Terry Cowgill

Remaining Local Media Stronger Than Ever

May 30, 2007 on 3:25 pm | In Local, Main, Media |

It’s time for a local media update. A week or two before Thanksgiving 2004, while on my four-year stint away from the LJ, I wrote an op-ed piece for the paper on the status of the radio scene in the NWC.

[Aside: The link has expired, but I found the text on my computer and have placed it in a comment box on another post. Click here to read that column and see how it compares to what we have today.]

Since radio, Web and print media have evolved (and even, in some cases, converged), it only makes sense to update my readers on the media scene in general, rather than limit myself to radio.

What has happened since that column is a mixed bag, to be sure. With exception of the LJ, print media coverage of our area has declined. But we are so much richer in other media than we were four years ago.

Print

As Michael Flint laments almost every Sunday morning on Straight Talk, the LJ pretty much owns the franchise for newspaper coverage of the goings on in the NWC. The Waterbury Republican bailed on regular coverage when Gale Toensing left the paper to start her own website and blog in 2005.

The Republican does have solid coverage of Kent because former LJ editor-in-chief David Parker (a wonderful man and a former mentor of mine) now lives there. And they come up to cover the occasional big story like the Lakeville Hose Company’s quest for a new firehouse. My guess is they do not see the advertising opportunities in places like Salisbury and Sharon, where the growing weekender population has never shown much of an affinity for conservative “Republicans” (be they public officials or newspapers).

Likewise, The Litchfield County Times gravitates to the more populous southern end of the county, where the paper is headquartered. But since it was purchased in 2001 by the hideous Journal Register Company from former New York Observer owner Arthur L. Carter, The Times has lost a little of its upscale luster.

As for the Register Citizen of Torrington, they won’t come up here anymore unless their is a devastating fire, a horrific car crash or the head football coach at Housy gets fired. So that leaves us. Frankly, it’s not a position I’m comfortable in. I think we do an excellent (albeit imperfect) job. But competition makes people and products perform even better. There’s not much I can do about the print exodus from the NWC, so I’ll leave it at that.

Radio and TV

Much has happened since my last column on this. The eclectic WKZE (FM 98.1) has left Sharon and moved to Rhinebeck. Doug Harrel, host of the aptly named “Doug & Pony Show,” was outstanding. So was Hal Lefferts. But both left the station about when it moved west a couple of years ago, so I haven’t listened to the station since.

But some things have stayed pretty much the same. WQQQ (103.3 FM) in Lakeville continues to thrive with largely the same programming and cast of characters it had in 2004.

Morning personality and station manager Joe Loverro does a crackerjack job running that station, which he has done since Marshall Miles left almost 10 years ago. I don’t care much for the default music format (mostly hits from the 80s on), but you have to play what you can to survive around here. I have noticed Bill Krasowski and the Saturday morning Talking Sports gang has left. Wonder what happened to them.

I like the station but I still felt as if there was something missing — something to connect me to my community a little better. Then that something else got my attention …

An enterprise called Tri-State Public Communications started to thrive in a suite of small rooms on the ground floor of Geer Village. Marshall Miles has been operating the cable access channel CATV11 (now CATV6) for four and a half years. He opened the station on Comcast cable out of cramped studios at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, moving about eight months later to more spacious headquarters at the newly finished Geer.

He had been trying to buy the old WKZE AM 1020 to simulcast his morning show, then called News & Views. The price was too high so he and colleague Jill Goodman found some donors, recruited some KZE-FM alumni and started Robinhoodradio.com, the NWC’s first Internet radio station. Then Miles swung a deal last year to lease KZE-AM from its owners and has started a whole new station to complement his on-line offering.

What Miles has done is nothing short of remarkable. He has built a small non-profit broadcasting empire right here in the NWC. His new morning show (now called Marshall & Mike) has been strengthened with the addition of Flint.

[Full disclosure: I appear regularly on the program to promote the LJ and this blog. And both men are my friends.]

But in addition to providing a wide range of programming that has something for everyone, Miles and his crew are doing a great service to the community by appearing at municipal meetings and events and taping them to show on CATV6. And get this! They don’t get paid for it.

Internet

Again, there’s not much except for us. Gale Toensing set out to cover the NWC after leaving The Republican, but has pretty much abandoned that effort in favor of exploring Middle East and American Indian issues.

We at the LJ have been trying to move into what new media types call Web 2.0, which is becoming a catch phrase for the upgrading of web technologies to such features as blogs, video, wikis, social networking and RSS feeds.

I put up some video footage (see below) video footage (crude though it may have been for a first-time effort) of the Memorial Day festivities in Salisbury this week. We have posted some breaking news stories sooner than they are available in our weekly print edition. And we plan more changes to make our website more interactive and useful. Stay tuned …

And to all of you who contribute to the richness of the media landscape in our area, thank you. Because by doing it, you’re either earning nothing or a lot less than you could doing something else.