Connect with us
Barrett News Media Summit 2024

BNM Writers

iHeartMedia’s Chris Berry Remains Bullish on Radio’s Future

As executive vice president of News, Talk and Sports for iHeartMedia, Chris Berry believes broadcasting’s future is bright as long as it continues to evolve.

Avatar photo

Published

on

Sports teams often take on terrifying names like the Badgers, Wolverines, Gladiators, and Lions to presumably intimidate opponents. Chris Berry had the dubious distinction of attending a school that believed a slow-moving, gentle, and seemingly melancholy mammal was the appropriate creature to name their team after.

“How would you like your team called the Manatees?” Berry asked. That menacing team name came from Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida.

When he lived in Bradenton, everything was rather sedate. “Florida Interstate 75 stopped at Tampa. We were beyond that. You had to want to go down there.”

As in many Florida cities, Bradenton has changed. When he was a kid, Berry said you’d often drive by little shacks selling boiled P-Nuts.

“I think they ran out of space on the sign to spell out peanuts,” Berry jokes. “I was in Sarasota last week before the election. Now it looks like Fort Lauderdale.”

Berry attended the University of Mississippi, the alma mater of writer William Faulkner. “In high school, I took the test that was to send you in the right direction of what career you should pursue. My results informed me I was supposed to be a cop or a reporter. When you look at it, psychologically they’re not that different. I think I wasn’t in any hurry to lose my life, so I decided to become a reporter. Instead of a gun, I picked up a typewriter.”

As executive vice president of News, Talk and Sports for iHeartMedia, Berry believes the future of broadcasting is bright as long as it continues to evolve. As technology progresses, Berry believes broadcasting is much like a man-eater.

“Media is like a shark,” Berry said. “You have to keep adapting and moving or you’ll die. Radio has been adapting and I think television is starting to as well.”

Sharks. Now that’s a tough team name.

In his current role, Berry is the brand manager for the spoken word formats that are programmed by iHeartMedia and oversees its national and local news operations. “We have more people in more places than any other radio group,” he said.

iHeart’s “24/7 News” is divided into eight regions, and the anchors, reporters and writers in each of those regions are responsible for developing and delivering “news of day” as well as breaking news for over 860 radio stations in 160 markets.

Berry’s experience in both network and local radio management makes him uniquely qualified for the positions.

Prior to joining iHeartMedia, Berry was vice president of radio for ABC News in New York, He also held management roles with CBS Radio in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and served as General Manager of WMAL in Washington D.C. and ESPN LA 710.

Initially, he thought he wanted to be a newspaper reporter, as he always enjoyed writing. Fresh out of Ole Miss, he got a television job as a weekend news producer and writer at WHBQ in Memphis.

Not long after his arrival, the news director left. One person’s departure is another person’s opportunity.

“The day the news director started, the producer of the six-o’clock news quit,” Berry explained. “I went into his office and introduced myself. I told him I was the weekend producer and could do the daily six-o’clock news. I was 22 years-old and he let me do it. That first year we won an AP award for best newscast.”

Not long after Berry heard CBS radio in Los Angeles was looking for a news writer at KNX Newsradio. He figured if he could land a job like that, he might move into television in that market. He took the writing test and got the job.

At KNX, he learned a lot about breaking news and said they had a fabulous staff. A huge audience with a million listeners a week.

Berry was writing news for morning drive then another stroke of luck. The woman in that executive producer job had appendicitis and Berry took over her job. “Two years later I moved to Washington as executive producer for CBS Radio. That is where I learned cover national news and politics.”

From there, it was to Chicago, first as assistant news director, and at the age of 29 he was promoted to news director of WBBM, the youngest ever at a CBS-owned station.

Berry said he was proud of the work in Chicago.

“We were all news at WBBM. I used to say, ‘we can interrupt the news to bring you the latest news.’ Today you have Twitter, all of social media, TMZ providing you with instant news. We did it first on all-news radio.”

In 1996 he joined The Walt Disney Company and its ABC News Radio division in New York City. After serving as general manager of operations for the network, he was promoted to vice president and general manager of News for the ABC Radio Network in 2000.

 When a friend who had jumped from CBS to ABC suggested Berry go with him to New York and run ABC’s radio network, he embraced what he called an incredible opportunity.

“At the time, ABC Radio was the hallmark in the business,” Berry said. “I was responsible for Paul Harvey News and Comment, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented journalists in the business. We won many Edward R. Murrow awards for our coverage.”

Berry is also proud of the coverage he managed on 9/11, something that will always stay with him.

“We offered our broadcasts that day to any station in the United States,” Berry explained. “They could run our coverage unfettered. I know thousands of stations carried our content that day. The team I was leading was honored with a Peabody Award for that work. It was a pivotal moment in our country’s history, and it unfolded on the radio.”

Another point of pride for Berry took place after the 2000 election. Berry oversaw coverage in the Supreme Court decision in the election between Bush and Gore.

“For the first time in history, we broadcast inside the Supreme Court during proceedings,” he said. “We provided pool coverage for the decision. That was an important journalistic milestone, and we were able to provide that content. It had never been done in broadcasting before. Then a year later we had 9/11.”

From ABC News he moved into station management at the Walt Disney Company’s radio division, first at WMAL in Washington, then at KSPN in Los Angeles. For the past 13 years he has been overseeing iHeart’s news operation from Phoenix.

“One of the great things about iHeart is that we operate like a startup. We will run with something and see if it works. That innovation comes from the top.” The adaptation philosophy Berry espouses includes the formation of the Black Information Network.

“Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeart Media, is truly a visionary,” Berry said. “About nine months before the George Floyd tragedy, we had a meeting, and Bob pointed out the fact that there was an underserved radio market for African American news. Floyd’s death absolutely changed a lot of things, and iHeartMedia Division President Tony Coles led the charge. Tony said if we didn’t move on the Black Information Network then, when would be the right time?”

Within about two months they had everybody hired for BIN, and today the format is heard in more than 20 markets.

“It’s news as seen through the lens of an African-American consumer,” Berry explained. “And they are stories that really aren’t heard anywhere else. I am very proud of the fact that we have the sort of latitude to start something like BIN.”

The Black Information Network is a harbinger of change in the industry, as is the changing complexion of how news is gathered.

“TMZ is an interesting operation,” Berry said. “For one thing, they pay many of their sources for news. When it comes to breaking news such as the Kobe Bryant tragedy, they paid their sources. They were also well ahead with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. As a result, it is the rare instance when they are wrong.”

There are concerns about the future of journalism. The Internet has no editor. Anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection can tell a story, which may or may not be true.

“I hope as we go forward the traditional news media is able to follow the basic tenets of journalism,” Berry said. “Unfortunately, we have had situations where established and respected news organizations like the Washington Post and ABC News have gotten stories very wrong.”

Berry is also a strong believer in the importance of local news. “Today, local newspapers are often the only news gathering outlets that regularly go to city council meetings,” Berry said. “If nobody is keeping an eye on our elected officials, the opportunity for corruption becomes very attractive News media is the watchdog. If the dog isn’t barking, we will all be in trouble.”

Berry said he believes the biggest competition for radio is time. With new websites popping up every day as well as new podcasts, the piece of the pie gets smaller every day and attempts to engage consumers has become fierce.

“When you’re driving home at night in your car, you have a lot of choices as to what you want to do with your time,” Berry said. “You can talk on your cell, listen to a podcast or the radio, or just do nothing. That’s the biggest challenge. The news that is delivered has to be intriguing.”

The competition has intensified as some resources are drying up.

“I think the Detroit Free Press only publishes a hard copy on Sunday,” Berry said. “In that situation, it is society that loses. I think the weekly community papers will survive because that’s content you can’t get anywhere else. The local police blotter and high school scores. Axios and Patch have done some work with that and identified that need, and we in radio need to continue to embrace that localism.”

During his career, Berry has had many reasons to be proud of radio journalism, and he remains extremely bullish on its future.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Dave Garver

    November 16, 2022 at 2:19 pm

    “Berry is also a strong believer in the importance of local news.”

    This is rich coming from the guy that oversaw the destruction of actual, LOCAL newsrooms for the implementation of the shit-show that is their “24/7 News.”

    Fortunately, this anchor read the writing on the wall and got the hell out. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

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.

Avatar photo

Published

on

A photo of clocks

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.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading

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.

Published

on

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.”

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading

BNM Writers

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?

Published

on

A photo featuring I voted stickers

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.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Advertisement
Advertisement

Upcoming Events

BNM Writers

Copyright © 2024 Barrett Media.