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Andrea Fujii Was Supposed to Be A Lawyer Before Television Came Calling

“I never asked my parents if they were disappointed in my not being a lawyer. They’d always been extremely supportive.”

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On a picturesque morning several years ago, the state of Hawaii crapped its collective pants. Andrea Fujii remembers the day well.

Back in 2018, Hawaiians greeted their day on January 13th with a hot cup of coffee and an emergency alert notifying them missiles were targeted at the islands and were on their way. If some skeptics were still holding on to their coffee mugs, they almost assuredly dropped them to the floor when they were informed the notification was not a drill.

“I remember the morning,” Fujii said. “I was in Los Angeles and my parents were in Hawaii. My dad swam in the ocean almost every morning and he was at the beach. My mom was at home and she texted me and informed me the missiles were coming toward Hawaii. She was in a closet. I hadn’t heard anything from any verifiable news source and began freaking out.”

Fujii frantically checked with her news desk and they didn’t have anything new to report. She said everyone around her thought the world was going to end.

“My dad was in the water and didn’t know any better,” Fujii said. “Not a bad place to be.”

Eventually, the news desk at KCAL got a hold of a Hawaii representative in Congress. Someone from the representatives’ office told them it was nothing, there was no imminent threat to Hawaii. No immediate vaporization. That didn’t mean the good people of Hawaii would get over the trauma anytime soon.

“My mom eventually came out of the closet where she’d gone for some kind of safety measure,” Fujii explained. “I was shaken.”

Fujii is currently a correspondent with ABC News in New York. She anchored at the NBC affiliate in Yakima, Washington, before anchoring and reporting at the Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City and CBS’ WJZ in Baltimore. She began working with CBS2/KCAL9 in October 2012.

Fujii was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father was born in Hawaii, and his grandparents came from Japan. Her mother is from Washington State.

“My dad was a dentist,” Fujii said. “My Uncle on my mom’s side was also a dentist. My Uncle set my parents up on a blind date.”

Before broadcasting Fujii had planned to be a lawyer. At the same time, she held a subliminal thought about being a news broadcaster. After taking and passing the California bar exam she realized she didn’t want to practice law. In a course readjustment, Fujii pursued her dream of reporting.

After undergraduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, Fujii went to Santa Clara University to earn her law degree. During her third year of law school, Fujii had just finished an internship. She wasn’t thrilled.

“I didn’t love it,” she said. “I knew other people that didn’t love working as a lawyer. I guess I got cold feet and decided law was not something I could do for the rest of my life. I always wanted to be a news reporter and anchor,” Fujii said. “Friends from high school are not surprised by the way it turned out. I’d always been interested in law but more interested in broadcasting.”

In hopes of discovering a different career path, Fujii spoke with one of her professors about her change of heart. The professor put her in contact with a television consumer reporter in Oakland, who was also an attorney.

“He became my mentor,” Fujii explained. “He was fantastic in every respect. He told me to finish law school and take the bar exam. He said I’d come that far and it made sense to take the exam.”

If her broadcasting career went belly-up, she’d still have the law to fall back on.
In law school, Fujii would argue cases, and it turned out she had a knack for the courtroom. She said as in broadcasting, communication is a huge part of what lawyers need to be successful in the courtroom.

“I never asked my parents if they were disappointed in my not being a lawyer,” Fujii said. “They’d always been extremely supportive. After I’d been working for a while I went to visit them in Hawaii and they were very proud. I can’t say I’m up to speed with the law. It’s like a foreign language where you have to keep up with it or lose it.”

Fujii met her husband Whit Johnson in Yakima, Washington, a couple of hours east of Seattle. Johnson is a journalist and co-anchor of the weekend editions of Good Morning America, and anchor’s the Saturday edition of ABC World News Tonight. When they met he was just getting started.

“I was working in my second job, he was fresh out of college on his first,” Fuji said. “We started in the ‘friend zone’ and worked from there. I knew he was going to be a big talent when we first met.”

Fujii even played a role in Johnson’s hire. Since she was an anchor, the news director sought Fujii’s opinion when hiring new reporters to get an idea as to how they’d work together.

“The news director pulled me aside and we watched demo tapes, then he would ask my opinion. I knew right away Whit Johnson was the right choice.”

When she watched her future husband’s tape, Fujii liked his confidence. “You don’t want the camera to go through you,” she said. “You see some young journalists that aren’t as confident. Whit had that.”

While covering virtually anything, Fujii enjoys general assignments to a specific beat.

“I like variety,” she said. “I enjoy doing a crime story one day, and a happy story the next day.”

When Whit Johnson was offered a job in New York, Fujii saw an opportunity. Perhaps she didn’t need to jump back into a full-time job and could escape some of the daily grinds. Maybe she could take this opening to help raise her daughters.

“It has been rewarding to spend time with kids,” Fujii said. “The move to New York was difficult and we had a great life in Los Angeles. Whit’s family is in California and both of us have very good friends there. It was hard to leave.”

It was never a plan to live in Manhattan.

“We were too used to suburban life,” she said.

The rigorous commute to the city would have been an hour each way, so that also influenced her decisions. At ABC, Fujii works for the overnight shows typically three nights a week.

“They’ll tell me my assignment around 9:00 pm, and I’ll have a script together in an hour and a half,” Fujii said.

When she worked in Hawaii, Fujii observed that the viewers got to know the anchors and reporters. They welcomed them into their lives.

“In New York, I don’t know if there are as many local television news viewers as there are in Hawaii,” Fujii said. “I don’t think TV news is dead, but people are going online for their news.”

As any professional journalist would tell you, don’t get political in your work.

“We’re not supposed to show any bias in our reporting,” Fujii said. “I do know there are some who feel it’s part of their job to give their opinion. My job as a journalist is to pick the correct words. To say things that don’t give a bias. We need to be careful not to say anything remotely questionable.”

Fujii said reporters and anchors can get in trouble even if they didn’t mean anything offensive, and a phrase came across in a way that made it suspect. 

Working in the industry provides moments of fun and unique experiences. Fujii and her news-guy husband were featured in a segment On Good Morning America. They shot a segment with Rick Macci who was the tennis coach for Venus and Serena Williams.

“Whit and I are still embarrassed by that,” she jokes. “We started playing tennis a few years ago during the pandemic. We’re still trying to get our footing.

We’re not terrible but it can be a humbling game.”

The GMA segment was shot during the U.S. Open, and Fujii said it was surreal to be on the same courts where the big names were about to play.

“The people in the stands must have been confused as to why we were out there,” she said.

The couple will have been married for 15 years in August. Fujii thinks having children of her own has made her look at the world and stories with a different eye.

“All parents are trying to cope, protect their children,” she said. “I’m leery of any story we do that has to do with kids. At the same time, I don’t want to be overprotective of my own. I try to take things with a grain of salt.”

She likes to think she keeps her daughters grounded, and focused on being humble.

“I want them to be accepting of everybody. I also want us to keep our morals in the way we should. We go to church almost every week and realize we’re blessed in many ways.”

When she worked in Los Angeles, Fujii covered a story where a child was assaulted when she went to the restroom in a restaurant. Her parents were just a few yards away.

“After I reported that story, I decided my young kids weren’t going to use the restroom without me in public places.”

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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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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.

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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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