the morning. It’s at the end of the shift let’s say and the rest of the crew, the morning show comes in at 5:30, so what am I gonna do with this hour and a half I need to fill. So I decide this is gonna be my big break in broadcasting. I decide I’m gonna start talking. So, I open up the mic and I say “WNIR 100 fm here we are at 3:30 in the morning. Lots going on in Akron. Let’s talk about what’s going on in Akron.” And of course there are professional broadcasters that do it. They have an opening monologue, they’ve done show prep they have all their material, they’ve read the news. I’m an eighteen year old kid that has no idea what’s going on in Akron news or politics. I barely know the weather and it’s printed on a piece of paper in front of me. So I decide to open up the mic and just start talking and my first caller, the phone lit up and I knew how to put a caller live on the air and I thought “This is great! Somebody is listening at four o’clock in the morning and I’m gonna take my first call!” And I push the button and I say “WNIR, caller you’re on the air. Go ahead please.” And it’s my coworker from who knows where. The concert is over I’m sure but he’s still up and he’s listening and he is not happy that I decided to open up the mic and go on the air and he said on the air “What do you think you’re doing?” And I said “well the, the real stopped I’ve run every commercial we have twice. I don’t know what to do.” He said well you need to go over to the other end of the he goes “Wait a minute am I on the air right now?” And he had used a few choice words when he first called. He said he didn’t exactly say what do you think you’re doing, and so he said take me off the air right now. I’m calling you on the private line this line should not be on the air! And I thought okay so basically all of the chewing out that I got for attempting to solve this problem by going live on the air went out live on the air. So my first experience as a broadcaster was getting chewed out. And as long as I live will never forget this. And I think if I tell this story to the students at Kent State in the media class, maybe some of them want to be filmmakers maybe some of them want to go into video production. They want to be camera operators, animators, there might be one person out of the 50 or 70 in this classroom interested in radio. So maybe this story wouldn’t resonate at all but the overall point of this story is that I was terrible but I was on the radio. I was absolutely terrible and the challenge in today’s media business is, where do young professionals go to be terrible? Where do they go for their first shot at it? The first shot that matters, the first shot that’s at a business not in the college bubble? The professors and the instructors certainly, they can teach their good thing. They’re industry professionals, they know what they’re doing and they can critique, but is it more meaningful when it’s actually live on the air and not protected in that. That is college world. Many of these colleges require that internship and in many cases that internship involves shadowing making coffee, carrying equipment, but does that add to your reel? Does that give you a real opportunity to be bad, to screw something up and I look back? And I consider how fortunate I was to have found myself in a place where I was going to get yelled at, where I was going to be chewed out even if it was live on the air. And thank God there was only one listener when it was him, but the reality is there has to be a place for young ambitious professionals. For creatives to go out into the world and try something even if they’re gonna get yelled at. And there has to be a place for us to develop that thick skin to be able to be critiqued to be able to take the fury of somebody who’s older and maybes a little bitter. Maybe they’re angry or maybe they didn’t quite turn out where they wanted to be in life or maybe they went to a concert and they were pretty drunk, who knows, but the world is filled with people who are older and have a lot to offer and who may have a delivery method in their speech and communication that is perhaps a turn-off. Perhaps it’s mean, perhaps it’s harsh, but we have to figure out a way that these wonderful ambitious creative young professionals can learn from those who have been doing something for 27 years. We have to be able to teach thick-skinned. Maybe this is the speech I need to give as I work through this. As I try to figure out how I can make an impact my message is go out there and fail. Go out there and get chewed out, go out there and be bad at something so that you can get good at it there. It needs to be a little self-awareness, a little understanding that no matter what, there’s always going to be something we’re going to be bad at we’re never going to perfect our craft. We always can be better and after 27 some years in media production, I’ve learned this. I can always give a better speech, I can always produce a better video. I can run a better company. I can come up with better marketing campaigns and I certainly have a ton that have failed. And I look back and I study those failures so all of us are gonna have something that we’re bored bad at and we’re gonna continue to be bad at until we get good at it and it’s awkward. It’s cringe-worthy. It’s, it’s that feeling in the stomach. Oh, that speech was terrible that recording was awful. What am I doing here? Am I wasting my time, but to convince these students to go somewhere to be bad at it, get shootout work, to improve, come back, do it better, stay with it and that’s the key persistence. To stay with it even when you feel like it’s all falling apart and what am I doing here and why did I spend four years of my life studying this. And the reality is there might be for each 100 students in a giant auditorium listening to a speech. There might be one or two dream jobs and a hundred graduates all eyeing for that one dream job and maybe there’s 60 or 70% of the students in the room that won’t pursue a career in this industry and we have to face that reality as well. That it’s a challenge to get in when it’s competitive. There’s a supply and demand issue here but as I work through what I would like to share in this speech I have a genuine interest in helping everyone in this room. Everyone even listening to this podcast to be successful and if somehow one of my ridiculous stories, one little tidbit of something I screwed up. If I can share through my own failures to help someone else be successful, then every bit of it was worth even more than what it did for my own career andI’ve had a great career. It’s been a lot of fun by biobus gonna be a lot more fun. Even for another 10 or 20 years hopefully, but the thought that maybe, just maybe I can go into that classroom; tell a few stories, answer a few questions. That’s something that I screwed up or failed at even 25 27 years ago might have value in helping one of these incredible talented students be successful get their brains turn and about what am I gonna do after I graduate. To drive home that point that you’ve got to do the internship, you’ve got to put your heart and soul into that entry-level position to advance. That’ll be the message. That’s gonna be what I’m going to talk about and I have a genuine interest in helping everyone be successful. That’s the thought for the day and I wish you well. I thank you for listening and I ask that you subscribe to our YouTube channel. Mosier media is on YouTube youtube.com/Mosiermedia and of course we’re on Facebook: facebook.com/Mosiermedia. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter @Mosiermedia. We’ve got it all set up. We have it fairly organized so we certainly appreciate you listening. We appreciate your support and hopefully through the content that we create in the stories we tell we can help everyone in our audience and everyone that we encounter to reach their goals and to be successful. Thanks for listening.