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Nikki Medoro Transitions From Life at KGO to YouTube

After 11 years at KGO, Medoro quickly reinvented herself. And I emphasize ‘quickly.’

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As a rule, news and talk show host Nikki Medoro doesn’t play with explosives. That doesn’t mean she can’t recognize when something has been blown to smithereens. 

“They did blow up KGO,” Medoro said. 

On October 6th, KGO didn’t just change their format to Easy Listening, or Rock & Roll, they stripped the station of all previous DNA, and are now a sports betting station, whatever that is. For those scoring at home, it’s now 810 The Spread.

“If you’d have asked me what might have been a logical transition for KGO I might have said syndication,” Medoro said. “They decided to go an entirely different route. But sports betting? Who was asking for this?”

Seems reminiscent of the New Coke, Olestra potato chips, and Godfather III. Who asked for those?

Medoro began as a street reporter in San Francisco in the evenings and graduated to evening anchor with Peter Finch. Later she was an afternoon anchor alongside Brett Burkhart. Medoro also did news for Chip Franklin, then earned her own show, becoming the first woman morning drive-time host in KGO’s history.

Medoro said she understands it was a business decision and they were free to do it. Many stations have switched formats, but KGO scorched the landscape.

“When you ask what blowing up a station means, I think it’s when you take away all the local issues for people that live in the Bay Area. Issues we used to present.” Medoro said. “Listeners are no longer going to get that, at least not in the form we were offering.”

After 11 years at KGO,  Medoro quickly reinvented herself. And I emphasize ‘quickly.’ The Nikki Medoro Show debuted on YouTube on Oct 17th and just completed its second week. Figuratively, the KGO body wasn’t even cold yet.

She decided to act fast as people have short memory. Medoro broadcasts from her home each day. 

“I figured I’d better strike while the iron was hot,” Medoro explained. “I understand how the news cycle works, and I’ve been involved with it for 20 years. If you provide too much time, it’s not that they’ll forget you, but it’s important to feed listeners’ interest in you. Also, you don’t want to lose the groove of doing a show. Even when I used to go on vacation from my show, I’d come back rusty.”

Medoro said her heart is warmed by how patient listeners have been with her fledgling YouTube show. At the same time, she’s not afraid to say it’s hard work. 

“I’m the host, technical person, sound person. I bring on guests. It’s a whole new world for me,” Medoro explained.  “This endeavor couldn’t be bigger for me at this point. I guess I could have taken a month off. But my former co-worker Mark Thompson, (who also took shrapnel from the detonation)  didn’t take any time off. He has more resources than I have and more background in doing this.”

Medoro has been often asked why she decided to go the YouTube route. 

“I imagine there are a few reasons,” she said. “I used to co-anchor news in the morning and did my own show for years. This way I can still do what I love to do.  This is really a new experience from every angle.”

Radio is clearly in the woman’s blood. Even if some huge station came calling, Medoro said she’d have to give it some thought. 

“If a job offer came in and they told me I’d be doing overnights, cover a beat, be a court reporter, I’d have to say no,” she said. “I’ve done all that. I like leading a talk show, bringing on guests, interacting with guests and listeners. I’m creating my own content right now. I control where it goes. Some friends have asked if I’d considered going into television. My answer is ‘no,’ I’ve been a radio girl all my life.”

Gambles, pardon the obvious pun, were made when management dumped the long-serving format of KGO. Medoro admits she probably could have read the writing on the wall. Things were set in motion a long time ago.

“I was at KGO for 11 years. Since day one, I started sensing they were making some changes. They began letting longtime hosts go. I’ve been dealing with that kind of stuff all along. I imagine I always sensed something was coming, but it wasn’t verbalized. I’ve never been laid off in my career. I know in radio, that isn’t very common.”

That’s the understatement of 2022.

Medoro said her YouTube show is still in its infancy, clutching a pacifier. There is a huge learning curve in this area. Just because she’d like to do something on the show doesn’t mean it can happen in an instant. 

“Will I do callers again? If I can figure out how to make it work I will,” Medoro said. “Something like that sounds a lot easier than it is, the technical bar can be pretty high. I’m alone. I don’t have a screener so I’m not going to open lines up to everyone. There’s an art to bringing on callers. If I’m headed in one direction on the show, I can’t afford to have a caller derail that. At the same time, I welcome counter-opinions.”

On her radio shows, Medoro said there were times when a caller would bring something up she liked and could run with. 

“I can tell you I’m working a lot harder for my current two-hour show than I had to for my old four-hour show on KGO. If I can find some more funding I’ll be able to do more.”

Medoro has lived in the Bay Area all her life. She said when she was a student at San Jose State University, she always said her dream was to have her own show on KGO Radio. Dreams come true and that one lasted for several years. She fulfilled her dream of talking with people in the Bay Area, the hometown she loves. Not a lot of people can say that.

“I love that I’ve been here all my life. When I talk about Bay issues, people know I’ve been here. I know the street they are talking about, the neighborhood and its history. It’s a shared history.”

Will we see more stations suffering a similar KGO fate? 

“I think it matters where you are geographically,” Medroro said. “If you’re in a large market, you’re competing with a lot of information. I guess the KGO experience could be a barometer for the rest of radio. If you haven’t already found a way to be at people’s fingertips, you’re already losing as information is so readily available. You might have the headlines, news and traffic from other sources. But radio is still the place you can talk about it. I suppose we should have had an FM presence, that might have made a difference.”

One of the interesting things about her show, Medoro said, is it appears she’s reaching a wider audience. 

“Watchers have reached out to me to say their own kids are listening. I got into radio because it is immediate. Just crack open the microphone and go. Bring something to the table right away. Are we seeing the demise of AM radio? Possibly. The medium? I don’t think so.”

She said she talked with Thompson a bit about pairing up on a YouTube show.

“It made sense because we share a newscaster, Kim McCallister. I’ve had Chip Franklin on a few times. I used to work with Chip, filled in for him. He taught me how to become a radio host. I’d react to what he was talking about. I had to set this up quickly as I really had no other choice.” Medoro said former colleague Mark Thompson launched a YouTube show a week before she did. She was able to see how it all worked. 

Medoro said she and Mark Thompson both have the same sponsor, Bay area attorney Steve Moskowitz. 

“He’s the guy to call if you ever have any tax questions,” she smiles. “Mark has a producer and an engineer. We have some consistent money coming in. I share mine with Kim McCallister. People can donate during the show. Is the cushion the same as my salary was at KGO? Not by a long shot. 

“I already knew about editing and had Adobe Audition,” she said. “I had to learn how to put up photos. I purchased a better camera, got better lighting.

I’m on daily life from noon to 2 pm. That satisfied uber-fans. You can obviously watch it anytime you want. A lot of fans from my KGO days will message me throughout the day and say they waited until the next morning to listen to a show, they were saving the experience. I also think it’s interesting that listeners are starting to get to know each other through the chat component of YouTube. That’s something new to the equation. They get a live text chat going. It’s not the same as taking calls, and I miss that.”

Her callers on KGO were regulars. Medoro knew personal things about them, laughed with them. She’d love to get back to callers and will be trying to put that together.

She also knew on her YouTube show that Kim McCallister was a necessity. 

“Kim and I grew very close on KGO. We were in the same booth for hours. Mark was on right after me, but we didn’t spend a lot of time together. I trust Kim. She’s been doing news forever. I’ll chime in during her newscast if I’m shocked about something. I used to do her job and it’s fun. The two hours seem to fly by between us. In between, it’s a lot of prep.”

Would she ever leave the Bay area? 

“My husband has a great job here and loves it. My kids are here. My daughter is going to start high school, both of my parents are here. I don’t know if I could leave everybody. I have a talk show, I have an opinion. I’ll talk about the facts as I know them. I’m not going to spew lies.”

Medoro said these days we have national personalities like Anderson Cooper or Sean Hannity and we can’t always identify when they’re a journalist and when they’re being a commentator.”

Hannity is a journalist? It must be Halloween. 

“Anderson Cooper will cover Hurricane Ian, then sit behind a desk and be a commentator. It can blur the line.”

Life happens. Life goes on. Her YouTube show has taken Medoro into a new career direction, but it’s also a much-needed distraction. 

“I know I can grow this business through baby steps,” she said. “It will become more seamless, more professional. I’d like to grow it. That takes consistency. I’ve got to make sure I put up fresh content every day. I imagine on holidays I can put up some kind of rerun.“ 

On the lighter side of the past few weeks, Medoro said a scary day like Halloween is a welcome break. 

“Haunted houses and horror movies make me happy,” she said. “I like everything scary, the emotion of it all. I’m not an Eli Roth film type of person. I like scary music. I like to be scared. It depends what I’m in the mood for. A new movie titled Smile made me jump, or what I like to say gave me a ‘jump scare’. I do like thrillers.”

I asked Medoro if she’d start prepping for the next week after we hung up.

“I have to put on my ‘mom’ hat after we hang up,” she said. “I’ve got to pick up the kids. There are so many hours in the day. Then I have to get some costumes ready. My daughter is going to be one of the pinball machine aliens from Toy Story. My son is going to be a stick of butter. I asked how he came up with that costume idea. “You tell me,” she joked.

After a month of scary things; losing your job, creating another in a new medium, Halloween haunted houses, it would take a lot to frighten Medoro. 

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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