This year...bleah. I honestly enjoyed meeting people at the Radio and Television News Directors exhibits more than the NAB floor. These folks were more interested in talking about what makes good radio than what newest toy they had for your station.

All that said, it was enjoyable from the aspect that I got the chance to make an impact on a couple of aspiring Journalism Students who were truly interested in learning their craft. They all asked what I considered to be worthwhile questions involving news writing and story selection. For your entertainment, what follows are my opening remarks which you might find amusing.

Welcome to April in the desert.

Yes, I live here, I love it here, and don’t plan to move anytime soon. News is a 24 hour business, and this is a 24 hour town After living here, it would be hard to move back to virtually any town in America. I’ve been all over this nation, in every state west of the Mississippi and most every state south of the Mason-Dixon, lived through Florida monsoons, Texas steambaths, Kansas and Nebraska tornadoes, and the incredibly dangerous to your waistline Alabama Peanut Harvests. But Nevada has six qualities apart from the always-open mentality here that make it unmatchable ..no snow, no ice, no fleas, not mosquitoes, no chiggers, no humidity.

I would like to thank the good people at UN Radio and here at the Radio and Television news Directors Association for the invitation to appear here today. It is truly an honor after 32 years in this business, broadcasting on large stations and small stations, networks of all sizes and shapes and tilts, for someone to actually call me and ask me what I think. Being very shy and soft spoken in my opinions, Jerry Piesecki had to talk for all of 35 seconds to convince me to attend. I hope what I have to say is relevant, particularly considering the challenges that YOU face on a daily basis.

How do you make global news relevant to your local audience. It is challenging on a daily basis, and some people think that for the local broadcaster, it’s not in their purview. After all, you have USA, Fox, ABC, CBS to report the hard local news. You have Paul Harvey, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jerry Hughes, Glenn Beck Alan Colmes Thom Hartmann,and others to run that hard national news through their own filters for analysis, which, after all, is what most talk hosts are today - the 21st century equivalents of analysts like HV Kaltenborn and the like. In many cases you even have local hosts to handle the analysis of local issues and some national issues. Where then, do you fit in the picture? Don’t misunderstand me, if you’re reporting on the city council, school board, and police blotter, that’s all very important, but for your station to remain relevant in this era, radio must do what the best local television stations are doing, and that’s explaining local angles to national and global stories. Some stories are no-brainers. Interviewing local servicemen just back from points of global conflict. Doing phoners with representatives of immigrant communities when trouble hits back home. No doubt many of you have local Muslim leaders on your speed dial for the latest reactions.

Thanks to the Internet and thanks to resources like UN Radio and others, you have resources to report global issues without being dependent on the national networks, who get so tied up in the sensational tabloid stories of the day, Anna Nicole, Imus, Lacy Peterson and the like, that they don’t spend the time necessary on stories like Darfur, the Sudan, the brewing crisis in every part of the world, and the growing needs the rest of the world has, that the people of this nation always assist.

Your major networks give passing mention to the flashpoints like the Middle East and South Korea, and to the debacle that should have been a no-brainer, but instead has become a legacy of shame in Iraq. Oh yeah, remember Afghanistan? We still have soldiers there working to stabilize that mess. It gets ignored too.

Every one of these stories can impact your local audience in terms of the economy, financial markets, descendants of the countries involved, or as is more frequent, family members involved in the overseas conflicts.

Ultimately it is up to you as a news director to set the tone. Do you want to be yet another tabloid news source, or a source of news that is relevant to your audience, that they need to know. That decision rests on you.

The discussion portion of the panel was in my mind far more valuable than the opening remarks that any of us made. In essence what I told the aspiring journalists:

To avoid story burnout, always write a complete story with beginning, middle, and end. Avoid being lazy. Writing the easy lead will turn your audience off to the story. “More violence in the middle ease...” is lazy. “A quiet day in a marketplace in Beirut turned deadly.....” Creative writing for the ear that engages the listener. Making a huge global story relevant can be as simple as reducing it from a million people to just one. Showing the story from a single person’s perspective can sound simplistic, but it engages listeners in a fashion that all the facts in the world can’t. In the final analysis, Pundits don’t count, people do.

I had the opportunity to chat with a number of young people afterwards and shared my resources with them. I reminded them that no journalist is ever 100% fully formed, that they will grow and learn all their lives. I’m still learning on a daily bases how to be better at what I do. That is not -- or should not -- be the exclusive providence of journalists. We should always be striving to grow and become better at what we do. The day we stop growing is the day that we die.