WBZ Florida

[Scott Fybush]

At 10:59 AM 1/15/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>The article notes, "But when contacted by phone in Florida immediately 
>after his
>shift, he said, 'Oh, my secret is out.'"  <ibid>

I KNOW I'm not the only one on the list to whom this hasn't been a secret 
at all for many years. The practice didn't start for daily news until 
sometime after I left in early 1997, but I'm pretty sure he was already 
contributing LaPierre on the Loose segments from down there while I was at 
BZ. (Or am I thinking of Dave Maynard, who sent many of his feature 
segments up from Florida on a regular basis?) But it was in full swing when 
I visited the station a few years ago, and I don't think anyone there - 
Gary least of all - would have denied it if asked. The bigger surprise, to 
me, is that it took the Globe so many years to even think to ask.

In any case, the practice doesn't really bother me that much. Rick Dees 
does many of his morning shows for KIIS in Los Angeles from his farm in 
Kentucky; Paul Harvey spends several months a year in Arizona and does his 
show from there; Don Imus is often at his ranch in New Mexico for his show 
- and now the whole world knows how infrequently Rush Limbaugh sets foot in 
his Manhattan studio. I'm pretty sure Dees and Harvey never mention where 
they are. Imus does. Limbaugh kept it as a barely-concealed secret for many 
years but now talks openly about doing the show from Florida.

I think the practice is highly defensible for these veteran broadcasters. 
Dees has been in LA now for, what, 25 years? If I'm his PD, I'd rather have 
him happy where he wants to be (in this case, with his horses) than sitting 
in LA stewing about how he'd rather be in Kentucky and thinking about 
retiring. And as long as Dees has been in LA, let's not forget that Gary 
has been covering Boston news at WBZ for FORTY years. If that doesn't set a 
single-station longevity record in Boston, it's got to come awfully close. 
(Carl de Suze started at BZ in 1942 and was forcibly retired around 1981.) 
If he doesn't know how to pronounce Leominster now, I don't think he ever 
will :-) Gary was talking about retiring to Florida when I started at WBZ, 
and that was (gulp) well over a decade ago already. As I understand it, 
getting to do the show from Florida (and, for that matter, getting out of 
doing the 5 AM half-hour) was part of the deal to keep him in the WBZ 
stable for a few more years. No offense to Jay McQuaide, who's a great guy 
and a solid anchor, but mornings on WBZ won't be the same when Gary 
retires, and I can't fault Peter Casey and his bosses for doing everything 
they can to hold on to their star player.

I draw a distinction between veteran broadcasters like those doing some of 
their broadcasts from out of town and the more insidious practice of doing 
news and talk from out of town with anchors and hosts who've barely set 
foot in the city they're trying to cover. Here in Rochester, the ONLY daily 
local talk slot on WHAM is held down most days by an Albany TV anchor named 
Joe Pagliarulo, who does it from the studios of WGY. He's visited Rochester 
a few times, he reads the daily paper on line every day, and someone once 
told him how to pronounce "Irondequoit" - and that apparently (at least in 
the eyes of WHAM) qualifies him to talk about local issues. The show sounds 
just as bad as you'd imagine.

Am I being defensive about the guy who taught me most of what I know about 
broadcast news writing? You bet I am. Gary is a professional's 
professional, and if his physical location were ever relevant to the 
content of the newscast, I have no doubt that he would have disclosed it 
(in fact, I recall several times when I was working there when there was 
news in his part of Florida and we called and interrupted his vacation to 
get him on the air about it :-). But the fact that it stayed "secret" for 
so many years is pretty good evidence that the quality of his newscasts was 
just as good from Florida as from Soldiers Field Road...and so I don't 
think this amounts to much more than petty jealousy from a lot of other 
people who'd love to be able to do THEIR jobs from Florida right about now.

s