I've been doing 'America's Newsroom' and lots of other news shows and writing over the years. That's my thing.
In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
It is very easy when you are in the hothouse of the newsroom to believe that everybody wants to know about this Important Story Of The Day, when actually, once you walk out the front door, it is people getting on with their lives.
Working in local news makes you very self-sufficient, which is a good thing because you know how all the different jobs work. I've worked many of those jobs in the newsroom, from my first job answering the phones and working the prompter, to producing, to being a reporter who does all of those things.
Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention.
It was love at first sight being in the newsroom.
My first shift in broadcasting was 2-11 A.M., doing lots of grunt work and running the TelePrompTer for the morning anchors. Luckily, I fell in love the minute I walked into the newsroom, and I've never gotten over that.
The modern economics of the newsroom don't support big investigative reporting staffs.
Notwithstanding the likes of 'All the President's Men' in the 1970s or HBO's recent 'The Newsroom,' film and TV have always loved to hate the press.
When I first started out as a young journalist, I know that on at least two occasions, when I walked into a newsroom, I knew I was replacing the black person in that job.
