Media really excited me. As an undergrad, I majored in radio, television, and film and did internships with CNBC and CNN. My first job was at Sky News in London.
I was hired at CNBC TV by a financial news anchor named Louis Rukeyser who had spent decades as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He told me I could learn the craft on the job. That was my first paid gig. Before that I was an unpaid intern at CNN in Atlanta.
Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?
Living in L.A. keeps me in my car a lot, and I'm constantly flipping back and forth between the following Sirius/XM Radio stations: NFL Radio, MLB Radio, POTUS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News.
Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.
When CNN launched in the early 1980s, everybody said: A 24-hour news network won't work. They launched, they did ok, CNN went almost bankrupt because of the risks they had taken, they got bailed out, and 25 years later CNN is a huge global brand. I think the same is going to happen in digital. If you look at the younger generation, there is a huge consumption of digital media and almost no consumption of print or traditional television. Eventually money will follow that. It is just a question of which companies win, how long it takes to get there and what kind of model you need to apply.
CNN is not a television network that has a website. CNN is a full-fledged media company.
With the exception of the New York Times, Fox news, and Lou Dobbs of CNN, and talk radio, the rest of the mainstream media has basically been silenced like a bunch of dumb monkeys.
When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting.
And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information.
As an independent skeptical of all news stations and wanting to understand diverse perspectives, I tend to navigate between CNN, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, CNBC, and yes, FOX.
Trump and his supporters often lambast news sources such as CNN as being the 'fake-news media' whose only goal is to take him down, and they're really doing themselves no favors when they say things that seem to support that.
The New York Times does an unbelievable amount of damage because every day television and radio stations along with the rest of media take their lead on the way the news should be presented along with what actually is the news.
CNN has a thing called You Choose the News. Y'know what CNN? I'm turning you on because I don't know the news. I was hoping you could help me.
So at 16 I got a job at the local radio station. And I was working after school and weekends. I did the news; I did everything. I did - played records.
I went to Drexel University, majored in computer science. Drexel has a great program - they call it co-op - but its, like, mandatory to graduate to do internships. I loved it because it helped me figure out very quickly that I didn't really want to be a programmer.
It doesn't matter if it's social media or radio media or television media - it's all media, and it's all marketing. It's about understanding where your fans are. And when you have infiltrated them, and they're satisfied, and there's demand, how do you grow it from there?