Posted by Mike Biel (posted by Gerry Wilkinson) on January 02, 1999 at 19:56:56:
In Reply to: Another perspective posted by Gary Torresani (posted by Jerry Klein) on October 11, 1998 at 21:52:19:
I only just now came across the two messages forwarded from Gary about the death of the AM and the rise of jazz at FM. ...I wasn't there, but some of what he said is what I had said a year ago. ...But what I had said was that I think the faculty was embarassed by the quality and some of the subject matter that they heard on the air and that their friends and fellow professors would hear on the air. I remember hearing rumblings that things would have to be cleaned up in the future when a higher power transmitter would be obtained. And I had heard that the move to jazz specifically was a very high level decision far above the departmental faculty. Within a very short time our mentors, Blenheim, Dusenbury, and Roberts were vastly outnumbered and outranked by a hoard of new professors who had no knowledge or interest in the past history and traditions of WRTI, and didn't know what they were losing. I had always figured that Kassi was just a powerless pawn in the changeover, and was surprised to hear Gerry's story (per John Roberts) which made him out to be the villian. But I wasn't there and never even met Kassi.
I am a little surprised at some of the things that Gary said, especially that AM was not going to be wired over to the new building. I can understand it as a separate station--I had told Jerry before I left that the new building would not be able to support our FM format--let along two stations--because I had come to the realization when walking thru the nearly completed facility that the studio set-up was not anywhere near as versital as what we had in Thomas Hall. It looked a hell of a lot better on paper than it did in real life. My first clue was that the ganged cart machines would not be able to mix two carts at the same time--only play them in sequence. Roberts didn't know that when he selected them. And when I saw the size of the studios I realized that you could not do productions while the station was on the air. Frankly I was surprised to learn after all these years that they had left AM on the air from Thomas Hall. You AM people were too eager to get over to the glitzy new studios and were too willing to give up Thomas Hall. And the FM people were too busy to worry about what was happening over in Thomas. Dusenbury talked me out of going to grad school there--he said that he and the others had nothing more to teach me, and I should go to a different school like Northwestern--but I wonder if I had stayed whether I would have been in any position to try to explain to you AM guys (and the rest of you) why you needed to keep Thomas Hall. When I left I thought it was going to be dismantled immediately. Speaking as a faculty member myself who is just about to have his building renovated and will be displaced for at least two years, the faculty was stupid not to have FOUGHT to keep that facility available to them for classes. Considering that they never did build Dusenbury's drama studio--the room became the film processor room--and that they eventually turned the OTHER studio into a student longue (keeping only the three overlooking controlrooms with no studios), they DESPIRATELY needed classroom studios. I met a group of Temple students at the NAB convention in the spring of 1973 and they mentioned that they had NO radio production classes anymore. The new faculty had refocused the ENTIRE DEPARTMENT away from radio produciton towards research and film production. It's where the glitz was, and they developed quite a reputation in these areas.
Let me comment a little more on some of the other aspects of Gary's second letter.
"The loss of Thomas Hall is a tragedy but such moves are not untypical in the business 90's." Tradition means little these days.
All that matters now is bottom line. Profits profits profits profits. Public service be damned. People be damned. Quality be damned. Year end business programs are reporting this as the worst year ever in layoffs, but the stock market is still booming. The stock market is booming BECAUSE of the layoffs.
"What are they going to do
with Annenberg when they build a new RTF facility? To think a building that is only 30 years old is now obsolite."
There were problems with it when it was new, as I indicated above. The Thomas Hall layout was MUCH better planned. It was planned by the WFIL engineers who KNEW how to make a facility that could produce. Roberts did a lot of the planning of the new facility, and he was not one of our radio production professors by that time, and had not done radio professionally for decades. He designed a very space conscious and efficient facility, but as I said above, it was not versital enough. It was much better suited for what WRTI became--which might have been in the plans all along! And those faculty offices. UGH. And when they super-enlarged the faculty that place became a nighmare overcrowded zoo.
Actually I consider the building older than just 30 years. Although the offices opened in Sept 67 and the studios in Sept 68, the blueprints were already finalized by the spring of 1963, which was when I saw them as a junior in High School. Remember, only one TV studio was color, and it had TK-42 cameras. The TK-44s were being introduced as the building opened.
"No wonder they are knocking down hundred year old buildings like Thomas Hall."
Ironically, Thomas Hall was in full use till the end. It was probably a much more plesant place to work than the cinderblock cells in Annenberg. They built for people back then, not for the bottom line.
"Well thanks for allowing me to share what happened. And again, I apologise for the rough tone. RTI-FM and AM was important to me in more ways than you can ever know. I can't imagine how I would have gotten started in broadcasting without the launching I got from RTI. I really wonder how students get any experience without the opportunity to be announcers on a student radio station. What do they do? tape stuff for themselves?"
Not even that. There are not real studios to even do that. When I visited in the late 70s I saw sign up sheets by the TV studios that were filled for THREE MONTHS AHEAD.
"That's why I hope that the Close channel FM gets going. On the other hand, with corporate broadcasting mergers these days, it is probably really rough to get a job. I just had a friend go through what Ed went through when his stations got taken over by Jaycor."
One of my students was Jacobs' son at the time when Jacobs still owned Jaycor and mainly ran WLW. He and his brother were also football players, and our Development Dept. actually told us to keep our hands off of Jacobs because his money was going to football. They got him to build a scoreboard that we didn't need, and got him to put artifical turf in that has cost the university a fortune since because it had to be replaced twice. They wouldn't let him give a dime to the broadcasting program. And you wonder why most university faculties have no respect for their administration.
"Now I understand that Jaycor is being taken over by yet another company. When does it ever end. Before its over, we''ll probably have three companies controlling all the major markets.. Let's see that would be Disney, CBS, and Jaycor."
When bottom line is the only thing that matters, and making a profit isn't good enough--you have to make a bigger and Bigger and BIGGER PROFIT--and everything else be damned, you get the ruination of an industry and public service. NBC is going to go belly up shortly, and the only thing that is going to be available soon will be specialized narrowcasters--and all of them are going to be owned by only a few owners. The requirement to go digital HDTV is going to wipe out terresterial TV, and within 10 years TV will all be cable and satellite. When the networks pull out in a few years the affiliates will not be able to afford the digital changover. I just came back from a week in New York, staying in a hotel right where all the festivities last night were broadcast from--the Marriott Marquis. And in spite of being in the heart of everything, during that week I did not see ANY HDTV Digital at all. No sets, no hype, no pubicity. Nothing. And supposedly it is already on the air there. I spent the summer in Europe and saw widescreen 16 X 9 TV sets EVERYWHERE. Every TV store had them, even in small villages. These are mainly standard resolution sets, but the German/Austrian digital satellite just went on the air last spring and has the potential to provide HDTV soon. There are NO plans for any terrestrial HDTV in Europe but they will probably get it by satellite before we do.
I saw the beginning of the end when Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as FCC Chair. When I heard his "un-regulate" speech that he shortly thereafter gave at the Kentucky Broadcasters Assoc. convention in Oct 81, I knew we were doomed. And when he loused up the AM Stereo decision he killed AM. And I am glad I got to tell him off to his face. By the time the AM Stereo decision was corrected, AM ratings had declined so rapidly that even stereo and the much delayed NRSC couldn't help. And because AM was in such distress because of his own foul-up, he had to loosen the ownership regulations. Commissioner James Quello predicted that stations would then start to be bought and sold like pork bellies, and that is what happened and is happening. Bottom line is the only thing that matters. Stations are being bought for much to much money, and they have to reduce the staffing and service to zero in order to make enough to service the debt, let along make a profit and perhaps serve the public interest. The next big thing could come if the courts decide to force the FCC to license low power micro radio stations under 100 watts. If they requre local ownership and disallow multiple ownerships to make them true neighborhood stations we might see the next revolution that might save the radio business.
This got us far from the WRTI question, but it partially is the same. The administration is only thinking of its bottom line, and the students are not in the picture. My daughter is starting to think about colleges, and I'm going to tell her to look for schools where they do not have lecture halls and don't have much of a graduate assistant program. And avoid schools where the TV sets in the classrooms come in pairs and have hidden cameras above them. Colleges are also undergoing jaycorizing, and the bottom line syndrome is getting worse than it has been.