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Speaker 3: When your old career gives you lemons throwing some ice
mix in some vodka. Call it a podcast from the
Mac of All Trade Studio in Fairport and driven by
Victor Chrysler Dots. Gee Brahm, It's Billified, the Bill Moran Podcast.
Speaker 2: Well, hello and welcome.
Speaker 1: Thank you forgetting your pot on. Thanks for telling a friend.
That's how we spread the word about the pirate ship.
Danny is not feel tonight, but he had said to me, Hey,
I ran into somebody you know, and he said he
wouldn't mind coming on the pod, and that would be
Mark Grub.
Speaker 2: I go grooves. It's been forever since I've seen grooves.
Speaker 1: And two I guess I should say two former media
personalities in town, right, I think that's fair.
Speaker 2: That's fair. Mark. Now, what are you at?
Speaker 1: Triple A Western New York and Central New York?
Speaker 4: YEP, Triple A Western and Central New York. And I
am a pr guy. Oh okay, I am all right.
Speaker 1: So you get out there, so you get to be
the pretty face that comes out and tell us list
the travel conditions, right, you know where to go, what
to do. By the way, triple A A great little
thing to have in your pocket.
Speaker 4: No doubt about it, especially this time he winter we've had.
You don't want to be stuck on the roadside.
Speaker 1: There's been when did winter show? I like it showed
up in January, all of a sudden, it just came.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting. I've talked to a couple of people
about it that I think this really has been a
pretty normal winter when you look at the stats. It is,
but because the last couple of years have been so
unusually mild, that suddenly we're like, whoa, what's going on?
Speaker 2: What's happening here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm I'm you know, we turned that calendar to March.
I'm ready to move on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too, you know, I am too.
Speaker 4: I don't mind if it comes in like a lion,
just go out like a lamb.
Speaker 1: So we've Mark is from originally from where in New Jersey, Westfield, Westfield,
Northern Jersey, Northern Jersey and about twenty miles outside Manhattan. Okay,
So and I grew up about ninety miles North in
New York City of New York City, in New York State.
So two people from downstate, you end up here and
you dis like it, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well that place grows on you, it does. When
I moved here, I literally knew no one.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The only people that I knew when I moved here
were the news director at channelten, Bill Seitzler, wild Bill
back in the day, and Rich Funky. Those are the
two people I'd interviewed with when I flew up here
at interview. This was November of ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Okay, So when.
Speaker 4: I packed up a U haul, Yeah, came north from
West Virginia. That's where I was.
Speaker 2: You were in West Virginia, Bluefield.
Speaker 4: West Virginia, small TV station in Bluefield. Came up here
to become the weekend sports guy at Channel ten. Yes,
those were the only two people I knew.
Speaker 2: All right, So let's.
Speaker 1: Let's go back a little bit here. Because always wanted
to be on.
Speaker 4: TV, you know, I think I always wanted to be
involved in sports.
Speaker 1: Always want to be involved in sports. That Okay, what
did your mom and dad do?
Speaker 4: So my dad worked in Manhattan, He worked on the street.
Speaker 2: He was a mortgage broker, okay.
Speaker 4: And my mom was a stay at home mom.
Speaker 1: Okay, and you lived in Jersey. You go big school,
I would assume that's a pretty populated area.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I went to a private day school.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my dad, you know, did well when I was
a kid. And you know, I went to public school
through sixth grade, and then seventh through twelfth I was
at private day school. Yeah, or the Heartridge.
Speaker 2: That's very Uh that's nice, isn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was great, it was.
Speaker 1: And then you go, now during that time, any exposure
to TV or sports broadcasting or anything in that those high.
Speaker 4: School years, not really you know. I mean, obviously I
was totally into it. I watched sports religiously. I played
sports religiously, but I you know, that felt unattainable at
that point in my life. It was just something that
was over there, he enjoyed. It was hard to imagine
myself participating in it. When I got into college, I
wrote for the school paper. I went to Trinity College
in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote for the school paper there, became
the sports editor, and at that point I began to think,
you know, you know, maybe I'll be a sports writer.
You know, you've got trying to find a gig at
a paper and do my thing.
Speaker 2: Did Trinity? What did you go to school for?
Speaker 4: So it's liberal arts school. I didn't really have a
plan going in like a lot of people back in
the day. It was more about just kind of you know,
you know, experiencing college and trying to figure it out
on the fly. You know, I've got I've got one
child in college. Now it's just a different game in
the sense that you know, when you're sixteen, seventeen, eight
years old, eighteen years old, there's so much pressure to
have it figured out at their age now because college
is such a huge investment. You know what I'm saying,
Yeah I do. You know, yeah, right, you know what
I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 4: But I didn't feel that pressure back then. I just
kind of went there. I enjoyed it obviously, you know,
I did the studying I had to do, but I
had a good time. I played on the soccer team
there and that was what was.
Speaker 2: What Division three D three. Yeah, but still that's a commitment.
Speaker 1: That's a to be a student athlete that I don't
care at any level of the NCAA is a commitment.
That's a job, your training and all that, and so
you had to be pretty good man.
Speaker 4: That was okay, all right, well that overstated it.
Speaker 2: It was good.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, though, because I want to veer off to
the college thing just just a little bit, sure, because
I love the liberal arts thing. And I'll tell you
a story that people have heard a million times in
the podcast and radio and everything. But I I think
the liberal arts and the knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is such a wonderful thing to have, and it's
great as you get older you kind of see the
benefit of that. You talk to my fifteen year old son,
my youngest by a lot, he'll tell you that, you know,
I don't care.
Speaker 2: I just get the homeward. Yeah, why to make me
do this?
Speaker 4: I agree with you. You know, I've talked to so
many aspiring journalists through the years. You know, people that
you know intern for me, or you know, you go
to classrooms and talk to students, and I told them,
you know, for me, I was a history major in college. Okay,
never took a communications class, yeah never, Yeah, But what
I did was I wrote. You know, an endless stream
of papers. Reading and writing is just drilled into me. Now,
I was a sports writer. I wrote for the school paper.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 4: And you know, so there was a journalistic component there.
Speaker 2: Well was the deal with the day school that you
went to.
Speaker 1: In terms of in terms of a lot of times
like uh, I put on my kids through a private
school too, the secondary school, and it was a lot
of the same thing, but his was more.
Speaker 2: Of a religious base. It was a Jesuit based school.
Speaker 1: So, but the reading and writing stuff sometimes is a
little more rigorous.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: In the in the private school. And then nothing please,
nothing against public school. I mean, I'm not knocking at all,
nor am I. I'm just saying that your public school
has to reach a mass amount here we can. It's
a finite. You know, you want to pay, and you're
you're buying a product almost you're buying a prep school.
Speaker 4: Yeah. When I say I agree with you, I'm saying
from my experience. Yeah, I felt like when I got
to college that having uh you know, significant reading assignments
and having papers that were five ten pages long. Yeah,
it was not a new experience. You know, I'd been
there and done it. The point that I would make
about it, and the thing that I think is so
transferable about those skills is that, you know, when you
think of journalism, whether it's you know, broadcast, radio, print,
whatever it is, you're talking about taking a large set
of facts and distilling them down and sharing them with
an audience, you know, viewers, listeners, readers, whatever it may be,
in a way that's easily understood.
Speaker 2: And so I.
Speaker 4: Felt like, you know, that reading and writing and doing
all that research and then distilling that information into a
five page paper, ten page paper, whatever it was, was
just building that skill set, it was, and what I
ended up doing in television was just simply a just
a shorter version of it, you know, where you had
to drill down even deeper instead of a ten page paper.
It was you know, in the beginning, when it was sports,
it was you've watched a two hour basketball game, Give
me the four baskets that tell the story of this game.
It's the same skill set, it's just applied differently. And
I pivoted into news later in my career. Same thing
I always say, you know, you know, it's still an interview,
whether you're interviewing the head coach of the Bills or
the mayor of Rochester. You know, it's a function of
conducting the interview, having a sense of what the right
questions to ask are, listening to what they're saying, and
applying the appropriate follow up. My wife has a master
from Syracuse and communications. She went to New House. She
was a top student there, and she understands things about
communications that I don't because I never studied it. You know,
everything that I know about is I learned on the fly.
While I was in college. My senior year, I did
an internship at a TV station. One of the guys
on the soccer team had done it easy a I
mean that.
Speaker 2: Was the cell.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, I could use one of those. Yeah,
this will help the GPA. Let's do it. And I
went in there. First day, I logged a yukon Boston
college basketball game. It's like a four o'clock tip. Six
o'clock news comes on, So the game ended right for
the newscast, Sports is gonna come on at six twenty.
It was like five of six and the guy looks
at me. The sports anchor, Steve Savard was the guy
wound up becoming the voice of the Rams called their
Super Bowl games. Really he was amazing, is amazing, great
great journalist, went and eventually pivoted to news as well,
but he was the weekend sports guy and at the
time there this is Channel thirty in Connecticut, and he said,
just what I said earlier. He said, give me the
four baskets that tell the story of the game. And
I was like wow. And so I looked at my
notes and I was like, well, you got to have
this one because they built a twelve point lead at
the half. You got to have this one because this
is where Boston College kind of rallied early in the
second half. You have to have this bucket because he
was the leading scorer. He really carried them down the stretch.
And you got to have this one because this is
the dunk that punctuated the win. And ten minutes later,
those highlights were edited and he's on the air talking
about it verbatim the way I explained it to him.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: And I walked out of that building that day and
I said, and I now know what I want to do.
Speaker 2: You graduate from.
Speaker 4: Trinity in what year? Ninety four?
Speaker 2: Ninety four? Okay, same as me. So then what what's
the path? How do you so?
Speaker 4: What I My path was this that when I finished
at Trinity, I had done that internship. And that internship
ended as I was graduating, and I basically I said
to the sports director at the time, the guy that
was running that office was a guy named Beasley Reese,
the former Giant.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's the hell yeah, he's the head of
the NFL Association.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So he was, you know, he had pivoted from playing
to becoming a sports broadcaster. And he's and I'm like, look,
you know, I want to keep this going. And he's like, well,
he's like, I can't make you any promises. There's there's
really nothing here for you. But if you're willing to
keep coming in, let's let's see where it leads over
the summer and goes from there. So I continued the internship.
I basically did it full time that summer for no pay,
for nothing I want. At the end of the summer, yeah,
you know, it was like I literally had to go
to the news director and I was like, you know,
like I'm out of time here, like we gotta you know,
either i gotta I gotta go, or you're going to
hire me. And he said, look, there's nobody in the
budget for you. I'm you know, at the begging of
these sports guys, I'm going to bring you on as
a part time sports producer, you know, putting the shows
together behind the scenes. He said, the minute a piece
of equipment in this building breaks, you're gone.
Speaker 2: What happens from this station? This is in Connecticut.
Speaker 4: Arts Hartford, Connectarket. This was the NBC affiliate there, Channel thirty. Yeah,
sort of the cliff notes version is. I worked there
for three years as a sports producer. You did twelve
months After about a year, I was elevated to the
main sports producer. You know, I'd done well, I'd kind
of taken the ball and run quick. It was great,
and I worked with incredible sportscasters. I was lucky. I
worked with people that really were good at what they did.
Speaker 2: When you're ran the sh shadow of New York City.
Speaker 4: And well Beasley was calling NFL games for see at
that point, you know, so there was you know, he
was doing the Olympics for them, So there was a
there was just a lot that I was getting exposed
to in that area. But the longer I did it,
the more there were to me. Two paths were emerging,
you know, like try to get to the network level
as a behind the scenes producer guy, or try and
take what everything I had learned and try to do
it myself. Yeah, obviously in my early twenties, I was
that was an easy choice for me. Me too, I thought,
if I fell on my face, then I'll go back
and try and get a network producer. But I'm going
to at least go for it. So I grinded it out.
I put resume tapes together. They were horrendous, you know,
they were just terrible. I had no idea.
Speaker 2: What do you have any anywhere? I don't know, but
you could ever show your kids or something.
Speaker 4: I don't know if I have the resume tapes that
I sent out to get that first job, but I
definitely have the first sports cast that I did once
I was on.
Speaker 1: Those are brutally, yeah, but how they're brutal, but they're great,
Yes they are.
Speaker 2: It's been a.
Speaker 4: Long time since I've seen it, but I I can
still see it. So we're in headlights.
Speaker 2: Is that where you went was at West Virginia?
Speaker 4: So I went from there to West Virginia. There's a
lot of great stories that we could leverage here. I'll
tell you how I got that gig. I mean, I
was sending these tapes everywhere. Yeah, I mean, and it
was like sending him into thin air, right, like nobody
was looking at these tapes. No one was ever going
to hire me for these jobs, but I'm mailing them
out and hoping against hope. I'll tell you how I
got my first on air job. So, the guy who
was the weekend guy who would replace Steve Savard that
I that I told you about was a guy named
Chris Raggy. Chris came to Hartford as the weekend sports guy.
Was so good that he left the weekend sports gig
in Hartford to take a gig as a correspondent on
Entertainment Tonight. Real, that's how talented this guy was. So,
I mean, I really was surrounded by unbelievable role models,
guys that really kind of showed me where the standard was.
Not that I ever got they were, but at least
what to shoot for. So Raggy leaves and they're looking
to phill his position. And so when they're bringing guys
in to audition for this role, one of these guys
comes up from West Virginia, guy named Kevin Nathan. He's
still there, He's still at that station all these years later.
Over thirty years later. Great guy. But I saw I'm
putting these shows together for his sports cast, and he's like,
he's not auditioning, like you know, behind the scenes. They
brought him in for a weekend and he did the
weekends worth the shows, And I'm putting these sports casts together,
and I poured everything I had into those shows for him.
I made them as good as they could be, and
he wound up getting the job. And when he came
back to start the job, he's like, look, I can't
thank you enough. You know, you you really help make
this happen. You maybe believe it could happen. You put
incredible shows together. And we convinced this news director that
I was the guy to hire.
Speaker 1: What was the motivating factor for you to have that
kind of dedicated always that way?
Speaker 4: I know, I learned a hard lesson. So when Savarred
left and the people were coming in to audition for
his job, I was put off by it because I
felt like I should have got it on. Yeah, and
I didn't really lean into it. I was, you know,
I kind of just went through the motions. And when
Chris got hired and came there, it took a while
for we worked very closely together right off the bat,
and it took a while, you know, to to sort
of thaw through that fiction or friction rather because I was,
you know, I was jealous of it. And Chris was
only a couple of years older than me. So I
was jealous of it, and I and I learned through
that experience that that that jealousy did not serve me well,
that it was that it was that it was to
my detriment, not to my benefit. So when the next
opportunity came around, I leaned into it and I did
everything I could for those candidates, whether they were or
whether they're good or bad. I gave them everything I
had and I and you know, I would say that's
something that I stayed with me. So long story short.
The guy, so Kevin Nathan, comes up, takes the job
in Hartford, and this is how the business works. So
Kevin Nathan's got a buddy who's in Bluefield. He takes
Kevin Nathan's job in Huntington, West Virginia. So now they've
got an opening in tiny little Bluefield. Well, guess who
sends their tape to Bluefield?
Speaker 1: Ye?
Speaker 4: Guess what news director gets a phone call from Kevin Nathan,
the news director in Bluefield. I drive all the way
down there, I do an interview, I drive all the
way back. He calls me. He says, you got the gig.
I put my whole life into a nineteen ninety three
Toyota centric drive for the hills of West Virginia.
Speaker 2: This is amazing.
Speaker 1: So I love the way that is, and I love
the whole story of not putting your all into it,
being jealous and envious and then realizing that's not serving you,
and boom, look what happened.
Speaker 2: So now you go down there? Was that just for weekends?
Speaker 4: So I went I started there as the weekend sports guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what do you do during the week So,
like then you would be like a sports reporter.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they yeah, it's a full time job, full
time gig. Okay, I got it.
Speaker 4: It didn't seem like full time money, but it was
a full time gig.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But you're a West Virginia where I'm thinking in myself,
and I think most people would think a little bit backwards. Certainly,
probably not.
Speaker 4: I didn't know what to expect. Yeah, you know, I
was in my mid twenties at that point. Like I said,
already been in the business for three years. I had
a lot of experience about how to put sports cast together,
but had very little experience actually going out in news gathering.
And when you're down in the market like that, that's
you know, you got to go out. Most nights, I
would have my entire sports cast inside my camera, you
know what I mean. Like I went out and shot
the entire sports cast. You come back, you edit all
those highlights together, and you throw it on the air
at eleven o'clock like you've had your feet up all night.
Speaker 2: Right right now.
Speaker 4: But I was driving around the hills of West Virginia
and Southern Virginia as well, is right on the border there.
And for me, yeah, I guess the way I approached it,
I wasn't really focused on what there was going on
around me when I got there, I was just totally
focused on the fact that I was getting this dream
up tunity, yeah, you know, and I just took full
advantage of it. Finally got to Rochester three years later,
as I said, interviewed November ninety nine. Started here in
December ninety nine, one month before the Music City Miracle.
So it was mostly it was most it was mostly
my fault.
Speaker 1: I forgot well were you Are you a Giant fan
or were you I grew up a Giant fan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did too, and people get mad at me.
They're like, well, you switch your loyalty, and I go, yeah.
But when you're here.
Speaker 1: And you cover the guys like I did radio shows
from Camp, I got mad, you know, yelled at by
Mario Williams. I sat with the different players all the
way through Doug Flutie. You talk to these guys, you
can't help but root for them.
Speaker 2: It's true, you just can't. I agree.
Speaker 4: I think you're you know, certainly, as a sports caster,
I tried to be as ejective as possible, you know,
when they struggled, and there were many years there where
they struggled. In my sports day, I don't remember that.
I was very you know, I you know, I was
as I was as clear as I could be about that.
I really didn't try to let my feelings enter the equation.
But yes, I mean, you know, the way I always
put it to people is, look, the better they do,
the better it is for you. You know, you want
to get to the playoffs, you want to have a
shot at the super Bowl. You want to be there
for the parade. Of course, you want them to win,
you want them to do well. And you do get
to know some of them, you know, yes, and when
you do, it becomes you know, now you're rooting from
them because you love the story. You think they're a
great guy, or they've been really good to you, and
you know they've helped you do your job better and
all those things factor in for sure.
Speaker 1: So you send it tape, are you still at West
Virginia And that's and you come came here from West Virginia,
from West Virginia, So you send it tape here and
it's again weekends, yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 4: And for me, you know, the way I looked at
it when I was there was it was sort of
like there it was like kind of college, you know,
like West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Marshall, Virginia to a lesser degree.
And here it was a chance to sort of take
that step from the college level to the pros with
the Bills sabers Ambergs Triple A baseball with the Red Wings. Yeah,
in fact that a lot of the kids are on
the Red Wings. When I moved here were guys that
I had covered in Bluefield because that back then it
was the Orioles rookie affiliate.
Speaker 2: Oh that's yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4: And you know, the time it took me to get
from there to hear it was the same amount of
time it took them to get from rookie ball to
Triple A.
Speaker 2: Wow. So they were playing rookie ball in West Virginia.
Speaker 4: Josh Towers was a guy and he pitched in the
two thousand All Star Game at Frontier Field and he
had a pretty good career in the majors. There's a
guy that was in Bluefield with me who was in
Rochester when I got here.
Speaker 2: And guys ever.
Speaker 4: Made the connection. You did, But it wasn't like, bro,
we did.
Speaker 2: Did you transition to news there?
Speaker 4: I did not?
Speaker 2: You did not. I took a year away. You took
a year away. What did you do for the year?
Speaker 4: I worked in financial services? Oh for about a year.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: And you talk about like timing in life, that was
not good timing. It was like nine when the world
was falling.
Speaker 2: Oh that was when they were in the Golden turns.
Speaker 4: People. Yes, people were not exactly lining up to get
money advice from me, right, So, but it was a
great learning experience, no regrets about it. Made some incredible friendships,
learned a ton, helped some people out along the way,
But recognize that for me, you know, the prudent move
with a young family was to get back into a
situation where I could accentuate my skill set. You know,
I think, you know, the way I look back on
that experience, I think had I been like just starting
out in my early twenties, you know, I could try
to grind my way through that. But with a wife
and kids and a house and a mortgage and all that,
I just need I needed to be in more of
a sure situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's and I and as I said, you know,
it was not a great time financially country.
Speaker 1: What happens to bring you back? Because I do remember
the CBS affiliate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you know I had a chance to come
back to Rochester. And for me, you know, John Cutchko
actually was the guy that kind of helped make it happen.
Speaker 2: Yea.
Speaker 4: You know, he was like, hey, we've got some openings
and I've talked to the news director about you. You know,
this could be a great opportunity for you to get
your foot back in the door, and you know, see
where it goes from there. And I saw it that way.
I saw it as an opportunity to get back in
and then kind of grow it from there and try
and get onto the anchor desk. I knew that what
I You know, one of the things that you learn
in that industry, television news, is that well, just turn
on the news. You'll see it for yourself. There's a
lot more news people than there are sports people. Oh yeah, yeah,
there's more reporters, there's more anchors, there's more shows. And
the other thing is, you know, when sports, you're always
begging like, oh, there's a big game tonight in Caledonia,
can we get some help getting some highlights from it.
In news, you never have to beg for that. You
go where it is and they want you to get it.
So there was an element of sort of if you
can't beat them, join them. I ended up doing bill
the two things I said I would never do. I
love mornings and news. And here's the beauty of it.
I did it voluntarily. Nobody forced me into it. They
asked me if I want to do it, and I said,
you bet, I do because at that moment in my life,
it was absolutely the right wing. I love sports. I'm
a sports guy at heart, always have been. But I
learned to appreciate news. I learned to appreciate not so
much the murder and mayhem elements of it, right, but
the incredible people in this community that are passionate about
doing different kinds of things, either on a business level
or a filmthropic level, that that I didn't know about
and otherwise would never have known about. Sure, I love sports,
but you know, there tends to be a groundhog day
component to it. It's football season, it's basketball season, it's
baseball season. It guess what, it's football season again, you know,
you know there's an element of ben there done that
the names in the face has changed, and that keeps
it fresh. But in news, it's constantly evolving.
Speaker 1: It is constantly evolving. And I like what you said
because I think I have found I don't watch a
whole lot of news anymore. And it's not out of
any other thing that I don't feel good when I
watched it.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I go.
Speaker 4: And it sounds like a lot of people well, which
is and I understand.
Speaker 1: But that's news, right, So sometimes I prefer to read
it than I do sometimes online because I can get
it and I can you know, I'll summarize articles for
myself for the podcast and things. Sure, but it's it's
a tough grind because you know, we report. I mean
the old adage that if it leads it or if
it bleeds, excuse me, it leads was, you know, the
way it was in news for a long time. I
think for almost a century that was sort of the saying.
Speaker 4: Well, and the research consistently shows that when people are
surveyed about television news, they will tell you consistently that
that that negative news is a turnoff. Yes, you know,
the you know, the bleeds it leads type of news
stories are turnoff. Yet at the same time, those same
people will tell you those of the stories they're most interesting.
I can remember there would be days where you'd get
you'd get that exclusive story at two in the afternoon,
and you'd be holding it until six to air it.
Those days are gone, Yes, because when it happened to
two in the afternoon, everybody already knows about it. Yeah,
because but you better have it advanced off of that
point into a completely new direction by six o'clock because you,
me and everyone else we've already consumed the basics of it,
the it of that breaking story. What where can you
take the story now four hours later? Right?
Speaker 1: And and there are still some people who may not
have heard about it, but you're right most people. I mean,
I say all the time marked that people are walking
around with a TV station in their pocket, no question,
they can go on live and get huge numbers potentially, right,
the abilities there to go viral in a sense and
have a story or any news get out.
Speaker 4: Right, and you're seeing you know, I mean, I don't
know how deep in the weeds we want to go, sure,
but you know you're seeing a version of that play
out in terms of X with Elon Musk. You know,
that's that's really his whole point, that the legacy media
is dead, and that every one of everyone, everyone who
has you know, a smartphone and X load downloaded onto
it is a journalist.
Speaker 2: In theory.
Speaker 4: There is some truth to that. But again I do
think that that while that there is an element of
truth there, you still have to uh, there still has
to be a room in the conversation for accuracy fact
versus opinion perspective advantage point. Even you know, where you
see something from a different angle, and it looks different
all of a sudden. So you may have captured something
one way, and it may give a certain view of
an event, and now people are often running with that
and suddenly some you know, another view of it comes
in and it provides a whole different understanding of The
research is being done about this in real time, you know,
and the books will be coming out about it, and
there will be courses of study in college. As we
shoutinue to loop back in this conversation, where people will
make that their life's work. I mean, I still feel
like that we are still in the wild West as
it comes.
Speaker 2: To ther Man.
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree with you more. And I know we
could say it feels like it's been around for a
lifetime over twenty five years, right, let's say, or a generation.
I don't want to say a lifetime a generation, but yeah,
we are because because even that has changed, yes, and
the ability to stream, the ability to do all this,
So this information stuff is out there. If you want it,
you can you can get it, yes, And that's the
that's almost too much.
Speaker 4: Yes, And I guess you know the wild West component
of it, you know, from a journalistic standpoint is that
there's no playbook. There are no rules of stablic that
I like. Well, yes, yeah, right, I carry you. It
has its advantages. It does, but think about it from
a journalistic standpoint. This is one of the things that
as time went on that I became I struggled with.
I guess is the fair way to put it? I mean,
you mentioned cronkite. You know where the where the mindset
there was middle of the road. You don't lean one
way or the other.
Speaker 2: You literal the road.
Speaker 4: You present the facts as you understand them. Because because
you're understanding evolved sometimes you learn new information. But you
give the information the facts as you understand it, and
you let the viewer.
Speaker 2: Listener decide the conduit for the information.
Speaker 4: So then you know this thing, you know, Facebook and
Twitter and Instagram, things like that come along, and now
you have journalists with their own page and they're building
their own brand, and they're telling you what they think.
Which it's America, it's a free country. You're allowed to
do that. But suddenly we've now without a rule book
or a play book or an understanding of how this
should work, we've blurred the lines. So now you have
a journalist who's basically laid out on Twitter how they
feel about someone or something going and covering that for
the news. Right, well, how are we gonna you know,
where is the neutrality there? Am I getting an unfiltered,
unbiased view of this event, whatever it may be. I
struggled with that as as time went on, because there
was really no one to kind of stand up and say,
this is how we should do it. This is the
way to separate those two things. Where you can have
your page and your interests, but you have to operate
in a way where when people turn on the TV
to watch you, they feel like they're getting again, an
unbiased version of what you're telling them, that what you're
telling them is authentic, it's not filtered or skewed in
any way based on your beliefs.
Speaker 2: It's tough, oh got it like it's it's.
Speaker 4: Like, I think this is something that you know. I
think almost immediately I began to see was an issue
in it on aquivocally is an issue as we speak.
Speaker 1: How did you handle social media for yourself when you
were on the.
Speaker 4: Yes, the answer is I tried to stay in the
middle of the road. In the middle of the road yeah, yeah,
I mean like to me, my, my, uh. Sort of
my line of where I felt like I could tread
into an opinion would be like the bills are going
to the playoffs. Like if you have a problem with that, then.
Speaker 2: You got me.
Speaker 1: If things will swing back a little bit to the
more of let's be let's try to bring some rationale
into the moment here and look at things. I'm not
saying that everything we're seeing is not as it is.
Maybe it is, but let's really kind of prove it
before we start swinging, because people are punching. Yeah and
figuratively and literally.
Speaker 4: Yes, and and it's amazing how quickly we can, you know,
dig our heels in and decide we're not moving off
that position, you know, in a moment's not in a moment,
one misinterpreted message.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, you.
Speaker 4: Know, unwined, you know, decades of friendship.
Speaker 2: It's crazy, it is crazy. Do you miss the news
at all?
Speaker 4: So I get that asked that question.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you do.
Speaker 4: I mean here's what I would say. Certainly, don't miss
the hours I described, Yes, I don't miss the murder
in the mayhem. You know, it's it's just troubling, it's sad,
it's awful. What I do miss are the people I
worked with, the relationships and the atmosphere of the newsroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, there was an energy.
Speaker 4: There's an energy in there. And I think what I
what I used to tell students that I believe this
is that people that find themselves in that environment are
naturally curious.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think that's a good thing to be
in the.
Speaker 4: You know, intelligence lack of intelligence, whatever, But you are
just naturally curious. You're inquisitive. You look at things and
you ask questions like why is that that way? What
if we turned it like this, would it be different?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: You just your mind works that way. And I think
when you're around other people that have that kind of
outlook on the world, that it's it can be a
really interesting place to be. No two days were alike, right,
And I think there's a lot to be said for that.
I think, you know, I'm sure there are people that
would think about their life. Oh it's the same old routine,
you know, after day, you know, living for the weekend.
You know, look, I get it some degree. I'm living
for the weekend now, and I'm happy about it. But
there was there was an energy in there that I
think is hard to replicate in most other work settings.
You know, they didn't hit a home run, they hit
a granny with Josh Allen.
Speaker 1: It's so strange because when I go back to that
draft and I think people saying we picked the wrong.
Speaker 4: Josh, I thought they picked the wrong Josh.
Speaker 2: Josh Rose in this conversation, I was that guy. Was
that guy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we was, accuracy was under question and all that,
and we've seen what he's become or maybe always was,
maybe always was.
Speaker 2: I mean you developed you. I always say, I.
Speaker 4: Think his coaching with Dable. I think when he first
got here was absolute game changer. I mean you look
at him from that first year to that second season.
He was a different football player.
Speaker 2: And that's that's his hard work.
Speaker 4: But there's an element of coaching there as well, helping
him understand uh to uh, to connect the mind to
what the body is capable of, you know, to put
those two in sync where they're working together.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily so funny because you could have some great coaches,
but just dummies that you're coaching. And I use the
term loosely, but that just aren't able to grasp it
or physically perform it. And here comes Josh and so
now you're he's not just a great player, but also
you're great coaches. But don't get that guy and you're terrible.
Speaker 2: You may be as good as any other coach in
the league.
Speaker 4: It's amazing when you put those two elements together, because
any any anything that's lacking in that equation and it
falls apart. You don't you don't get to where you
could go. You're right, I mean you think if Alan
had gone to a lot of other teams, how does
this play out?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: We don't know that.
Speaker 2: We don't.
Speaker 4: I think it's successful, but I don't know if it's
as successful as it's been. And really enjoy uh. The
driving reason for making this change in my life is
to just enjoy these moments with my family, all of them.
Savor them. And then you know what they say, you know,
right off into the sun, right.
Speaker 1: Off into the sunset. Who knows could be anything? Could
reinvent myself. I could, Professor Gruba, That's all I'm saying.
That's such a nice.
Speaker 2: Way about you.
Speaker 1: You can sing well to the kids, tell them the
stories from some ports through awesome I think it would
be awesome.
Speaker 2: This is great for Mark Gruba. I'm Bill Moran. We'll
see you next week. Didn't know what to do. I
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