Meyerson

‘Podcasting has become this explosive medium’

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:47:14 +0000

… in which acclaimed broadcaster and podcast host John St. Augustine and I discuss the intersection of news, podcasting … and farmers’ market music.

Thanks, John, for the kind words about my modest efforts in all three arenas.

(Interview recorded March 29, 2026; published May 30, 2026.)

If you like this, check out more of my podcast guidance on Rivet’s website and elsewhere on this blog.

And hear more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora or Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

Who could resist an invitation to join a podcast called ‘Misfits Among Us’?

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:00:00 +0000

I certainly couldn’t. So when Joey Marcus said he wanted to talk, I said yes.

And then here’s what happened.

Comics letters page flashback: Justice League [of America] 96

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 21:38:00 +0000

News of the death of esteemed comics letterhack Guy H. Lillian sent me off to the web in search of letters pages to which we’d both contributed.

The Grand Comics Database didn’t turn up one, but it did point me to a series of Justice League of America issues around 1971, when we both were active …

… and where, in issue No. 96, I made a suggestion that CollectedEditions.com moderator Osgood Peabody generously observed in 2012 “turned out to be years ahead of his time in calling for the JLA to drop ‘of America.’”

As I noted then: “Why, their headquarters isn't even in America anymore—but 22,300 miles out in space!” …

… a comment that prompted editor Julius Schwartz (or maybe one of his ghost writers at the time) to observe, “Almost sounds like a case of ‘America! Love it—or leave it!’”

Was my letter overwritten? You bet—but please note that I was 16 at the time.

As I’ve observed in this space before, those comics letters pages were thick with smart, talented young people—many of whom grew up to be acclaimed comics and TV and movie and publishing pros.

And it’s still a thrill, all these years later, to see my name alongside theirs.

Rest in peace, Mr. Lillian.

Charlie Meyerson …

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:56:00 +0000

… has delivered award-winning Chicago-area news for a long time—including more than 10 years at the city’s legendary progressive rock station, WXRT-FM 93.1; almost nine years at pioneering “smooth jazz” station WNUA-FM 95.5; almost 13 years at Tribune Co., as senior producer and Daywatch columnist at chicagotribune.com and then as news director at Chicago’s premier news/talk station, WGN-AM 720.

After a year as Chicago bureau chief for the short-lived (but fun) FM News Chicago and New York—covering government, politics, culture and technology—Meyerson became founding head of news at the digital audio startup Rivet, where he led the team to two national Edward R. Murrow Awards; adjunct professor of journalism at Roosevelt University; an occasional contributor to WXRT, WBEZ-FM 91.5 and Crain’s Chicago Business; and principal at Meyerson Strategy, a content strategy, podcasting and media consulting practice.

With his Rivet colleagues, he has been awarded a U.S. patent for delivering a “contextually relevant media content stream based on listener preference.

His latest project, Chicago Public Square, launched in January 2017, is a return to the newscasting biz—this time through an email-delivered news roundup billed as “Chicago’s new front page.”

You can hear some of his most memorable audio work—old and new—here, here and here.

Meyerson, winner of dozens of journalism awards—including a national Edward R. Murrow Award for audio investigative reporting and a national UPI award for investigative reporting—is not picking his nose in the photo above.

Chronology

Jan. 27, 2025: ‘I’ve really only had one idea through my whole career.’

“It was a privilege to take … questions about … my journalism career and the state of the news biz.”

Aug. 24, 2023: ‘From dorm broadcasting to the digital frontier: A journalist’s journey.’

“I can trace the origin of my broadcasting career back to Aug. 24, 1973.”

April 27, 2023: ‘The products that Charlie Meyerson … can’t do without.’ (Simon Owens)

“Charlie walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business.”

March 2, 2022: ‘Best free daily roundup in your inbox.’ (Chicago Reader)

“Square is the culmination of Meyerson’s … career as a journalist.”

Oct. 29, 2020: ‘This newspaper veteran launched his own Chicago-focused newsletter, and it’s thriving.’ (Tech and media journalist Simon Owens)

“Meyerson had the kind of background that was perfect for launching a Chicago-focused newsletter.”

Sept. 20, 2020: ‘There’s not a project he doesn’t create that a year later you don’t find an award with’ (Weigel Broadcasting executive producer Fred Weintraub)

“Any project that Charlie works on or creates, really, is never a project about himself. It’s about the teams that he creates.”

June 26, 2020: Sustaining journalism in a pandemic: ‘We need each other’ (Illinois Press Association)

“What’s yet to be seen is what that right size is for the media landscape at large. Is it going to be the big companies shrinking, or the small companies growing?”

June 9, 2020: ‘Chicago Public Square: Keeping Chicago informed and winning awards along the way.’ (Rad Letters)

“Readers’ attention is not to be taken for granted. Their priority is fundamentally opposed to publishers’ and broadcasters’ priority: We want them to spend all their time with us, and they want to get on with their lives. In email—as in radio news—every word counts.”

May 28, 2020: Chicago Public Square offers daily news briefings (WGN Radio)

“Charlie joined Bob Sirott to talk about … the competitiveness of digital news… and the ‘embarrassment of riches’ when it comes to news.”

March 18, 2020: ‘Charlie’s daily newsletter … a must-read every single day.’ (WGN Radio)

“Meyerson joins Justin to talk about Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park leaders urging residents to ‘shelter in place’ to slow the spread of COVID-19.”

Jan. 30, 2020: ‘The future of local news media’ (Newcity)

“A diversity of reliable, responsible and well-funded sources is a good thing—and a big improvement over the days when a handful of organizations, mostly run by white guys, decided what was newsworthy.”

Nov. 19, 2019: ‘How News Outlets Can Make Email Newsletters More Effective.’ (Local News Initiative)

“Certain words and turns of phrase and presentations and headline styles can work to connect people with great journalism.”

Nov. 11, 2019: ‘Meyerson wins best blog in Chicago Reader poll.’ (Illinois College of Media)

“More than 30,000 people voted in more than 300 categories of the poll.”

May 13, 2019: ‘Meyerson … picked up best radio newscast honors for The Chicago Public Square Newscast.’ (Robert Feder)

“The other finalist in the category was WBBM Newsradio. Meyerson also had a hand in the winner for best podcast, Rivet Radio, where the veteran Chicago newsman works part-time as vice president/editorial and development.”

Sept. 18, 2018: ‘Meyerson … moderated a thoughtful and enlightening panel …’ (Robert Feder)

“… on how newspaper editorial boards operate.”

April 4, 2018: ‘Charlie Meyerson, the veteran Chicago journalist and digital news pioneer who keeps finding new ways to do great work …’ (Robert Feder)

“… just launched a Chicago Public Square Newscast series.”

April 1, 2018: ‘Charlie is a pioneer in the e-newsletter headline business.’ (Illinois Entertainer columnist Rick Kaempfer)

“Meyerson has been a part of the Chicago media landscape now for four decades.”

Sept. 13, 2017: ‘Charlie Meyerson, our terrific moderator’ (Wednesday Journal)

“Those of you lucky enough to be in the audience … saw the easy rapport between Axelrod and Charlie ….”

July 28, 2017: This veteran Chicago journalist is using an email ‘newscast’ to keep people informed (Poynter)

“In his opinion… what works in newsletters is what’s always worked best in journalism: Be clear and concise, don’t waste people’s time, offer them something of value.”

June 29, 2016: A Murrow award for Rivet Radio (Chicago Reader)

“A sweet honor for an innovative operation that was a gleam in Charlie Meyerson’s eye just two and a half years ago.”

June 21, 2016: Rivet Radio Makes the Best of a Bad Situation (FishbowlNY)

[The national Edward R. Murrow Award-winning report] “is hosted by Charlie Meyerson.”

March 21, 2016: ‘Free from the tyranny of the clock’ (WGN-AM podcast)

“Meyerson … joins Justin to discuss the evolution of the media landscape, the future of radio and podcasting, digital media, content creation, the ease of editing, what it takes to get people to listen and finding ways to monetize your product.”

March 3, 2016: Rivet Radio’s Charlie Meyerson gives our readers podcast pointers (Chicago Journalists Association)

“Award-winning Chicago radio (WXRT, WGN, WBEZ) and Internet (chicagotribune.com, Rivet) newsman Charlie Meyerson’s taking his expertise in audience engagement and radio production on the road over the next few weeks.”

Sept. 19, 2015: ‘Listen to it like you hate me’: Audio editing advice from a radio professional (Excellence in Journalism 2015 convention coverage)

“Meyerson … taught me how to be a sharp self-editor, my best-worst critic, and a tactful audio journalist who throws it back to the basics with Strunk and White.”

Dec. 26, 2013:

Chicago startup Rivet News Radio echoes Zite and Pandora for audio news (Poynter)

“Meyerson explained to me the vision for the service: ‘Our mission is to provide one riveting experience after another.’”

Dec. 3, 2013:

A step fast-forward for radio news? (Reader)

“Meyerson … pretty much laid out the idea of Rivet News Radio in a visionary application to the Knight News Challenge.”

Jan. 7, 2013: ‘Kudos to veteran Chicago newsman Charlie Meyerson …’ (Robert Feder)

“It’s an ideal match for WBEZ and Meyerson, who pioneered the format as senior producer and Daywatch columnist for chicagotribune.com.”

July 18, 2012: Inside the Merlin staff meeting (Radio Ink)

“We are better positioned, with stronger, sharper skills than any of us had a year ago to go on and create something new again, somewhere else.”

June 24, 2012: Charlie Meyerson: Optimistic News Guy (Radiogirl podcast)

“Charlie … talks about his career at WXRT, WNUA, the Tribune Company, and WGN Radio. He also talks about his audio reports, his new teaching gig at Roosevelt University, and shares his optimism about the media.”

June 28, 2011: Merlin Media Quickly Hires Meyerson (Media Confidential)

“Meyerson has quickly landed a new gig.”

June 19, 2011: Charlie Meyerson Says Goodbye To WGN and Tribune (Chicagoland Radio and Media)

“We moved the news team from its home of a quarter-century on the 1st floor of Tribune Tower to the 4th floor, integrating it more tightly with the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV news teams. We launched aggressive email and text alert services for our listeners. We overhauled and improved WGNradio.com several times. We aired some of Chicago’s smartest radio news reporting and analysis—on technology, the weather, the environment, politics, civic affairs and more. And the WGN Radio News team’s hard work has been recognized with several significant awards this year: The AP/Illinois prizes for Outstanding News Operation and Best Newscast; the Chicago Headline Club Lisagor Award for Best Newscast; and a contributing role in the Illinois Broadcasters Association Silver Dome awards for Station of the Year and Best Station Website.”

July 29, 2009: WGN-AM names Chicago Tribune Daywatch columnist Charlie Meyerson news director (Chicago Tribune)

“His return to broadcasting, announced Wednesday and effective Aug. 6, comes about 11 years after Meyerson left the business and joined the Tribune to help develop its then-nascent digital presence and strategy.”

Aug. 12, 2008: One-stop news . . . from a newspaper? (Reader)

“Daywatch, the Tribune‘s daily news briefing, isn’t sticking to news originated by the Tribune. Charlie Meyerson, who compiles Daywatch each morning and e-mails it to about 60,000 subscribers, has taken to sweetening the package with stories that catch his eye no matter where he finds them–and that includes in the Sun-Times.”

May 14, 2008: The Power of Connections: Media Meets Mission, panel discussion at The Axelson Center for Nonprofit Management (WBEZ)

“You don’t need a broadcast license, you don’t need to own a huge antenna, you don’t need to have a TV studio, you don’t need to suck up to someone who owns giant printing presses, you know, all you need is a computer or a library card that will get you access to a computer, and … you have the potential to connect to an unlimited audience.”

November 2007: Advancing the Story

“None of this should be cause for despair among journalists who fear becoming slaves to public opinion, reporting only what an audience wants instead of what they think it needs. … Journalists who want to sail an audience in a specific direction need not be slaves to the winds of audience preferences. But, like a good sailor, they can navigate more successfully if they perceive which way those winds are blowing.”

Feb. 18, 2007: Chicago Radio Spotlight

“This is the best time in history to become a journalist.”

Aug. 25, 2006: News breaks at chicagotribune.com

[Review of Meyerson presentation at Society of Professional Journalists convention]: “The BEST convention session I’ve attended.”

July/August 2004: Illinois Alumni magazine

“The WPGU reunion, held in Champaign in April in honor of the student-run radio station’s 50 years of existence, lured Chicago radio news veteran Charlie Meyerson ‘77 COM, MS ‘78 COM, back to campus for the first time since 1987.”

March 14, 2002: Online Journalism Review

“Charlie Meyerson, a chicagotribune.com staff reporter who was a news radio veteran before he became an Internet reporter, informally trains colleagues in broadcast basics in the online newsroom. In addition to his text news updating and reporting duties online, including an early-morning, e-mailed update newsletter to [60,000+] subscribers [as of 2006], he gives an 8 a.m. radio broadcast on WGN-AM, a Tribune Company station.”

January/February 2000: American Journalism Review

“Meyerson and his afternoon counterpart, Joyce Garcia, update the information several times a day, taking feeds from the Tribune’s staff of a half-dozen online reporters and occasionally from the paper’s print reporters. Their goal is nothing less than their slogan—‘Instant Chicago.’”

October 1999: The Communicator

“Three years ago, Charlie Meyerson, the news director at WNUA-FM in Chicago, sent a memo to his new bosses at Chancellor Media Corporation, urging them to embrace the Internet.”

April 7, 1999: Editor & Publisher

“Meyerson, a 20-year radio news and newspaper veteran who recently joined the Tribune breaking news operation, says he won’t be surprised to see some of his old radio listeners become readers of his Web content.”

Oct. 11, 1998: The sound of news is fading out on many FM stations (Chicago Tribune)

“Meyerson … [is] taking his time before deciding what his next move will be, and it may not be back to the radio airwaves. He says that whatever happens, the Internet is bound to create more opportunities for journalists who know how to make news compelling: “The one thing that won’t change is the ability to tell a story, and tell it well.”

Sept. 2, 1998: Sam Weller’s 411 (Newcity)

“Longtime WNUA-FM 95.5 news director Charlie Meyerson has parted ways with his former employers. … The award-winning journalist would like to stay in radio, but sees the Internet as an option as well.”

Dec. 5, 1990: Chicago Tribune Inc. column

“He’s in a helicopter covering a story about an oil tanker on the Chicago River (hey, this is fantasy, folks) and gets attacked by a giant flying monster.”

awarded a U.S. patent

1985: My first computer

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:00:00 +0000

March 1985 was a milestone: The month I got my first computer.

Inspired after seeing an original 1984 128K Macintosh at my friend Mike Gold’s Evanston home, I took advantage of Apple’s innovative “Test Drive a Mac” program—under which computer shops such as Oak Park’s BIES* Systems (an advertiser with my then-employer, WXRT-FM) invited you to take a Mac home for a brief trial run.

That trial run was just long enough for me to fall in love with a device so underpowered that it wouldn’t do a thing until you inserted a 400K floppy disk containing the operating system and (if you were miserly with your storage) an application or three.

I considered some of the other non-graphic-user-interface computers on the market in 1984, but the words of BIES’ Dave Leonard stick with me today: “If you buy a Macintosh, you’re buying the future.”

And, indeed, I bought myself a fine future that month—for the equivalent of about $7,000 in 2025 money (plus another inflation-adjusted $2,000 for the dot-matrix Imagewriter printer.)

1985 being my final year of non-parenthood, I took a whole week of vacation just to play with the thing—learning the niceties of computer keyboards vs. traditional typewriters; the art of find-and-replace (Was it case-sensitive? Did spaces and punctuation count?) and copy-and-paste (Did it include a trailing space or not?); how to change fonts and styles; and how to type extended characters like ellipses, em dashes and curly quotes. Also: The astonishing MacPaint.

Within weeks, I was using that Mac to compose the first of a memorable series of columns for Gold’s First Comics. And within a year and a half, I persuaded my colleagues at WXRT News to move from IBM Selectric typewriters to a Mac. The ability to fix mistakes without having to backspace and X out long passages, and to rearrange paragraphs without relying on scissors and transparent adhesive tape, was transformative. Compare the mess of my typewritten 1986 scripts …

… to the much-cleaner work composed on a Mac beginning in January 1987.

Meanwhile, the children began arriving. Some of their earliest memories—or at least some of my earliest memories of them—have them on my lap, watching letters and pictures appear on that tiny, 9-inch black-and-white screen. The first words they could read included “Save” and “Quit.” (And, later, two of our three sons would take jobs out of college working for the Apple Store; another majored in computer science.)

So essential did computers become for me that, when I left ’XRT to join fledgling “smooth jazz” station WNUA-FM as its news director in 1989, I insisted the newsroom get a Mac.

And the rise of personal computers—and, in the years that followed, the World Wide Web—became a recurring focus for my work at WNUA, where I interviewed …

■ …photographer Rick Smolan about his book 24 Hours in Cyberspace …

■ … author William Gibson, who coined the phrase cyberspace …

■ … humorist Dave Barry, who shared “computer-buying advice for cyberstuds” …

■ … tech reporter Kara Swisher, then documenting The War for the Web …

■ … journalists Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner, who’d tracked The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace …

■ … and interim Apple CEO Gil Amelio, considered by some “the man who really saved Apple.”

Not to mention the station’s groundbreaking embrace of …

■ … digital audio editing, where I developed innovative production techniques I’d share beginning in 2013 with our team at the pioneering Rivet news and podcast production firm …

■ … and email, via which WNUA may have been the first Chicago station to offer listeners news alerts.

All of that set the stage for what may have been the biggest pivot of my career: When WNUA eliminated its news department in 1998, I fully embraced computers and the web, teaching myself HTML before joining the Chicago Tribune to launch its email newsletters and help program its pioneering breaking-news website.

Would any of that have happened had I not bought that first (of many, many to follow) Mac?

Maybe. But that fateful purchase in March 1985 indisputably positioned me well for what was to come. Which is why I can’t bring myself to part with it.

* Business, Industrial, Educational and Scientific.

(Photos: Promo materials from that first test-drive and purchase; and the box still containing that 128K Mac.)

How the worst day of my young adult life … turned out great

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:20:00 +0000

Every fall, the Farther Foundation—a nonprofit devoted to providing global travel opportunities for students from families and communities that have faced chronic disinvestment and sustained inequity—hosts a Story Slam at the historic FitzGerald’s Night Club in Berwyn. I was honored to be invited to take the stage in 2023 but—as you’re about to learn—couldn’t make it.

The foundation nevertheless invited me back the next year. And—given its belief in the life-changing power of travel—well, I couldn’t resist sharing the story of how one particular seemingly ill-fated trip changed my life absolutely for the better. Here’s how it sounded, Oct. 10, 2024.

If you enjoyed this story—or even if you didn’t—consider making a tax-deductible contribution at fartherfoundation.org/donate.

If you’re not in a place where you can listen, here’s a transcript.

[Cheering and applause.] I am unworthy of those woos, but thank you very much.

You know, one of the Farther Foundation’s overarching themes is learning from travel experiences. Interesting fact: I prepared what you’re about to hear in 2023, when it turns out I was not allowed any travel experiences—because I came down with COVID just before last year’s big Farther Foundation fundraiser.

For you, the good news is that I’ve had a year to practice this. (Not that I have.)

So …

Driving a car is a kind of travel, right?

I have to confess: I’m not a great driver. I’m a lot better than I used to be, but I’m probably still not great. Let me give you an example that’s become a running joke in my family:

I’m driving to the airport, more often than not to drop off or pick up a relative approaching the airport. The signs say Arrivals and Departures. So. I’m arriving at the airport to drop off a son who is departing for another city. Which way do I go?

Or: I’m arriving at the airport to pick up someone, and then we’ll depart from my home in Oak Park. Which way do I go?

More than once, I confess, I have made the wrong choice over the years. I’ve mostly managed to keep this cognitive dissonance at bay by focusing on the icons: Airplane pointed up? Someone leaving Chicago. Airplane pointed down? Someone coming home with me.

But I’m still easy to fool.

My son, Joel, not long ago—as I wrote this last year—screwed around with me as I took him to a flight out of town. “We’re arriving at the airport,” he said helpfully, “so go to arrivals.” And he said it with such straight-faced authority—I’ve come to trust my sons on driving counsel—that I started to head down until he laughed nervously, just before I made the wrong turn: “No, no, no. I’m departing. Go up! Go up!”

In the fullness of time, the reasons for my motorist shortcomings may become clearer. But—right now, at this point in my life—I have a few theories:

Maybe because my mom died when I was 14 and my dad, his hands full with me and my two younger sisters, kinda left me to figure out the whole driving thing on my own with some help from my friends.

Or maybe it’s because as a high school kid in band, I recognized that I had to sacrifice one of my academic elective slots to band rehearsals. So, after my freshman year, I exploited a loophole in the rules to push to the shorter six-week summer sessions the classes I didn’t really care about. You know, P.E, health and, uh, yeah, driver education.

So I didn’t really get that much driver education. And then I flunked my driver’s license test—twice. For, you know, little things like turning right when the examiner said to turn left. I passed on the third try only because the examiner took pity on me: “Ya failed twice? Ah, man. No one should fail twice. Ge’ me back alive and I’ll give ya yer license.”

So, besides all that, I was an early embracer of the environmental movement, and I didn’t buy into the whole car culture thing. I liked bicycling a lot better.

In the summer of 1976, I biked 120 miles back to our home in Orland Park from the University of Illinois, where I had worked at the student radio station, WPGU—where a friend fatefully there would later recommend me for my first job out of college, as news director at an AM/FM combination in Aurora.

And so it was that in July 1978, I was driving back home to Orland Park from Aurora in my Volkswagen Rabbit—with a manual transmission, because back then they were more fuel efficient, if a little more attention intensive. I’d worked a long day—got in around 5 in the morning and I was leaving that day around 4:30 in the afternoon—and I was headed home along 75th Street through Naperville, just east of Fox Valley Mall, if you know where that is. Probably was fiddling with the radio because, you know, I worked in radio—when the car ahead of the car ahead of me stopped. And the car ahead of me stopped. And I stopped—but not quite soon enough.

My little Rabbit crashed into the big Buick LeSabre that was ahead of me.

The LeSabre suffered, maybe, like, a cracked taillight. The Volkswagen Rabbit crumpled up like an accordion.

Fortunately, no one was hurt. The young woman in the car ahead of me got out and—as I recall—said, not as I might have said, “What the hell? Weren’t you paying attention?” but “Oh, your poor car!”

Well, the Rabbit was functional enough to ease to the side of the road as we awaited the arrival of a police officer, who sat us in the back of his cruiser, allowing us to exchange insurance information and phone numbers—and who chose, to my good fortune, not to issue a ticket.

But it was clear nevertheless that, as the motorist whose car had rear-ended another, it was my fault and my insurance company and I would pay.

So the Rabbit limped home to Orland Park on what seemed like the worst day of my young adult life. The repairs weren’t gonna be cheap and the deductible wasn’t trivial for a recent college graduate.

But I thought to myself: “Hmm. She seemed nice.”

The next week mercifully was a vacation week for me. Unfortunately, the state of the Rabbit meant I wouldn’t be able to make a date I’d planned with a former girlfriend whom I’d hoped to reconnect with, and so that was off. But I thought to myself again about the other driver in my accident on what had seemed like the worst day of my young adult life: “Hmm. She seemed nice.”

So I called her to make sure that the insurance company was taking care of the damage, and—of course, it was just a polite thing to do—to offer to take her to lunch.

And once I was back at work with a functioning car, she accepted and we had a lovely lunch. And that was that, I thought. My duty was discharged. I’d made amends for my lousy driving on what had seemed like the worst day of my young adult life, and that was that. Also, she was four years younger than I was, so that was that.

But then she called me at work just to say hi. Because the radio station I worked at was playing at the mall clothing store where she worked—Best & Co.—and she wanted to know if I could get a song played: The Moody Blues, as I recall.

Well, as the news guy, I didn’t control the music and the Moody Blues were not in the main rotation at the station, but she seemed nice. So I walked down the hall and I begged the DJ to break format and play a Moody Blues song, and he did.

And that was that.

Then she called another time or two, for another song or two, and one day she called to say she was considering transferring to the University of Illinois and would I be willing to talk to her about the U. of I., and I said, thinking that she seemed nicer all the time, that I’d be happy to—in fact, I happened to have two press tickets to the Second City performance at Aurora’s Paramount Art Center that weekend so maybe we could go to dinner and a show and talk about the U. of I. along the way.

And she said yes.

I don’t remember talking much about the U. of I. that night, but whatever I said or did, she later told me, prompted her to tell a friend late that evening that … um …she was in love.

And it turns out she decided to attend DePaul University instead of the U. of I. And, to make a long and somewhat winding story short and a little straighter, almost five years after what seemed like the worst day of my young adult life, we got married.

And three sons, three grandsons and a granddaughter later—now, just a bit past our 46th crashiversary, as we call it—we remain happily married.

And she still seems nice.

And with some embarrassment but much joy, I would have to concede that none of it would’ve happened …

… if I had been a better driver.

‘ I’ve really only had one idea through my whole career.’

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 02:50:00 +0000

The existence of my daily email newsletter, Chicago Public Square, became public Jan. 27, 2017, during a visit to my alma mater, WGN Radio.

So it seems appropriate, eight years later to the day, to share audio from another interview on WGN—earlier this month, at 10 p.m., Jan. 4, 2025—joining two people I’ve known for (wow) close to half a century: Steve King and Johnnie Putman. Johnnie and I met at my first job out of college, news director at WMRO-AM and WAUR-FM in Aurora—where I designed this T-shirt:

(2017 photo)

It was a privilege to take Johnnie and Steve’s questions about Square, my journalism career and the state of the news biz. You can hear how it went here.

If you’d like to hear their full show from that night, with other guests to follow, you’ll find that on WGN’s website here.

Or if you’re the readin’ type, here’s a rough—and roughly edited—transcript:

Johnnie Putman: We have a full show tonight.

Steve King: We do. And we are going to reconnect with a long-time friend that many of you know from this radio station and other radio stations around the Chicago area. Charlie Meyerson is gonna be joining us.

Putman: Yep.

King: Charlie is now the publisher of a wonderful news site, Chicago Public Square.
Ron Brown: Isn’t that great?

Putman: It is.

King: It is one of the go-to news sites that we have every day.

Putman: Wasn’t it just recognized as being the best blog?

King: I think, yeah. Didn’t they get the Reader’s award for the best blog?

Brown: If not once, several times. But at least once. And deservedly so. There’s nothing that really compares. There’s nothing as good. I’ve seen others. And they really pale in comparison.

Putman: Yep.

Brown: Yeah.

Putman: He puts a lot of effort into making that a first-class site where you can go and just get all the news you need to start your day.

Brown: Maybe you can get ’im to talk a little bit about that.

Putman: Ya think?

Brown: Maybe be a good idea.

King: We’ll see if we can twist his arm.

Putman: 1977 is when we started together. Dean Richards, Charlie Meyerson and yours truly at WMRO and WAUR in Aurora.

Brown: Oh, is that right? I didn’t know that.

Putman: It was a wonderful radio station, too, ’cause it was like the WGN of the Fox Valley.

King: It really was.

Putman: Don’t laugh at that, ’cause Aurora was a big town.

King: That was back in the day when the suburban radio stations, they played for their own audience. Like, at WJOB in Hammond—same thing. On the outskirts of Chicago—but still: Full-service radio station for their own audience, which is what WAUR was doing.

Putman: WMRO in particular, ’cause we were talk and sports and we had a great sports department and carried all the NIU Huskies sports because we were a stone’s throw from DeKalb. It was a perfect fit. One of the funnest things that I ever did when I worked out there—there were competing Aurora teams and it was such a big competition. They had me out there with the wives of the coaches from the Aurora teams. I was like, OK, is this gonna be like a wrestling match? What’s gonna happen? I did not realize just how intense the rivalry was, and I think it’s probably still that way. But it was great because they had a radio station where you could listen to those games and it was a great service. And it was also pretty fun to be a big fish in a small pond.

King: Sure. We gotta take a quick break and then we’ve got a whole lot coming up. So stay with us at WGN.

Musical interlude: Bill Haley and His Comets, “The Paper Boy.”
King: Steve King and Johnnie Putman at WGN Radio. Tell me just what. Do you read? We read Chicago Public Square, and we’re gonna talk about that and a whole lot more with a man that you know from the days when he was working at this here radio station, but Johnnie started her career with him. So I’m gonna turn it over to you.

Putman: Yes, he is Charlie Meyerson. How are you tonight, Charlie?

Meyerson: I’m fine and I’m delighted to be with you. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna steal a little bit of your thunder, Johnnie, because I wanna recap all the ways that that we have intersected over the years. Are you ready?

Putman: I think yes.

Meyerson: I listened to Steve on WLS during my formative years. I’m still in my formative years …

King: Don’t blame me for this.

Meyerson: … my earlier formative years. I started my first job out of college alongside Johnnie at WMRO-AM and WAUR-FM in Aurora in 1977. I attended your wedding—a wonderful event in 1984—where Steve did a killer version of “Johnny B. Goode.” Am I correct?

King: Yes, I did. I did.

Meyerson: … which I’m just now thinking about. “Johnny B. Goode”: What a great selection for a song that was, when you’re marrying someone named Johnnie. And I found myself working the swing shift at the Chicago Tribune in 2008 and I was honored to join you guys nightly, it seems, for a regular segment “From the Update Desk of the Chicago Tribune.” And then, when I joined WGN News as news director, we won awards together, as you led coverage of a big fire overnight.

King: Yeah, it was right down on Michigan Avenue. And, oh, and our producer was Margaret Larkin at that point.

Putman: Wow. I’m still reeling at all these times that our paths have crossed. You didn’t even mention that I attended your wedding, which was one of the great stories of all time because when we were working together out in Aurora and you came in and talked about being in a car accident and the fact that you had collided with this lovely young woman who you ultimately married. So there on the top of your wedding cake were the cars colliding.

Meyerson: Two little Matchbox cars, yes, that proved—I tried with a hammer to bang them up, so they kind of resembled what happened in the accident, but let me tell you, I speak from experience—Matchbox cars are almost indestructible.

Putman: Unless you step on them, and then you break your foot.

Meyerson: No, even then. I tried to hammer them. A couple of paint flecks came off. But yeah, it was close enough. So yeah, you were there at the very beginning of my wonderful marriage to my wonderful wife, Pam.

Putman: And who was at fault in that car accident? I don’t recall that.

Meyerson: It’s not important. There were no tickets issued.

Putman: That’s right. And you just got her number. That was the important thing, right?

Meyerson: If she were here, she’d interject, “His insurance company paid.”

Putman: Ah-huh. We should tell folks that—they certainly recognize your name. You’ve been at a few radio stations here in Chicago, and we are so fortunate because—born and raised in this area, you’ve always worked here. You never left, right, Charlie?

Meyerson: I have to correct you there. I was not born here. I was actually born in Detroit. But, at 13, moved to Orland Park—unincorporated Palos Township, but so you know, almost—

Putman: But your entire journalism career has been at radio stations in Chicago, as well as the Chicago Tribune, and that’s pretty, pretty impressive for 40-plus years, Charlie.

King: I don’t know that I’ve ever asked you this, Charlie, but what gave you your passion? Because you have a passion for good journalism. What ignited that in you?

Meyerson: First of all, thank you for asking. I have to credit my parents, who both were at various points in their careers newspaper people. My dad was a newspaper editor in the Detroit area. The reason that we moved to Illinois when I was 13 in 1968 was that my dad, who had been teaching journalism at a suburban community college outside Detroit, got the same job at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills. So— he was a journalism teacher and taught me much of what I know and what I’ve taught and what I’ve tried to apply about concise writing and good journalism. My mom was a community journalist and would write, both in Michigan and here in the suburbs of Chicago, community news roundups for, among others, the Palos Regional newspaper back in the day. But also, you guys know, I’m a comics fan.

Putman: Yes.

King: Are you?

Meyerson: And Steve—

King: That’s one of the many things we bonded on.

Meyerson: Absolutely. Who are some of the most prominent journalists in comics? Clark Kent and Peter Parker.

King: Yeah, there you go.

Meyerson: And, Peter Parker—Spider-Man as a teenager—was working for this big newspaper in New York. And it gave me the idea in high school that maybe I could do some journalism in high school—in addition to working for the student newspaper. When a reporter for then the Star/Tribune newspaper, Barb Hipsman—who went on to teach journalism in Ohio [at Kent State University]—was interviewing high school students about what we thought about the war in Vietnam, I said, “Hey, do you need a stringer? Do you need any volunteer journalists?” And, lo and behold, they started sending me to cover some school board meetings and park district meetings. And so, in high school, I was, like Peter Parker, kinda pretending that I was a journalist.

Putman: Were you a nerdy high schooler?

Meyerson: Johnnie, I think you’ve known me long enough to know the answer to that. That’s a loaded question. And yes, I think my wife and my kids and my sisters—yeah, and anyone else who’s known me all these years—would tell you, “Yeah, he is still pretty nerdy. The nerd is strong in this one.”

Putman: I still have to say, though, it’s very impressive that you never had to leave town to get the job of your dreams, ’cause you’ve had some awesome positions. How many years were you with WXRT?

Meyerson: 10 years. 1979 to 1989. Yeah, and when I talk to young people who are considering journalism as a career—and, sadly, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be—I tell them that, assuming they have the luxury of a little bit of time, they should look for a job first in the place where they want to live. And to follow their hearts. And, for me, that was really staying close to family and friends. You probably both got this same advice when you were coming up: You wanna make it in Chicago? You’re gonna have to go to Podunk, Iowa, and pay your dues. And I could have done that, but I also had friends—contemporaries at the time—who did that and never found their way back to Chicago.

So I decided early on I was gonna look for something here—was lucky enough, really, to find that great job in Aurora which was—for Johnnie, for you and me both, as well as many others—including our good friend, Dean Richards; we all started there in Aurora. And it was, far enough away from Chicago that, for instance, in my case, I could phone in news stories from Aurora for WIND Radio in Chicago back when WIND was a good radio station, as you’ll recall—

Putman: Yes.

King: Sing it!

Meyerson: —and, get my voice on Chicago radio, which helped build up the resume. And when I knocked on the door at ’XRT, I could say, oh, “I’ve done some work for WIND in Chicago.” In high school, since we’re going way back, I did do one phone-in report for, I believe it was then WDAI-FM—an Earth Day report or something like that: “Here at Carl Sandburg High School, kids are sending balloons into the air to mark Earth Day,” and so I think that was my Chicago radio debut when I was back in high school.

Putman: You mentioned that, sadly, there’re not that many that you come across that are going into the field of journalism. It breaks my heart that Columbia College has dropped their Radio Department. I’m like, what? Why? Wouldn’t you just hang on?

Meyerson: One of the things is—I have to step back and say, I taught radio news at Columbia College for four years in the ’80s, and it made me a better journalist to be telling kids, “Don’t do this, and here’s why.” So I owe a tremendous debt to Columbia College and have had a good relationship with the college through the years, even when I’m not getting paid for it. But I think it was a little antiquated to have, at this point, separate tracks for radio journalism and television journalism and print journalism. Because, as the web taught us at the Tribune and elsewhere, it’s all one. Radio stations have websites, radio stations need people who can spell, TV stations need people who can write, radio stations need people who can write and create video. So, to have individual tracks I think was, at this point, shortsighted.

Putman: Understood.

King: The Blatant Plug Light has started flashing—

Meyerson: Oh, good.

King: —so we wanna talk about, for people who have not checked out Chicago Public Square, Charlie, it’s all yours: Chicago Public Square—who, what, when, where, how do you access it? What do you do?

Meyerson: All right, a shortcut if people want to jump on that right now—and I’ll be able to actually watch my email inbox to see if anyone actually responds to this: If you go to, right now, to sub as in subscriptions, sub.ChicagoPublicSquare.com, you can sign up, type your email address in, and every weekday at 10 o’clock—almost every weekday; I take some days off for the holidays, for instance—you’ll get my take on news that is relevant to and important for the Chicago area. It began back in 2017 with the rise of the first Donald Trump administration. I had some time on my hands and a compulsion to get into the day-to-day news business again. And, to my surprise, it’s grown over the last almost eight years now. People seem to value it. So I’ll say that one more time and then you guys can take it back: sub.ChicagoPublicSquare.com, And it’s free—it’s always free—and I’m happy to have everyone jump in and join the fun.

King: And I don’t know if you heard our conversation with Ron Brown earlier. Ron is manning the news desk tonight, and Ron was saying—and Ron, feel free to jump in—that Chicago Public Square is one of your go-to sources too, right?

Brown: Oh, I’ve been reading it every day for several years—seven of the eight years. Maybe all eight years, Charlie.

Meyerson: I’ve been honored to be on the same team with Ron at Rivet, which is this startup that we began in 2013 to sort of reinvent radio news for the smartphone era—a great idea, wonderful talent, including, of course, Ron, which is how I came to know Ron. Rivet’s more in the podcast production business now. But Ron is a wonderfully talented news guy. And Ron, it’s great to be on the air with you again.

Brown: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. But let’s talk about the newsletter. It’s just so good. There’s nothing out there that equals it, that rivals it—and seriously, everybody should have this.

Putman: And we should explain—because I did the shoutouts for the people who are listening to us around the country: When we talk about this being a compilation of news that you can use to start your day, it’s not just what’s happening in Chicago, right, Charlie? This is your approach to “This is valuable stuff that you might miss. So I’m gonna put it all together for you so you, you’ve got it there at your fingertips.”

Meyerson: Johnnie, I’ve really only had one idea through my whole career, which is: Newscasting. And what do radio newscasters do? What does Ron do every hour? What do all the WGN News anchors do? We traditionally have looked at the morning newspapers—in the days before the internet—to see what’s in there. We look at the wire services. As the internet has come along, we look at email alerts that we get from various news sources. We look at our Twitter, or maybe now—certainly for me—Bluesky accounts to see what smart people that we follow are sharing, and then we boil it down to, a 3-, 4-, 5-minute newscast, maybe a 10-minute newscast. “Here’s what you should know.” And it’s generally with attribution: “The Tribune is reporting this, the Sun-Times is reporting this, The Associated Press is saying this, The New York Times says this, The Washington Post says this.” I’ve billed Chicago Public Square as “Chicago’s new front page.” And anyone who’s looked at the front page of a traditional newspaper or the front page of a news website like the Chicago Tribune—which, for many years I would get in first thing in the morning and decide what stories were gonna be on the front page of chicagotribune.com—knows that, yes, there are a lot of stories about things that happen in Chicago. But there are also—especially over the last eight years—a lot of stories that happen elsewhere that affect what happens in Chicago.

A few things have happened in the last few months—trends have emerged in the feedback I get from readers of Chicago Public Square. One is, “Hey, why are you writing so much about Washington and, the presidential election?” Or, more recently, the incoming Donald Trump administration. And “Why aren’t you writing more about Chicago?”

And my answer has been: “Yes, there’s lots that happening that’s happening in Chicago, but, frankly, what’s happening in Washington is, in my opinion, going to have a lot more impact on Chicago and how Chicagoans and how people in Illinois live their lives than many of the stories that are geographically located here.”

So the idea behind a front page is, yeah, there’s local news on the front page of the newspaper. There’s also national news and world news. What affects Chicago and Chicago readers is, as I preached when I was news director at WGN, not just stuff that happens in Chicago, but also stuff that happens anywhere but that resonates with people who are listening or reading or watching here in Chicago.

Putman: Chicago Public Square, your approach is as an independent source for news, correct?

Meyerson: One of the nice things about what I’ve discovered in running Chicago Public Square is that it is— Well, there’re pros and cons. First of all, I miss editors. Having an editor, a second voice or a second pair of eyes, look at your work and say, “Hey, you gotta typo here, Hey, you misspelled this. Hey, you got these facts wrong”—that’s not something to be dismissed lightly. Fortunately, I’m blessed with many engaged readers who are not shy about saying, “Hey, you got this wrong,” and then I send out a correction. But as we watch what happens with national corporate-owned media where the people in charge are concerned, seemingly, about their businesses under an incoming Trump administration, we see instances where independent-minded journalists and independent journalism is not being given quite the free reign that that we’d like it to get. And there’s a story today in the news that we can talk about if you want.

King: And there’s a whole lot of things we gotta get to. So we’ll come back and talk more with Charlie Meyerson. And, again, it’s sub.ChicagoPublicSquare.com or just go to ChicagoPublicSquare.com. And you can scroll around and you’ll find everything you need …

Putman: … and subscribe and follow that way.

Musical interlude: Hedgehoppers Anonymous, “It’s Good News Week.”
King: Steve King and Johnnie Putman at WGN Radio. It may or may not be Good News Week, but we’re talking about a terrific news site, ChicagoPublicSquare.com. We’re talking with Charlie Meyerson. And Charlie, I wanna address one thing that has impressed me from Day One with Chicago Public Square. Separate from the fact that we’ve known you as a colleague for years and we respect your work, one of the many things I appreciate about the way you approach Chicago Public Square: Unlike news sites—and I’ll name it like Fox News, and their slogan for years has been “Fair and Balanced”; they have never been fair and balanced from Day One—if there is a story on Chicago Public Square, and if you have a particular take on that story leaning one way or another, you say it. You don’t hesitate to say, “This is where I’m coming from about this particular story.” And I really appreciate that.

Meyerson: One of the style choices that I’ve made at Chicago Public Square is when I write “Fox News,” I go back and strike out the word news. There’s a little crosshatch through the word news when I refer to it.

I’m gonna go back to my college days when, influenced by professors, I rejected the notion of objectivity, which has become a corporate mandate over the years, and really is just something that manifested itself during what some have called The Age of Mass Media—roughly 1955 and the rise of television to 1995 and the rise of the internet. During those years, the mission of the news business, unlike before and after, was to amass the largest possible audience. And to do that, you try not to piss anybody off. But who were some of the most influential journalists in that Age of Mass Media? Here in Chicago: Mike Royko—again a big influence for me. And Mike Royko didn’t make any secrets about where he was coming from—who was a liar, who was a truth teller, whom you could trust, whom you couldn’t. And it’s become my mindset when I’ve been able to apply it over the years to not hide opinions that are based in fact. And that when someone has a reputation of being a liar, or someone has a reputation of being inaccurate, that person is identified as such when that person is in the news.

King: And don’t you agree that, sadly, too many people in positions of control of the news media don’t understand that the average person … can take a news report from someone who has a bias—if they’re open about that bias? Just don’t say, “I’m giving you everything fair and balanced.” No, you’re not. You’re hiding your particular bent inside the story.

Meyerson: Yeah, the tradition, just coming back to, for instance, Chicago City Hall—something that I covered for many years. Over the course of covering the City Council, for instance, you get to know over time which aldermen are full of crap, and which aren’t. And to report what one of those City Council members says without putting it in context—without mentioning this City Council member who has a reputation for being inaccurate, or who previously told us this, and after that we learned this. Just quoting the alderman without that context is to do a disservice to the audience and not provide context for, “Here’s the quote.”

With Chicago Public Square, for instance, I look to elevate informed opinion from columnists who may have opinions, but whose opinions are backed up by facts and hyperlinks and details. And, people can certainly read those opinion columnists and I generally identify them by something like “columnist” so that someone knows going in, “OK, this is not gonna be your traditional straight, ‘he- said-she-said-they-said’ kind of story”—that they have some context for understanding what they’re about to read.

Putman: I think Neil Steinberg is a good example. You guys have a great working relationship.

Meyerson: I’m a fan.

Putman: Yeah. And he’s—

King: We are, too.

Putman: —obviously a fan of yours too.

Meyerson: Yeah.

Putman: And that works out well because he brings our attention to something that you have reported on and you do the same for his columns.

Meyerson: Yeah. And Eric Zorn also—a similar relationship. Again, two great columnists. And it’s sad that the Chicago Tribune has parted ways with many—all, really—of its news opinion columnists. And it’s great that Neil is still with the Sun-Times. But yeah, I look to columnists to provide context and provide explanatory journalism that TikTok news reporting doesn’t.

King: Yes. And don’t you think that what’s happening with the Tribune, because I think objectively there are a skeleton crew of people at the Tribune who are really trying hard—in spite of the hedge fund owners that have decimated that paper.

Meyerson: … and we should remind everyone that, once upon a time, the Tribune and WGN— World’s Greatest Newspaper—were co-owned and are not anymore.

King: Yep.

Meyerson: There are tremendously talented journalists still at the Tribune. I still get the Tribune and the Sun-Times tossed onto our porch every morning—

Putman: So do we.

King: Yep.

Meyerson: It is a much smaller staff than it used to be, and those who are there are doing the job with far fewer resources than was the case when I left the paper to join WGN in 2009.-of-

Putman: I did some end-of-year bookkeeping and I was stunned at what we pay for a seven-day-a-week subscription. We’re into the thousands of dollars.

King: Yeah.

Meyerson: OK, let me back up. If you’re paying more than I believe it’s 155 bucks a year for seven-day delivery, then you should call …

Putman: What???

Meyerson: … customer service.

Putman: What???

Meyerson: I’m not kidding you. And Eric Zorn has written about this at great length, too. Much of the—and I don’t want to pick on any one newspaper. Much of the business at this point—as I perceive it, because I’m not in it anymore—is relying on momentum from newspaper subscribers of a certain age and older just to keep paying whatever ’cause they’ve always paid it. But it is worth everyone’s while, at least once a year, to call and say, “I’m gonna cancel unless you give me the best rate that you’re offering your brand-new consumers.” And you can Google and say “New subscriber to [this newspaper].”

Putman: I will start the year out that way because …

Meyerson: The Tribune’s offering new subscribers—I think it’s 155 bucks for a full year. And if they say, “No, we can’t do it,” then what you do is you cancel and then you sign up with your spouse’s name and a different email address and get the new rate. But, generally, the customer service people are happy to keep you on board. I’m payin’ four bucks a month for access to The New York Times and, I think, four bucks a month for access to The Washington Post. Although—you wanna talk about The Washington Post?

King: Who was the cartoonist who just resigned from The Washington Post?

Meyerson: Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post after an editor rejected her cartoon showing tech magnates, including Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos—and Mickey Mouse, by the way—genuflecting before a statue of Donald Trump. My friend, another Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and columnist, Jack Oman—he’s given us clearance to republish his cartoons, which I do frequently in Chicago Public Square, to which you can subscribe free at sub.ChicagoPublicSquare.com as several listeners have already—Jack wrote something that I want to quote, because he has a blog of his own, and he wrote this today about Ann Telnaes’ resignation. He’s worked with her through the years. He says—here’s the quote: “I grieve because it’s not just Ann. It’s everyone in journalism. If you’re in opinion, you should be getting your affairs in order and making other arrangements. Unless you’re a coward. Then you’ll be fine.”

Putman: Wow.

Meyerson: And the bottom line there is: With these large corporate news media—for which I hope things go well and things get much better—we do see their owners bending the knee to the new administration, the incoming administration …

King: Yeah.

Meyerson: … and so I put a great deal of hope in independent truth-tellers—Substack/email newsletter journalists, who have in increasing numbers been leaving these large news organizations to strike out on their own and form startup news organizations or, in some cases, to just work solo. There is a lot of great work being done there. It’s not the same as the work that was being done by big corporate media, but I put a lot of hope in what they’re doing—Jack, and now Ann Telnaes has got her own email newsletter and will be distributing her cartoons that way, probably.

Putman: Yes. I just signed up for her Substack today.

Meyerson: Good. Yeah. I was not actually familiar with her work, but I really like this cartoon that The Washington Post didn’t publish, which now will ironically no doubt be seen by a lot more people—a lot more than it would’ve seen by had they published it in the Post.

King: Just before we take a break, did you just win another award from the Chicago Reader?

Meyerson: No, not yet. Chicago Public Square is again, as it’s been several years in a row, a finalist for Best Email Newsletter and Best Independent Website or Blog. Some years we win, some years we don’t, but the voting just wrapped up on Dec. 31st and we’ll learn the winners in March. But it’s an honor just to be a finalist.

Putman: And in this case. He’s telling the truth. We’re gonna take a break and we will come right back for some closing thoughts with our friend Charlie Meyerson on WGN.

Musical interlude: John Fogerty, “Headlines.”
King: Steve King and Johnnie Putman at WGN Radio, where we’re talking with our friend Charlie Meyerson. You should check out ChicagoPublicSquare.com. Subscribe. It’s free, and your life will be better for doing that.

Putman: And Charlie, let’s clarify. You can subscribe for free, but your site is actually reader-supported, correct?

Meyerson: That’s true. I did it free for a year. I think I mentioned that I started it in 2017, when the first Trump administration was dawning. And after a year, as new forms of financial support evolved—back in the day, I used Memberful—about a year in, I said, “Hey, is this worth anything to you?” Subtext: “What will you pay me not to quit?” And, to my surprise, people actually paid me not to quit. And that model has since been adopted by other organizations—Substack it most famously—but it didn’t exist back in 2018. And people are finding in general—journalists are finding across the country and across virtually all beats—that people are willing to pay to get email newsletters that they find valuable. Which brings me back to something I said earlier: I said there have been a couple of threads of communication that have developed with readers over the last few months. One is: “Why are you doing so much Washington news, D.C. news, national news?”

The other is: “Please don’t quit.” I had a friend, a woman I hadn’t seen for 20 years, stopped me in the grocery store parking lot —one of the aisles at Jewel, actually—and said, “Love your newsletter, please don’t stop.” Just a few weeks ago. And I gotta confide: Had the presidential election gone another way, I was prepared to glide off into the sunset. But a number of people have unsolicitedly said, “Please don’t stop.” And so now I’m kinda stuck. It’s a responsibility that I feel I have to keep.

King: And full disclosure: That was part of the conversation we had with Charlie, off the air, a few weeks ago …

Putman: … when we said “Please don’t stop.”

King: Yeah.

Putman: By the way, I’m looking at texts that come in and wanted to clarify that, in fact, people can subscribe for free right to Chicago Public Square and you can give Charlie feedback and Chicago Public Square is, in fact, visible on Facebook, if that’s where you wanna check it out first.

King: Facebook and I believe Bluesky and Threads.

Meyerson: Yeah. In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Facebook—Meta, its parent company, Facebook and Threads—suppressed some of the posts that I shared: Others’ reporting—critically, specifically—about Donald Trump. So I have begun to, let’s say, deprecate the role of Facebook—which was the go-to channel for between-editions updates for Chicago Public Square—in favor of Bluesky.

King: Yeah.

Meyerson: So I’m now encouraging anyone who likes Chicago Public Square and wants to know what’s happening between editions to follow Chicago Public Square on Bluesky, which—can I get a little technical in this?—has a major advantage over Twitter, which once upon a time was of great value to me and many other people.

Twitter turned off its API, its automated programming interface—I believe that’s what it stands for [Correction: Application programming interface]—that allowed other programs to skim Twitter. That was a valuable channel for me to find out what all the smart people I was following on Twitter were sharing. It could rank news stories by “12 of your friends have shared this, 12 respected journalists have shared this.” They turned that off. Bluesky has that: There’s a free app called Sill that people who are on Bluesky can use. Sill basically cuts out the noise of social media and serves up, “OK, 12 of your friends are sharing this on Bluesky, 11 are sharing this, nine are sharing this,” or “They shared it within the last three hours.” And that’s a major source of information for me in Chicago Public Square, and for the content that I share with people on Bluesky because—ideally—I’m following people who are smarter than I am. And I’m able then to share the news from people who are smarter than I am with my readers and followers. For instance, that’s how I learned about the Washington Post cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, who stepped down from her job. I saw it on Sill, which was monitoring Bluesky for me. So I recommend that: Bluesky and Sill.

King: I get it. You’re looking out at the blue sky from your window sill. I get it. Okay.

Meyerson: Yeah, I think that’s it. It also helps that the guy who developed Sill actually took feedback from me. I made some suggestions and he said, “Yeah.”

Putman: Really?

Meyerson: Yeah. So it’s nice when there’s an organization with a human being behind it, as opposed to the faceless, unreachable customer service.

Putman: Like when you say to Facebook, “Why are you doing this to me?” We have so many friends who are musicians who’ve had basically Facebook to shut them down and this is how—

Meyerson: Yeah.

Putman: —they make their living.

Meyerson: With no explanation and no way to reach a human being. Very frustrating.

King: It has increased over the past six months.

Putman: Yeah. Very intense. You’ve done a great job explaining what Chicago Public Square is all about and how people can get their copy of Chicago Public Square every day. But you’ve also done a great job, and I’m telling you folks at the Chicago Tribune, you better buckle up because we’re hearing from people saying, “Oh my God, I’m calling on Monday.”

King: And so are we.

Putman: We’ve heard from people who are paying $116 a month. We are paying $190 every two months.

Meyerson: Oh no.

Putman: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Meyerson: And I don’t wanna pick on the Trib. This is true of all the major publishers and magazines. Call them—and cable providers, too. Anyone you have a subscription with, it’s worth calling at least once a year. Say, “What’s your best deal?”

Putman: And our problem is we just get complacent and it’s automatically withdrawn. And until you look at it, you don’t realize, “Whoa, what am I doing here?”

King: And I don’t play the age card often, but I will here: Johnnie and I are guilty of, as much as we embrace all forms of new social media, a day without a newspaper—or, in Chicago, two newspapers—on our kitchen table is a bad day.

Putman: Absolutely.

King: And I don’t apologize for that, but we need to find out ways to make that day a little less expensive.

Putman: Yeah, exactly. Again, congratulations with Chicago Public Square. I’m gonna say right here, right now: Join us in March so we can celebrate Chicago Public Square being chosen by the Chicago Reader. ’Cause it’s gonna happen again.

Meyerson: From your lips to the Reader editors’ ears. So lemme just—Are you kicking me off now?

Putman: Yeah.

Meyerson: I’m just getting warmed up.

Putman: I know.

Meyerson: I was gonna be with you all six hours tonight. You don’t want me anymore?

King: You hear that chortling in the background? That’s Ron Brown.

Brown: Yes. It was great to hear from you again, Charlie. I hope that we hear from you again very soon. And I’ll add my voice to the chorus, too: Please don’t quit. I’ve been following you since ’XRT days and I still do.

Meyerson: It’s my privilege.

Putman: Thank you so much, Charlie.

King: Thanks, Charlie. We’ll talk again soon.

Putman: Yeah, happy New Year.

King: See you.

Meyerson: You, too. Thank you.

King: And again, it’s ChicagoPublicSquare.com. Free subscription, but if you want to support Charlie, you can do that too.

Help wanted: Two cool jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 23:35:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve shared word of intriguing jobs. But these two just came in over the transom:

■ Growing Community Media, the nonprofit Chicago-area news organization whose board I’ve just joined, is hiring a managing editor at the Austin Weekly News.

■ The pioneering Online News Association (a.k.a. Journalists.org) is in the hunt for an executive director/chief executive officer.

Tell ’em Charlie sent ya.

Two cues for local news

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 02:15:00 +0000

[Crain’s Chicago Business kindly asked me to contribute some thoughts to its special-edition “Forum on local journalism and the news.” The version posted to Crain’s website omitted the explanatory hyperlinks I included. For the record, here’s my original draft—hyperlinks included.]

By Charlie Meyerson
Publisher, Chicago Public Square

As a mentor to up-and-coming journalists and a consultant to news organizations—legacy or startups, profit or nonprofit—I often cite two priorities for those plotting local news’ future.

1. Growing audience is Job No. 1, and email’s the key.

That means: Gather people’s email addresses. The top of any news website should include an invitation to “Sign up for updates via email.” I’ve gone so far as to recommend one local publisher announce loudly—on front page wraparounds for months—something like “This print edition is going away on [date certain]. If you want to keep getting the news, get us your email address now.” Then shut off the presses, pour all that production and distribution money into digital journalism, and charge advertisers a premium for reaching a community you’ll own like no other.

Email’s ability to connect all manner of content with an audience makes it the logical successor to everything from a daily or weekly newspaper to a nightly or hourly newscast. It can alert subscribers to text, photos, podcasts, video and more. Unlike the ever-flowing rivers of social media or the vagaries of search engine behavior, your email will be seen. And unlike websites, which an audience must remember to visit, your email’s always there, waiting, whenever anyone checks the inbox.

That said: Whether anyone opens that email or not is overwhelmingly a function of the subject line. So the corollary: Make your email great. That means compelling, non-repetitive subject lines, where the most interesting and engaging words come first—and so won’t be obscured on small screens. It also means informative but tight content—a dispatch designed as a satisfying experience in itself but also engaging enough to get readers to tap over to ad-supported web pages.

Bonus: Email can provide unmatched insights into your audience’s priorities.

2. Lose the paywall, put out the tip jar

Paywalls crimp audience growth, and that limits what you can charge advertisers. People won’t share content with friends or colleagues—your potential new readers—if those friends will smash, Wile E. Coyote-style, head-on into a paywall. A better approach: Make your content free for all—as public broadcasting and other media (notably in Chicago, the Sun-Times and the Reader) have done—but ask that growing audience to support your free content voluntarily. Maybe just 10% or 15% of your audience will kick in, but 10% of a growing number is … a growing number. (Compromise: A generous “gift link” program for paid readers.)

The mission’s vital

The plague of local government corruption, school and library book bans and election skulduggery with national consequences has made the importance of vibrant and engaging community news clearer than ever.

As a growing number of Americans get their news not on paper, but via phones and computers, the news business needs to meet them where they are. Email’s ideal for that—and for persuading them news is worth supporting.
_____

After 20 years in Chicago radio news—including WXRT-FM—Charlie Meyerson joined the Chicago Tribune in 1998 to launch its pioneering email newsletters, including Daywatch. Since 2017, he’s applied the principles above daily in “Chicago’s new front page,” the free, reader-supported Chicago Public Square email newsletter. He’s also vice president of editorial for award-winning podcast production company Rivet360. (Photo credit: Steve Ewert.)

Want to podcast? Create a gripping open.

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 23:41:00 +0000

(Adapted from my “Four Keys to Creating a Great Audio Interview” for the Orbit Media Studios blog.)

No one gets to the end—or even the middle—of your podcast without listening to the beginning. And a long, wordy, boring open is one of the best ways to ensure people don’t stick around for long.

One key to engaging listeners—especially people new to your podcast (and who doesn’t want a steady flow of them, huh?)—is to open your show with some of the most interesting words from what’s to come.

Here’s a great way to craft a compelling intro for a typical podcast interview:

1. A one- or two-sentence preview, beginning with the most compelling words you can muster, leading into …

2. A short (20-30-second) excerpt from your guest or guests—the most exciting, emotionally powerful cut in the whole show.

3. An ID for the guest(s), yourself, your show and your underwriter or sponsor—mixed, if you must, with theme music (which, based on Rivet360’s groundbreaking data, often will prove a tuneout; keep it short if you use it at all).

Here’s a sample (click to hear audio):

Here are more examples:

■ Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal tells his not-favorite things

■ Barack Obama’s 1st biographer, David Mendell: Michelle didn't care for the book

■ Music journalist Jim DeRogatis: ‘Every system in this city failed … to protect these young black girls’

Tip: You can save yourself and your team production work by crafting your “live” intro (the one you read while you’re sitting with your subject), to include a brief pause where you can later insert a cut. The key is to write an intro that alludes to a question you’re sure you’ll be asking. If a stronger cut emerges, you can recut your first few opening words to match that clip and let the rest of your original recording flow from there.

Example: An interview with two veterans of the Second City comedy organization, Tom Yorton and Kelly Leonard. (Photo credit: Charlie Meyerson.)

Tip: Spare your listeners the waste of time that is “Thank you for joining us” or “Thanks for being here” at the opening. That just brings things to a halt. (Because we all know what comes next: “Great to be here.” Or “Thanks for having me.” And then a brief, awkward pause.) Thank your guests as profusely as you like—before and after your recorded segment. If you must thank guests—it is hard to resist—don’t wait for an answer; just move directly to your first question. Keep it moving, start to finish.

My Hall of Fame induction speech: Cherish your friends, embrace your rivals (2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 01:03:00 +0000

On this date in 2008, I was fortunate enough to be inducted into the Illini Media Alumni Hall of Fame. Here’s the speech I prepared for that evening. (Note: About 60 seconds before I wrapped it up—in a bit we’d worked out in advance—fellow inductee and Chicago Blackhawks announcer Gene Honda kindly interjected, as he has at so many hockey games, shouting “One minute remaining!”)

It’s hypocritical of me to stand here, because I really think Hall of Fame honors should not occur before the honoree has shuffled off this mortal coil with a clean rap sheet. On the other hand, I’d have a harder time conveying my gratitude then, so what the heck.

I want to give my thanks and my love to my wonderful family—parents, siblings, kids—and my wife, Pam, without whose amazing ability to sleep through a clock radio at 3:15 in the morning I would have almost no career at all.

And I want to share what I consider three of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the 35 years since I first cracked open a mic at WPGU’s Dorm Broadcasting System.

NUMBER ONE: Teach when you can, share when you can. Teaching others makes us better, more responsive professionals. The very act of explaining yourself helps you become better at what you do—whatever it is. And the karma comes back, in rewarding and surprising ways.

NUMBER TWO. There’s no day so bad it can’t be improved by listening to “Go All the Way” by the Raspberries. Preferably several times in a row. The repeat button on your music player was meant for this song.

NUMBER THREE. Be nice—play it straight, play it fair—with everyone, all the time. Because, if you’re lucky enough to have a career that lasts a decade or more, one day that rival could be your colleague, your neighbor, your boss—or your kid’s boss. This is a tough one, because, let’s face it, we in the media are a darned competitive bunch.

And that brings me to the story of a colleague back in my days at WPGU. He was a couple of years older and, as such, his show on WPGU used to follow my graveyard shift radio show. We had an on-air rivalry. I would insult him or play a derogatory song to introduce his show. But he taught me the hard way not to poke a stick at the guy who controls the microphone—or at least, who takes control of it after you do. One time, he proceeded to take the controls only to dedicate to me Loudon Wainwright’s classic song “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.”

Now, it would have been easy for this kind of thing to get out of hand. I’ve seen it happen time and again in this profession. And, clearly, I gotta say, that memory did stick with me. So, of all the people I met during my years on campus, you might not have guessed that Tom Thomas would have become so close a friend years later. And I surely wouldn’t have guessed back then that Tom, bless him, would pass away all too soon this year while working on Illini Media matters, including—as I later came to find out—my nomination to this great, great honor.

And so, I want to thank him publicly—and say to you all: Life is too short for petty competition and emotional rivalries.

Cherish your friends, embrace your rivals. Make them a part of your life, and you’ll be glad you did.

Thank you all.

From dorm broadcasting to the digital frontier: A journalist’s journey

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 17:29:00 +0000

I can trace the origin of my broadcasting career back to Aug. 24, 1973—early in my first year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when a tradition known as Quad Day gave campus student organizations a chance to introduce themselves.

In particular, I got to know student radio station WPGU—a story I shared in some detail with a speech to the University of Illinois Library team on the occasion of Homecoming weekend, Oct. 14, 2022.

To mark the 50th anniversary of that life-changing encounter, here’s video and a rough transcript of those remarks.

I wouldn’t be here talking to you today if I didn’t save everything.

And I wouldn’t be here talking to you today if the University of Illinois in its wisdom hadn’t decided that my old, let’s say, stuff from my era in Illinois was worth keeping…

… which has been great and welcome news for my relatives—my wife and sons—who’ve been begging me for years to find a home or a trash bin for some of that … stuff.

And before we go further back in history—like, wow, half a century, which means I’m about to give short shrift to almost everything that I’m going to tell you—I want to take you back to June 7, 2017, when Laura Haber at Unit One—a pioneering project in the Allen Hall dorm where students devised their own courses and taught one another from their own skill sets—posted a fateful message to the “Ghosts of Allen Hall Past” group on Facebook:

“The alumni association’s working on a history display for the Alice Campbell Welcome Center. They’d like to have some photos or 3D artifacts from Unit One.”

I wasn’t ready at that point to part with actual 3D artifacts, but I had been digging through some old audio from my student days at the U. of I.—including my ~~freshman~~ [correction: sophomore] year, when I created my first radio documentary for student station WPGU about—in what I might now consider a significant conflict of interest—my dorm, Allen Hall and Unit One:

[Young Meyerson: When the student unrest that shook the campus in the late 1960s finally reached the administrative hierarchy of the University of Illinois, the chancellor’s office formed CRUEL—that’s the Commission to Reform Undergraduate Education and Living, which is currently on ice and inactive. Created in 1970 to humanize the often-criticized computer-run campus, CRUEL’s first and some say only major achievement was the creation of Unit One, billed since its beginning in 1971 as a ‘living-learning experiment.’” (audio fades)]

So I shared that with the group, and with Laura, and that was fun. But then, in September of last year, Laura ratcheted things up with a call for “stories, memories, artifacts, photos, posters, recordings, letters, diaries, electronic media and anything else that might help document the history of Unit One.” And then we were off to the races, because … I saved it all.

This, for instance—from my fictional concoction for a “Science Fiction as Social Forecasting” class at Unit One. And if you can read my scrawls in this mockup of a newspaper clipping, you might see some things that evoke more recent global history.

The call for Unit One memorabilia connected me to U. of I. Archivist for Student Life and Culture Ellen Swain, who, to my surprise and again my family’s delight, has at least pretended to be interested in virtually everything I never threw away from my college years and even other stuff that I have hoarded through almost half a century in journalism—a career that began in earnest right here at the U. of I., the former College of Communications and WPGU.

My journalistic destiny was probably set in stone long before I came here. Both my parents were newspaper people, and so I developed an early interest in the news, and it’s no surprise that I worked on the student newspaper in high school and freelanced for the Orland Park paper in high school and through summers in college. (This is a column I wrote about riding my bike from Champaign back to Orland Park. It was frightening. Route 45 all the way.)

And I also, as many of my generation did, had a passion for science and space. And once it became clear to me that I really didn’t have the right stuff to be an astronaut, I figured the closest I could come to the space program would be as a journalist. And more on that later.

So that combo—science, journalism, technology—was a common thread as I applied to college. And I applied to a bunch. I was accepted at Northwestern, the Universities of Michigan and Chicago, and Princeton‚ whose spelling left something to be desired.

But, you know, Einstein wound up there, I thought, so, you know: Worth considering. And they sent me what may have been the only telegram I ever received.

And Illinois took me in.

When I consulted my dad about where to go—my mom had died three years earlier—his answer was, “I think we can afford Illinois, Charlie.” So, Illinois it was. (I know it still kind of stings, but stay tuned. It worked out.)

In the years that followed, my two wonderful sisters made the same choice.

Back in 1973, when I took the U. of I. up on its acceptance offer, you couldn’t major in journalism until you had enough credits to qualify as a junior. So I had to pick another major. And I somehow managed to persuade the Chemistry Department to take me in—with a scholarship.

And I really regret depriving someone genuinely interested in chemistry of that cash that I took—especially since it became clear quickly that I really wasn’t cut out for chemistry; I got the first D of my college career in a chem class, despite my elaborate note-taking.

Amazingly, in retrospect, I got a B for both courses, both semesters. But those notes are pretty, aren’t they?

Meanwhile, outside the classroom, things moved more quickly. On Quad Day of my freshman year, I checked in with both WPGU and the Daily Illini. WPGU called me first, and had me on board within a few days, doing newscasts via the Dorm Broadcasting System, which was a way at the time of smuggling beginners’ radio shows to the dormitories via the buildings’ electrical currents. Your radio could pick up a signal, but your radio had to be within, I don’t know, 10 or 12 feet of electrical wiring in the building. You couldn’t get on the over-the-air FM station until you proved you were good enough for the big time.

By the time the Daily Illini got back to me and offered me a chance to work with the paper, I was waist-deep in magnetic tape and newscast copy. And although I was game to do both, you couldn’t do that because, at the time, in that era of Watergate, so many people aspired to be journalists that one person was not allowed to work in both places—because that would deprive someone else of an opportunity. And everybody wanted one of those opportunities.

Even though I aspired to be a print journalist, WPGU gave me the chance to explore both being a radio reporter—anchoring the news—and being a DJ:

[Young Meyerson: About a minute after 7 o’clock in the morning, right here at The Best Rock Around, WPGU, Urbana … The Urbana-Champaign Senate’s 50 student seats are up for election Wednesday and Thursday. About 150 candidates are vying for those spots …]

And I loved both those roles. So, sadly, I turned the DI down.

Fortunately for the Chemistry Department, my Advanced Placement and College Level Examination Program (or CLEP) tests gave me enough credits after just one year to escape chemistry and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to join the print journalism program at the then-College of Communications, which accepted me—despite my snotty acceptance letter.

My journalism education got off to a rocky start—another D.

Ah, well, uh … That second year brought lots of new fun, including a photography course in which I demonstrated proficiency just slightly more impressive than my efforts in chemistry (another B) but that yielded a bunch of photos—

—that’s my Allen Hall desk by the way—that now reside in the University Archives.

Meanwhile, at WPGU, I began to carve out a role as a kind of consumer advocate in the mini-documentary series known as Probe, many installments of which are among the audio tapes that I’m now entrusting to the U. of I. Media Preservation and Digital Reformatting Project, which is doing amazingly detailed restoration work …

[Young Meyerson: I’m Charles Meyerson. This is Probe, the show that answers your questions, solves your problems, and checks into things you want to know more about. This week. For instance, we got a call from a listener named Mark, who lives in Champaign.

[Mark: Yeah, I’ve been collecting my Daily Illinis for the last semester and a half, and I got all these newspapers hanging around and I’ve been waiting and looking in the paper for, you know, a recycling place or you know, paper drive. I don’t see it.

[Young Meyerson: An appropriate question, we think for what has been called …]

…although, in retrospect, a lot of the consumers for whom I was supposed to be advocating suspiciously shared my passion for science and science fiction. But that led to some memorable interviews with people like Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who explained what was holding up the first Star Trek movie.

[Young Meyerson: At the behest of the local Star Trek Federation, Probe called Roddenberry’s Hollywood office last Tuesday to find out what the delay is. And he said:

[Roddenberry: Our attitude is, we don’t want to rush into a hurried script. That is not really what we want. We feel, and we think the fans probably agree with us, it’s better to come out a month later and wait and get exactly the script you’re looking for …]

The joke for years—maybe even still—has been that students paid U. of I. tuition so they could work at WPGU or the Daily Illini, and the academic opportunities were just fringe benefits. To believe that would be to ignore the surprising ways, in my case, at least, in which those requirements for journalism majors—that they take a lot of classes in a lot of different subjects—paid off over the course of my career. In 1979, working at my first pro job at WMRO and WAUR in Aurora, I brought to bear some of what I learned in a course I derided as “nuclear engineering for dummies.”

And as I was looking for a job in Chicago in the months after that year’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial meltdown in Pennsylvania, that reporting and my U. of I. education helped me sound a little smarter than maybe some other radio reporters.

[Young Meyerson: A couple of good things about fusion. Number one, it doesn’t leave much in the way of radioactive waste, disposal of which is a big headache. Number two, it uses hydrogen, which is available in a practically limitless quantity in seawater. Fusion involves pressing …. ]

… and that reporting was part of what helped me land the job that, as I’ve said many times in many places, sprinkled fairy dust over all the rest of my career: Reporter and news anchor at WXRT-FM in Chicago, which was at that point a young rock station that mixed news and music in surprising and rewarding ways.

’XRT gave me a chance to scratch that itch for science and space reporting. It gave me a platform in 1985 from which to submit one of 1,700 applications for NASA’s “Journalist in Space” program. But before NASA could name a winning applicant, disaster happened in January 1986, giving me the sad responsibility of telling listeners that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.

[Young Meyerson: The problem seems to have developed with either the main liquid fuel cylinder, the big one in the middle, or one of the two solid rocket boosters to either side of the shuttle. … Whatever happened happened with no notice—happened so quickly that a ground controller continued to treat things routinely, droning off numbers and statistics even after the videotape clearly showed the explosion. So NASA’s instruments may not reflect whatever the problem was. With no notice, they never had a chance.]

NASA named 40 finalists for the Journalist in Space program that May, just a few months later. I was not on the list. It was kind of a relief at the time; we were expecting our firstborn son. But NASA never named a winner.

Next year brought one of my most memorable interviews: A sit-down with legendary astronaut Jim Lovell, who gave us all that Apollo 13 quote—and this, by the way, is what he really said—“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

[Lovell: During all the flights, things usually go wrong. Certainly, in three outta four of my flights, we had failures along the way. We tend to become complacent with space flight because we had so many successes. I think the Challenger accident has maybe given us a better perspective of the risk involved in space flight than we had before.]

There at WXRT, at the dawn of the consumer computer age, my computer science course at the U. of I. helped me be a little more comfy than some other radio types when it was time to move from typewriters to computers. That comfort came even more in handy as I moved to my next job—as news director at WNUA, which was an innovative smooth jazz station—just as radio transitioned to digital audio editing, which made radio news and audio editing more fun than ever. And it gave me a chance to talk about the digital frontier with people including science fiction visionary William Gibson, who coined the phrase cyberspace—but who in 1993 didn’t have and didn’t want an email address.

[Gibson: Well, there are a number of reasons. One, I’ve developed a sort of cyber-agoraphobia at the very thought of it. Another reason is that my working day consists of sitting in front of a Macintosh computer from 9 to 5 writing. And when I’m done writing, the last thing I wanna do is sit in front of the same Macintosh computer while I open and read my email.]

I also had a chance to talk to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Barry, who in 1996 made affectionate fun of technology.

[Meyerson: Why does anyone need personal computers?

[Barry: To me, the beauty of it is that you can now, in the privacy of your home, sit there and have a machine that is, you know, able to do billions and billions of complex calculations in a second. And you can sit there and use that thing to play a game like Solitaire. To me, that’s a wonderful thing.]

Uh, the Barry interview might have been a mistake—especially the part where I introduced him to the boss.

[Boss: Nice to meet you, Dave. I’ve heard a lot about you from Charlie.

[Barry: Same, Ralph. You should fire Charlie. He doesn’t prepare …

[Meyerson: Could you wait another 15 minutes until the show’s over?]

That joke— and it was a joke at the time—proved prophetic, because the Telecommunications Act of 1996 cleared the way for fewer and larger corporations to acquire more and more radio stations, and spelled the end of an era for radio news. In 1998, my employer, a precursor to the radio behemoth Clear Channel—later, now, iHeart Media—eliminated WNUA’s news department, which by then was just me.

Or, as the Chicago Tribune put it in writing about my layoff a few weeks later, “The sound of news is fading out on many FM stations.”

But in 1998, the internet was beckoning. The Tribune, it turns out, was ramping up staffing to provide breaking news on its emerging website—a tip I got from the Trib’s Steve Rynkiewicz, who happened to be married to Brenda Russell, who happened to be a contemporary of mine at the University of Illinois. (She was president of the Society of Professional Journalists campus chapter.)

The Trib, whose staff at that point was conditioned mainly to think of meeting just one or two, maybe three, deadlines a day, suddenly needed people used to thinking in terms of hourly or half-hourly or minutely deadlines. And a radio news guy seemed like a good fit. Or so I thought, and—fortunately for me—so at least a few people at the Tribune agreed. And, thanks to my U. of I. degree in journalism, I— unlike a lot of broadcasters—knew how to spell and punctuate and I owned an AP Style Book. And thanks to that computer science course, I was comfy around computers.

So in November 1998, I turned down another job in radio news that had been offered to me, instead to join the Tribune to work on this weird new thing—my friends in radio were puzzled why I would do this—internet news, including overseeing the launch of the Trib’s pioneering email newsletter program. I spent 11 years there—most of them, as first guy in the morning to decide what would go on the front page of the website, and then composing a daily email news briefing, Daywatch, that went out at 10 o’clock each morning, along with news alerts when big news broke …

… which, sadly, it did—not long after we launched that program.

In those early text-centric days of the Trib on the web, I filed what may have been the first audio interview for the Tribune’s website: A talk with science fiction and fantasy author—and Illinois native (from Waukegan)—Ray Bradbury, who, to my surprise, didn’t think much about cyberspace.

[Bradbury: I don’t have a computer. I don’t believe in the internet. It’s a step backward. It’s a game show and it’s idiotic.]

I’m gonna compress what followed to get to the main lessons of my journey from dorm broadcasting to the digital frontier.

In my time at the Trib, I moved from the fourth floor of Tribune Tower, the internet team’s space, down to the first floor, the home of the Tribune’s sibling WGN Radio; and then back up to the fourth floor of Tribune Tower, as we moved the radio news operation into the middle of the Tribune newspaper newsroom—in what once, in fact, had been the newspaper editor’s office.

It was a pioneering move, coincidentally paralleled around that time by the merging of WPGU and the Daily Illini here on campus—something that sadly didn’t last much longer than my relatively brief two years at WGN. (That’s a whole other lecture.)

After that, a series of adventures at the intersection of journalism, tech and technology:

A year at an innovative and award-winning experiment in all-news on the FM dial, FM News Chicago; and nine years [now 10] and counting—I’m still there as the nagger-in-chief, the founding head of news—at Rivet, a startup that set out to reinvent radio news for the smartphone era and won a bunch of awards along the way …

—and that now is primarily a producer of podcasts. And with which, along the way, I was awarded—who saw this coming?—a U.S. patent.

And my other current baby, Chicago Public Square, which is—stop me if you’ve heard this—an email news briefing that arrives in people’s mailboxes at that old familiar time, 10 o’clock, and that is supported with completely voluntary cash from readers who don’t want me to quit.

(Supporter No. 1, by the way: A U. of I. contemporary and Daily Illini alumnus, Mark Wukas—wonderful guy.)

One of the joys of email in this present media landscape is this:

Chicago Public Square has been a platform for virtually anything and everything that I’ve learned to do over the last half-century, including podcasting—interviews, on stage and off:

[Meyerson: Peter Sagal is the host of NPR’s incredibly successful show Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me. But …

[Sagal: I hate the title of my radio show. I have always hated the title of my radio show.

Meyerson: You know what else? He hates the place where he works.

Sagal: Navy goddamned Pier.

Meyerson: It’s beautiful! It’s lovely! It’s on the lake—

Sagal: Navy f*cking Pier.

Meyerson: I’m Charlie Meyerson. Those are just two of the revelations that emerged when Peter Sagal and I met on stage as part of the Wednesday Journal newspaper …]

And even an award-winning newscast series has briefly found a home at Chicago Public Square …

[Meyerson in newscast: Over the objections of one of the more raucous crowds in recent Chicago City Council history, the City Council’s approved a plan for a $95 million police and fire academy in West Garfield Park. This is the Chicago Public Square newscast, and I’m Charlie Meyerson. The vote followed …]

All of this work has paid off in a number of ways since 2017—with more honors and recognition. And it’s become one of the most rewarding chapters in my now very loooooong career.

So, how has my time at Illinois shaped my journey to the digital frontier? Well, a few ways—some of which I noted when ~~I was honored to be inducted into the Illini Media Alumni Hall of Fame in the ancient past: 2008~~ [correction] I spoke to students and alumni in 2004:

“If there’s a recurring thread in my career, this certainly has been one of them: A continual quest to build a professional environment that matches what we had on campus here at the Illini Media organizations—a place where anyone could critique anyone else, because we all shared the mission of getting better and doing better work, and where we were encouraged always to try new things all the time. I’ve been surprised to learn how rare that is in the real world.

“Also at WPGU, we learned not to fear technology. To kick it or pound it sometimes, but not to fear it—and always, for those occasions when it fails completely, have a Pink Floyd track ready to go.”

Now, this one applies particularly to radio: “We learned the joys of a job with almost no dress code.” Needless to say, this is a promise delivered upon in spades by the pandemic. I was ready.

Let me return, though, to the reason that I attended the U. of I. in the first place: Remember, I wound up here because, in my dad’s words, we could afford it. In retrospect, the cost of not attending the U. of I. would’ve been for me unimaginably high.

And here’s why:

That first professional job in Aurora? I got it because my WPGU news director and classmate, the late Allan Loudell—who just this year sadly and posthumously joined me in the Alumni Hall of Fame, a man that Joe Biden has been quoted as calling “the smartest person I know”—was looking for work at the same time I was.

And he passed on that job in Aurora. But he put a good word in for me, and I got it. I was hired. Had I attended one of those other joints—Princeton, Northwestern, Michigan, Chicago—I would not have met Allan. Allan wouldn’t have recommended me for that job, and I wouldn’t have been in a great position to apply for jobs in Chicago—especially that big dream job at WXRT.

And even more important, I would not have been driving home from Aurora to Orland Park on the afternoon of July 27, 1978, when I was, oh, let’s say engaged in a traffic accident. (No tickets issued, no one hurt. Why does everyone want to know whose fault it was? Why is that always the first question? It’s not important. I assure you it makes no difference whatsoever.)

Had I not been in that accident, I would not have met the other driver, Pam McLean, who five years later would become my wife and eventually mother to our three wonderful sons and grandmother to our two wonderful grandsons [Update, August 2023: and a granddaughter, with another grandson on the way] … and who often notes that my insurance company paid in that accident.

So you can see, I hope, that I owe my entire, wonderful adult life—a life I would not trade for anything—to this institution.

And that is why I am loyal to you, Illinois. And why I’m giving a lot more of my, let’s say, stuff—including much of what you’ve seen and heard today—to the library.

Thank you so much.

Stan Lee: A life in review

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 01:39:00 +0000

[Adapted from my daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter. Subscribe free here.]

‘He has a heroic moment when he invents Spider-Man.’ Variety’s Owen Gleiberman reviews a new Disney+ documentary about the late Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee …

■ … a movie that Looper’s Reuben Baron says skips “many stranger and sadder chapters” in Lee’s life.

■ Not a Disney+ subscriber? You’re in luck, because …

I got a lot of the story straight from Lee himself over the decades, and you can revisit my encounters with him in 1975, 1976, 1998, 2017 … and a postmortem with two of his biographers in 2021.

Bonus, from 1997, on the occasion of Lee’s 75th birthday. Ten things I learned from Marvel Comics written by Stan Lee.

If you enjoyed this, check out my other archival work on the comics.

How best to open a podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:19:00 +0000

I haven’t posted much here lately about my work with the talented team I helped assemble a decade ago at Rivet (now formally known as Rivet360)—mostly in secret at the beginning.

That’s partly because, as I’ve shifted focus since 2017 to my award-winning Chicago Public Square email news briefing (subscribe free!), I’ve eased into a role as Rivet’s Vice President of Editorial and Development—or, as I call myself, Nagger-in-Chief.

And it’s partly because the company’s shifted its focus from journalism to become an innovative podcast consultancy—producing audio for others as well as shows of its own.

One of those shows, PodWell—a guide to becoming better podcasters—is hosted by my friend and colleague Terri Lydon, who was kind enough to share the mic with me in her June 6 edition (recorded May 3, 2023, when I was just getting over a cold or something else that really wasn’t COVID-19).

That gave me nine minutes or so to nag on one of my favorite topics: How best to open a podcast.

If you like this, check out more of my podcast guidance on Rivet’s website and elsewhere on this blog.

And hear more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora or Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

(Meyerson headshot: Steve Ewert.)

Science fiction writer Greg Bear in 1994: The Internet’s future

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 14:39:00 +0000

[Updating this original post—from March 1, 2015—on Nov. 20, 2022: Greg Bear is dead at 71.]

Science fiction writer Greg Bear in a 1994 interview with me on WNUA-FM, Chicago, on the future of the Internet:

“It’s going to be a huge intellectual telephone line, with graphics and library materials, all available at a few minutes’ notice. That, I think, will be revolutionary. ... We have a lot of people from the entertainment industries thinking it’s going to be a lot of the same old, same old — where they can simply market movies in new ways, and I don’t think it’s going to be that way at all. ... The people who are loosely called Generation Xers are going to have their say on this. And I think we may not be able to predict what they’re going to do with it.”

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: A later interview with Greg Bear, from 1996, when we talked about the prospect of life on Mars.

Chicago Public Square: I built it for free, and you can do the same

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 03:37:00 +0000

On Sept. 22, 2022, I was invited to talk to members of the Oak Park Temple B’nai Abraham Zion congregation via Zoom about the story behind the story of the creation of Chicago Public Square. The thrust of my message was this: Virtually for free, I created this email newsletter for people who live in and care about the Chicago region, and you—or anyone you know—can do the same for any subject matter about which you’re passionate.

You can see edited video excerpts here or read the rough transcript below.

Charlie Meyerson 0:00
All right, I want to take you back to early 2017. Donald Trump was just taking office and I had some time on my hands. I was then, as I am still, vice president of editorial and development at Rivet, which is a smartphone app that aspired to reinvent radio news. But it had become mainly a job in which I was of counsel. I like to refer to myself at Rivet as the complainer-in-chief or nagger-in-chief. Anyway, early in 2017, I was getting restless. And I had some time on my hands. As it turns out, some of my friends were getting restless, too—one of them, a working mother I’d known since she was in high school. She sent me a message on Facebook with some measure of desperation: “Every time I looked at Facebook or Twitter, terrible things were happening in our government. Is there any news source that’s keeping track of things that are happening day by day, just in bullet form? And if there’s a resource you found or you’re doing one, please let me know.”

Well, that’s basically a newscast, rounding up the news. And that’s something I’ve always kind of been—a newscaster. This is something I created when I was 7 years old, delivered to my living room from another part of my living room—by Beany Copter. Some of you may remember this ad … [ad plays]

I still have my Beany Copter—although it’s cracked. There, in the middle of the propellers, was a little tiny compartment you could fold up and put a piece of paper in, and I delivered that thing you saw from one part of the room to another part of the room. My mom no doubt read it.

So I went on to work at my high school newspaper, the Sandburg Aquila. And for the first 20 years or so of my adult career, after graduating from the University of Illinois, I went on to be a radio newscaster—first at an AM/FM combination in Aurora. And then it was on to WXRT. And later at WNUA, a now-defunct smooth jazz station in Chicago. And in 1998, I made the leap from radio to the internet, with the then-new thing called chicagotribune.com, where I launched and produced a daily email newsletter called Daywatch, which was revolutionary in its time because it was conversational—read like a radio newscast, surprise, surprise—and it dared to link to the websites that weren’t part of the Tribune family. It was a comprehensive news roundup. That’s a practice that stopped shortly after I left the Tribune family.

For more than a decade now, since then, across several jobs, I’ve continued that tradition of learning things and then sharing them—not via Beany Copter, but now on Facebook and Twitter.

And so, when my friend—one of several friends with the same concern, in fact—asked after a news source that is keeping track of things, I had a couple of thoughts: One was, “Hey, I know how to do that.” And the other was, “What have I been telling job seekers and others with too much time on their hands to do when they come to me asking for job advice?” And the answer to that question for more than a decade almost always takes this form: “Don’t wait for someone to pay you to do what you love doing. Start a blog and just do it.”

And so, I just did it.

And because, as much as anything, Chicago Public Square was designed as a demonstration project to show others how they can launch a media brand or regular coverage of any subject, I’m going to take you step-by-step through what I did and how I did it. As you’ll see, there’s nothing here anyone can’t do. And maybe it’ll inspire you—or inspire you to inspire someone you know—to do something very much like this. As a bonus, we’ll keep a running tally of what it cost me to launch Chicago Public Square—which as you’ll see, is virtually nothing.

Step one, I created a blog with a working title of Chicago Public Square on Blogger.com and on Wordpress.com. These are two of the most venerable blogging sites on the internet. And I wanted to compare the two, both of which are free to start. The hard part is picking and tweaking a design. That’s a process that offers near-infinite possibilities. And it can be hard to walk away from that. I picked Blogger in the end because I liked the interface better and I was able to tweak the design at almost no cost.

I bought a private design. But I could’ve used one of Blogger’s free designs. The cost of that design was $10. But it could have been $0.

I came up with and registered the name Chicago Public Square. You can buy from Google domains for $12. (I did not buy CharlieIsCheap.com. That’s purely for demonstration purposes.) Okay, I’m up to $22.

So I plugged my Blogger blog into that domain. Cost: Zero. Still $22. Which I really didn’t have to pay.

Then I signed up for a free Mailchimp service that at that point let you send about 12,000 emails a month to 2,000 or fewer subscribers for free. Now, that’s since changed; you get 500 contacts with 2,500 email sends a month and a limit of 500 per day. But even that would have been good enough to get me going.

You manually can create your email in Mailchimp or you can have Mailchimp scrape your website each day at the same time and automatically send whatever it finds on your website. And if it finds nothing, it doesn’t send anything. Again, additional cost of this: Zero. Still at 22 bucks.

I made sure a Mailchimp subscribe box pops up when people visit ChicagoPublicSquare.com. So, as I told people, “Come see what I’ve done at ChicagoPublicSquare.com,” they’d get a little reminder: “Hey, sign up to get still no additional cost.” Still at 22 bucks, which I didn’t have to pay.

OK, here I got extravagant: I printed up 1,000 business cards because why not? Cost of that? 28 bucks and 65 cents. So now I’m up to $51. Again, all optional expenses.

Here’s where, you know, I had an advantage that others might not have: I began publicizing it. Basically, that meant telling my friends and asking them to tell their friends. Now in my case, some of my friends happened to be in the media business. Media blogger Robert Feder, who’s most recently retired—but back then, and still to this day, has a big following if he chooses to use it. He was kind enough to write about Square. Lars, the mystery man who ran the Chicagoland Radio and Media website and email newsletter that has since gone away. And Justin Kaufman, who at that point was working at WGN Radio, and now he’s working for Axios Chicago. Justin had me on, I talked about it and got a few dozen new subscribers—after being on WGN Radio, where I used to work. You might not have friends in the media—or, you know, someone else who’s launching an email newsletter might not have friends in the media—but the principle is the same: Your friends can be and can help grow your audience. Cost of this kind of publicity: $0.

I left out Step Zero: Get a lot of friends. If you aspire to follow my lead—or if someone you know is aspiring to follow my lead, and that person is not now building a huge list of connections on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and Snapchat, Pinterest or wherever friends are hanging out—they should get to work on it. There’s a reason that, when I teach journalism, I give my students extra credit for every 20 Twitter followers they gain over the course of a semester. Those connections—people who follow you—are golden in undertaking any new communications venture, or when you’re hired by someone else at a more established organization. And in my case, my thousands of connections on Facebook and Twitter made up the core audience for my startup. And they helped drive circulation from zero at the end of January to almost 800 in a few weeks—early April. Cost: Zero.

So where are we? Total expenditures to launch Chicago Public Square: $50.65, rounding up to $51. And as you remember, even those expenses were optional. And that’s it. Except for one more thing: Sending to that many people every weekday in the course of a couple of months pushed me into Mailchimp’s tier for paid customers. So that was $15 a month. Total cost two months in: 66 bucks or so. But that’s a good problem to have, more people signing up. And you begin to see, well, OK, if I reach this many people, there may be ways to monetize this. In the years since launch, circulation has grown a bit. I now pay Mailchimp, partly because it’s raised its rates to almost 70 bucks a month. But more on that in a bit.

Once I’d assembled a growing audience, a few advertisers stepped forward—friends in some cases. And that wasn’t coming close to compensating me for my work—about three or four hours a day—but it was something and I loved it. And, as my family knows, it’s compulsive behavior, money be damned. So I did it for about a year for free, virtually, with a few ads along the way. But after about a year, in February 2018, I launched a program modeled more or less after public broadcasting. “Do you like this? Is it worth anything to you?” Subtext: What would you pay me to keep me from quitting?

And I didn’t launch a paywall. In my consulting work, I tell content creators that building an audience is Job No. 1 and paywalls cripple that mission.

So, actually to my surprise over the last five and a half years, even as circulation has grown steadily, a pretty dependable 15 or 16% of the audience has chipped in $5 to $7 a month per person to keep me doing this work. That covers the costs and gives me enough lunch money to not have to beg my wife on occasion for an infusion of cash. And it’s a nice little part-time job.

But the work isn’t easy, and it is intense.

I decided to make Square a five-days-a-week newsletter, beamed up and blasted out by Mailchimp every morning at 10 a.m. I begin around 7:30 or 8 and I work until Mailchimp sucks up the website and sends it out. And those hours are jam-packed because there’s so much news in the eras of Trump and a pandemic and so much more everything-everywhere-all-at-once for the last few years. But one advantage of having Mailchimp sweep the site precisely at 10 is that I have to stop. At least, there’s not much point in working after 10 because the email’s already gone out.

One of the downsides of working in digital media is it makes real one of my favorite quotes: Leonardo da Vinci’s “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” If I didn’t have that deadline. I’d have a hard time moving on from the work—because, “Oh wait! Something just happened! I can tweak the newsletter, hang on just another 5 or 10 minutes.” And I’d be working on it all day and it might never go out.

So what is the work? The lovely thing about an email newsletter and a blog/website is that it’s a platform that can support virtually all kinds of creative media including original reporting like this, early on: The first video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s then newly renovated landmark Unity Temple in Oak Park, which was conducted with just an iPhone, a microphone and a friend who held the phone as I did this:

[Video excerpt plays] 13:41

CM: 14:00
… a podcast series

[Podcast excerpt plays]

… and even a short-lived award-winning newscast series.

[Newscast excerpt plays]

I loved that. It was a return to my broadcasting roots, but I abandoned it after 60 episodes—enough to win an award. It demanded a lot of time, and the audience wasn’t growing anywhere near as fast as the email newsletter’s was.

One of the greatest joys of my now 5 1/2 years doing Chicago Public Square has been my all-too-brief partnership with Oak Parker—and for a time, long before Square was born, my fellow hockey dad—Keith J. Taylor. Keith was our relentless, insightful and hilarious breaking-news cartoonist whose work for Square won him a 2020 Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award for best illustration, and—not long after his death in December 2021—Chicago Reader readers’ Best of Chicago Award for Best Comics Illustrator. Brilliant, hilarious, funny, insightful, unrelenting, he’d send me a dozen cartoons in a day. The hardest part of working with him was deciding which of his breaking-news cartoons to run.

For the most part, Square’s an email news roundup: Need-to-know items from the nation and the world and the region, important or interesting or significant for Chicago-area readers. And how I find those items is something that you can do for any subject—whether it’s a sports team, a local community, your favorite element on the periodic table—even if you don’t have an email newsletter, or a blog or a media presence of any sort.

A lot of my friends are quick to poo-poo Twitter and Facebook. I find them both very rewarding experiences, although I use them differently than a lot of people do. I follow smart and knowledgeable people on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter in particular, I don’t necessarily follow friends or relatives. In my case, the focus is on many of the Chicago and Washington and national journalists I know personally, or whose work I know and respect. Like, for instance, David Farenthold—who, as Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab put it, went from tweeting pictures of his notepad to winning a Pulitzer Prize.

For you, the lineup of people you follow could be experts in nuclear physics, or knitting or pickleball, or whatever interests you. But follow smart people. And then whatever the field, wherever the experts or wherever your social cluster is, you let apps like TweetShelf, or NewsLit.co know. You give them your Twitter account and who you follow on Twitter. And it serves up the articles that they are sharing. In my case, I get to see what some of the smartest journalists in the world are sharing. And then I get to look smart by sharing what they’re sharing and commenting on them. And eventually, if I actually read them, become more of an expert myself in the things that they are sharing. It’s a great way to take advantage of the collective intelligence of social media without getting too deep in the weeds yourself. And the nice thing is, you can see at a glance, as you can see here, how many people are tweeting something. It gives you a gauge of just how appealing, engaging, interesting or significant a piece of news is.

So all of this work—the gathering, the information, creating media, sending out a daily email news blast—has paid off in a number of ways since 2017, with honors and recognition. And in the years since its launch, Square has evolved a bit: New typography and a reader support program.

But it’s basically the same idea I had at the start—and by start, I mean 1998 at the Tribune. It’s Chicago’s new front page, and I hope you have a chance to check it out. Subscribe for free. If you like it, tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell people about whom you’re ambivalent. And that’s where we are. That’s the end of my presentation.

Now questions, complaints, criticism?

Alan Hoffstadter 19:51
I’m more disconnected than most. I don’t use Twitter. I’m not particularly happy with Facebook.

CM 20:04
Why? Why? Why not?

AH 20:06

Too much information. TMI.

Yeah, once upon a time, I prided myself—I’m looking back to 2016 and before that—on not unfriending anybody on Facebook. And, as 2017 dawned, it was pretty clear that a lot of those people were going to be more trouble than they were worth. So I unfriended them. And the result has been, for me, a consistently enlightening experience on Facebook, I actually do spend time on Facebook looking at what people share—much more so than on Twitter, where, as I explained, I let these other apps filter. I think if you’re not on Twitter, you should be on Twitter, even if it’s just to follow a few people you respect—you know, whether they are academic experts or politicians or journalists or communicators or authors. And then again, if even that experience on Twitter is too much for you, these other services are great at just saying, “Hey, the people you respect are sharing them.”

AH 21:17
Anybody who can give me capsules of what’s happening every day is a delight. And you’re only going to be one of two that I follow. And Eric Zorn is the other one.

CM 21:27
Eric and I are old friends going back to the Tribune, and he and I actually—we feed on one another. I mean, I often will link to his blog, and he will link to mine, and Eric does a great job. I helped Eric launch his first blog at the Tribune, because that was one of my jobs back at the Tribune. Yeah, you know, it’s one of the subtexts of what I do. And there are others like it, including Axios Chicago and City Cast Chicago: “We read the news, so you don’t have to” …

AH 22:06

Thank you.

CM 22:08

… sort of the subtitle for what I do. Well, the great feedback is certainly welcome. You know, good, bad, indifferent. One of the things I didn’t talk about—and one of the things I tell people who are concerned about fake news or their news sources—is: Look for sites that accept and make corrections. That’s a fundamental distinction in my mind between the good guys and gals, and the bad ones. And one of the salient features of Chicago Public Square is, “Did we make a mistake? Send us corrections.” Some of my journalist friends think I go overboard in taking corrections on punctuation and spelling, but, you know, for me, it’s a reward to know that people are paying that much attention to what I do, and then taking time to tell me that I made a mistake. Corrections are, perversely, a way of sort of encouraging me to keep doing it.

Doug Fager 23:08
How do we avoid being in a self-reflective echo chamber? How can your site ensure that it’s bringing a diversity of opinion?

CM 23:25
Well, I gotta tell you, it’s a challenge in this age. You know, I like to say that I will follow anyone who is authoritative and rational. And there ain’t a lot of rationality on what some of us might consider to be the other side. And yet, there are some reliable, rational conservatives out there. And I follow them, and I’m happy to link to them when they say something that is relevant or engaging for Chicago. And I encourage everyone … to be proactive in seeking people who might have different perspectives, but who argue rationally and intelligently about those other perspectives. It’s getting harder and harder to find Republicans—to be precise, you know, rational Republicans. The party has boiled down to a seething mass of hatred. So it’s very difficult.

DF 24:46
You’re not getting pushback from readers—at least not much pushback from a large portion of readers—because they’re kind of in sync with your view of the world and that’s partly why they’re there?

CM 24:56
Every once in a while, I get an unsubscribe note. And one I got recently inspired me to have some T-shirts made. Imagine I’m holding it up: On the front, it has the Chicago Public Square logo; on the back, it says “Leftist claptrap.” So every once in a while, I get one. Most people will just unsubscribe and say No reason given. But every once in a while, someone will type in a reason and, you know, people who find what I do to be less than subservient to the former president and his followers will object and let me know in no uncertain terms. And I think these T-shirts will be very popular. The box just arrived yesterday. So … some but not much. I mean, that’s the joy of email. It’s free. If you don’t like it, unsubscribe. I’d rather have people keep reading; I’d rather have people write in. When people write back with rational objections or counterpoints, I’m happy to, you know, publish letters to the Chicago Public Square mailbag—often at the bottom of our email. But I don’t get a lot of emails.

DF 26:18
When I’m reading The New York Times, some of the most interesting reading is what people have to say about the story—what they might like, or what they disagree with in this story.

CM 26:29
If you go to ChicagoPublicSquare.com—and there’s a link at the top of every email that says, see today’s edition on the web, or read it in your browser—there is at the bottom of every post, “Comment on this story. It’s a Facebook widget, so I think you need to be a Facebook user to comment. So you can certainly comment on Chicago Public Square there. Or you can just reply to any edition of Square in your email, and I will get that. It won’t let the world see it, but the stories that I linked to can be commented on if the websites that are hosting those stories allow comments. Sadly, Chicago’s main news websites—the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the TV stations—don’t allow comments anymore. When I was at the Tribune we did. But it’s a lot of work to manage those message boards and to keep hate and ignorance at bay. So, especially as the economy has become tough for newspapers—and radio stations and increasingly TV stations—they’re not staffing that kind of service anymore. That’s where the Facebook plugin becomes a little of a labor-saver—in that you have to play within Facebook’s borders, which are still pretty liberal. But at least you generally have to have an account, and so, if you do something truly reprehensible, you can be blocked or shut down.

But again, in Chicago Public Square, frankly, I had hoped at the beginning that there would be a lot more input from readers and I had hoped that there would be a more robust discussion within the pages of Chicago Public Square, within the email of Chicago Public Square, that we’d have a letter section regularly, but I don’t get that many comments. Which is okay. I mean, it’s as much as anything a utility. People are reading it and opening it and getting their news and coming back the next day. If that makes them happy, and they don’t need to comment, I’m okay with that.

AH 28:41
That’s an interesting point, Charlie. I read the Tribune, electronically, daily. And, when I like something that a columnist—well, used to be a lot more columnists …—I’ve written them on a number of occasions. I’ve even written the photographers and I have to tell you, nobody’s writing them. If you feel uncomfortable that you’re not getting anything, I can tell you that some very important people at the Tribune don’t often get things either and are delighted to hear from us. Because it means somebody who doesn’t necessarily have newsprint on their fingers is looking at their stuff and saying, “Oh, that was great” and encouraging them to do it again. I get such nice, you know, comments back from people. The last one I wrote was Nina Metz and then I got a lovely— That was the last one I can remember. So don’t feel bad that you’re not getting any response.

CM 29:54
I absolutely understand that. And, you know, people have lives. You know, people don’t write fan letters to TV shows that they watch religiously, they don’t write letters to radio hosts that they listen to, or even podcasts they listen to. So I’m fine with that. I’m delighted when somebody tells me, as somebody did today, “You left a period off at the end of the sentence.” Because that tells me this is someone who is paying rapt attention to what I’m doing. And that’s excellent feedback.

DF 30:30
So I was wondering how much your traffic drives what you decide to link to. It’s a chicken-and-egg question. You know, who’s driving whom?

CM 30:43
It’s a little bit of each. Because I don’t know that everybody’s aware of this, and you should probably know it, and I wish I could turn off this information: When somebody clicks on a link in one of my emails—almost any email newsletter you get, certainly those sent by Mailchimp—Mailchimp makes available to the creators of that email a list of people who clicked on that link. OK, I would prefer not to know which individuals clicked on like; I’d prefer just to know 27 people clicked on this link, 300 people clicked on this link, that would be much better for me. I wish Mailchimp didn’t give me that information. If you’re at all squeamish about having somebody know that you clicked the link—and, on the one hand, I don’t think you should be; I mean, if you’re the sort of person who is willing to write a letter, it’s like sending a little note, “Hey, I thought that was interesting.” … But if you’re all squeamish about it, there are services you can use to avoid that.

But to get back to your point, one of the joys of creating this, going back to my days at the Tribune when this was brand-new stuff, was to be able to say—and I’ve done consulting on this—OK, in an email newsletter, we have 30, links. And in a perfect world, where every link is as interesting as the others—can’t miss, gotta click, gotta read this—if they were all equally interesting, which would be the most clicked?

DF 32:36
The one easiest to reach up front, I suppose.

CM 32:42
Number one, the first one. Which would be the least clicked?

DF 32:45

I suppose the last.

CM 32:48

Yeah. People get called away, you know, the baby’s crying, gotta make breakfast, you know, you gotta do something else. But you know, if every one was can’t resist, you gotta click this—and that’s, of course, what I and anyone who creates email aspire to do—the interesting thing is, when the click patterns diverge from that, when the most-clicked link is at the bottom, that’s a revelatory moment for content creators. It says, you know, “Hey, Charlie, you thought this was among the least interesting, or at least significant, but, you know, your audience is telling you they’re really, really interested in this. And so next time, Charlie, and consider putting it higher, where even more people will see it, or maybe lead with it next time.”

An example this week: Chris Redd, who’s a longtime, five-year member of the Saturday Night Live cast, is retiring. (I misspelled his name; a number of people wrote to tell me I had Rudd. I’m gonna blame autocorrect for that.) It was at the bottom, or very close to the bottom It was the most clicked link, or one of the most clicked links, in the issue. And this is a pattern I’ve seen: Saturday Night Live is one of those things that—for my audience, at least—is of widespread interest. Should I have led with that? I don’t think so. Because my mission, in my mind, is news that’s going to have some significant long-term impact on society. I, you know, have slightly loftier aims than that. Had I led with it, it probably still would have been the most clicked link in the issue, and it probably would have been clicked on by even more readers. But it’s a reminder to me: Hey, next time there’s Saturday Night Live news, do include it.

I’m not alone in this. This is an industry-wide trend: News engagement overall—whether it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post or Chicago Public Square—has dropped since Joe Biden became president. Everything is just a little less intense. There’s still plenty of intensity. But even so, when I link to—let’s say blunt—content about President Trump, those often are among or are the most-clicked links in the issue. There is still for my audience, at least—in Chicago, frankly, probably more traditionally liberal—a lot of interest in seeing Donald Trump get his comeuppance, or maybe get his comeuppance, or be threatened with his comeuppance. So that kind of thing also bounces to the top. And so it’d be very easy to do nothing but Donald Trump news. But today’s edition—let me call it back—actually, I’ll look at my metrics from today …

The most-clicked link in today’s issue was indeed a link that is like the fourth or fifth link down in the issue. You know, it’s even further down than that. The phrasing was “Politico: Five juicy takeaways from the suit,” of the lawsuit against Donald Trump. Words like juicy—that’s a quote from Politico—will drive traffic. And Donald Trump drives traffic. So that’s the most-clicked link in the issue, but it is, let’s see, probably about the 10th link in the issue. And what I led with instead was something that got clicked about 30% less—about Governor Pritzker calling for the resignation of two Democratic state lawmakers accused of wrongdoing—which just happened this morning, I led with that because it was new, a relatively fresh news release that came out around 7 or 7:30. Chicago Public Square came out around 10. I figured a lot of my readers hadn’t seen that. And then the follow-up was State Sen. Emil Jones, who a Sun-Times editorial says sold himself way too cheaply in bribery. And then a story about pink slime—you may have heard about these bogus news organizations that are pretending to be newspapers or websites, but that are sharing bogus information. I thought those were more significant in the long term and relevant to Chicago and Illinois politics than yet another—a big turn of the screw, but yet another turn of the screw—in the ongoing saga of Donald Trump, even though I knew that Trump would be the big appeal. … It’s a little bit like a chef: You know, “People like sugar, how much sugar should I put in here? Should it be on top? Should it be in the middle? Should it be infused?” (I know nothing about cooking. So that metaphor might not be very good.)

Janet Kelenson 38:21
This morning on one of the networks, I was listening to the news, and they featured something about a squirrel invading someone’s home office. And I changed the channel because I wanted to hear real news. So with that Chris Redd piece, I understand that that makes sense to have that in. And I hope that cultural content that’s worthwhile makes it in.

CM 38:57
I’m willing to keep talking. I’ve talked too long. I mean, we’ve been at this about an hour. I’m at your disposal, but I also don’t want people to feel obligated to stick around as I blather on.

JK 39:09
Are there further questions for Charlie? Usually, our guests speak for about an hour or so I think we’re right in the ballpark on that. And we want to thank you for your presentation and your willingness to talk candidly with us. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much.

CM 39:33
It’s been my honor. Again, I hope you all check it out. And I hope you all let me know when I leave a period off at the end of the sentence.

Transcribed by Otter.ai

Why I should never sing in public

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 18:31:00 +0000

Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky was kind enough to invite me on his show this week—we talked Wednesday, the podcast was published Saturday—to answer questions about how and why I do what I do for Chicago Public Square.

I was honored along the way to express my admiration for columnists Neil Steinberg and Robert Feder, Reader critic Jack Helbig, The Onion, WXRT-FM News pioneers C.D. Jaco and Linda Brill, Square reader Angela Mullins, radio DJs Bob Stroud and Marty Lennartz, my college radio station WPGU …

… and to deliver an ill-advised musical tribute to my alma mater, Carl Sandburg High School, whose fight song I was—for reasons that elude me now—moved to butcher.

You’ve been warned. Here it is.

If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora or Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

1995: Peter David, Chris Claremont and Gary Colabuono discuss the comic book industry’s flirtation with disaster

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 23:17:00 +0000

[It’s been a while since we dove into the archives. But now that hour’s come round at last—again.]

In 1995, the comic book industry was approaching what later became known as “the Great Comics Crash of 1996”—triggered in part by Marvel Comics’ 1994 purchase of the business’ third-largest distributor, converting it to distribute Marvel’s stuff exclusively.

So that was a significant topic June 30, 1995, when I sat down at WNUA-FM in Chicago—just ahead of the 20th annual Chicago Comicon*—with acclaimed comics writers Peter David and Chris Claremont, maybe best known then for their work on Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk and The Uncanny X-Men, respectively; and the convention’s CEO, Classics International Entertainment President Gary Colabuono, also then the proprietor of Moondog’s comic shops.

Here’s how it went.

Looking back on that time now, Colabuono recalls: “Marvel’s decision to distribute their own comics was not only the death knell for direct market distributors, it was also the beginning of the end for the vast majority of comic book specialty shops in the U.S. Of the 21 stores in the Moondog’s chain, 20 were out of business within a year of Marvel’s move.”

I’ve also asked David and Claremont for their perspectives on that time. I’ll share them as they arrive.

But here’s David’s July 28, 1995, reflection on that year’s con: “If Gary Colabuono … asks you to be guest of honor, two words—Do It. Gary is the consummate host, making sure that you want for nothing and taking care that every need is anticipated.”

* For a show that was broadcast July 2, which explains David’s joke at the end, “Boy, am I exhausted from that!”

‘120 Miles on a Bike’

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 19:47:00 +0000

That was the headline bestowed on an “Off the Beat” column I wrote as a college student and occasional stringer for the southwest suburban Star-Herald newspaper, Aug. 26, 1976 (Page 10, to be precise). Here for historical purposes is the full text, lightly edited. Because I’m a little smarter now.

Now that the numbness has left my fingers, the callouses have left my legs and the dust has been washed out of my hair, the story can be typed:

How my friend Roger and I bicycled 120-plus miles from Champaign-Urbana to Orland Park via Route 45—[with me] on a Raleigh Record 10-speed—in just 14 hours and 15 minutes.

And lived.

Despite the 20 mile-an-hour winds from the north, large trucks and small compacts alike edging us off the highway, broken glass and dead skunks in the middle of the road.

IT WAS originally a “let’s get some exercise and discover America” proposal.

I got the exercise–even if Roger, in much better shape and with a much lighter bicycle, had to wait for me to catch up (puff, gasp, wheeze) every two or three miles.

And we discovered America, too.

Two of them.

ONE AMERICA is full of friendly people like the nice grocer in Ashkum (“Where you folks comin’ from and goin’ to?) who sold us lunch (a quart of milk and a box of Pop-Tarts apiece) and let me—a bearded, hippie-type stranger—change clothes in his restroom; the curious high-school kids in Onarga; and the friendly, courteous and curious gas-station attendants in Paxton, Loda, Buckley, Kankakee and all the rest.

I confess: Before undertaking that Illinois odyssey, I had visions of middle-American lynch mobs riding Roger and me out of town on a rail.

It just didn’t happen. People are nice. But there’s another America. And it’s not so nice.

Something happens to all those nice grocers, gas-pumpers and gawking kids when they get behind the wheel of a car or a truck.

I tell you, they’re killers.

FINGERS AND TOES aren’t enough to count the number of times Roger and I nearly lost our left ears to vehicles passing us without giving us even half the leeway they would have given the smallest of cars.

(You’ve got to understand that bicycles—especially racers—can go sprawling any which way if they hit even a little pebble.

(So the gravel shoulder along most of Route 45 is unnavigable for two-wheelers. But there's nowhere else to go when those passing cars barrel past.)

Fortunately for cyclists, we’ve got a little more highway savvy than the average animal wandering down the street.

Lots of our furry friends get cut down mercilessly by that other, sinister, motoring America. Mashed animal, it seems, lined our path, from Urbana all the way to Orland Square.

IN A NUMBER of instances, Roger and I almost joined them:

You’ve never looked fear in the eye until you’ve bicycled toward side-by-side cars zooming at you 55 miles an hour on a curving, two-lane highway.

That strip of shoulder may have been pitifully narrow, but Roger and I were glad we could cling to it as those motorists motored merrily along.

Had we been driving a Volkswagen, you might be able to slide us into your toaster today.

BUT WE made it.

Once we rolled our bikes into the comfortable haven of my garage and showered, Roger and I slumped on a couch, heaving sighs of relief.

“Well,” he asked me in his best sarcastic Glencoe drawl, “did you discover America today?”

The answer is yes.

I discovered America, all right. But I’m not sure I like all of it. It’s a strange society, split by this gas-powered schizophrenia.

For all its commitment to cutting down on fuel use, America still doesn’t provide the basics to its bicycling public.

WE WHO pedal don’t waste fuel and put far less wear and tear on roads than our gas-guzzling fellow travelers.

But we’ve still got to look far and, unfortunately, not so wide to find roads with even a token strip of pavement—not gravel, mind you—that we can call our own.

In a nation where the highway death toll has long since exceeded the number of citizens dead in all our wars, I think it’s time we took a long look at bicycling as one cure to our motor madness.

In the meanwhile, I’m risking the perilous trip back to Champaign with my bicycle.

The bike will be strapped to the trunk.

I hope we both make it.

Ex-Chicago Tribune editor James Squires warned in 1993 about the corporate takeover of America’s newspapers

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:40:00 +0000

Back in 1993, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune sounded an alarm about the growing conflict between the drive for corporate profits and traditional journalism’s social-reform agenda.

That was close to six years before I joined the Trib and close to two decades before that trend inexorably led to a gutting of the paper’s staff.

As the paper welcomes a new editor, now seems like a good time to revisit the words of Jim Squires, talking about his book Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers—in an interview recorded Feb. 3, 1993, and aired Feb. 7 on WNUA-FM, Chicago. Listen up.

If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

How I got the shot

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 22:57:00 +0000

My recent post about landing my first COVID-19 shot drew the inevitable surge of questions from people asking, “How’d you do it?”

Acknowledging that ever-evolving protocol may have changed by the time you read this—but in the interest of helping others and spotlighting the challenges faced by those who don’t have or aren’t used to computers—here’s the step-by-step I used:

A friend familiar with Rush University Medical Center’s vaccine logistics advised me that Rush sometimes gets (or through cancellations winds up with) extra doses—and that those typically become available at or after 4 or 4:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays for those ready and willing to snag a last-minute same-day appointment.

My friend explained that the vaccines can go not just to Rush patients but also to anyone who’s currently eligible under state or city guidelines* and who’s signed up via Rush’s free online portal, “My Rush powered by MyChart.”

If you’re a Rush patient, you’re probably already in the system. I hadn’t been to Rush for more than a decade, so I signed up as a Guy Nobody Sent:

You simply enter some basic information—including the last four digits of your Social Security number—to get an activation code that puts you in the system within seconds.

Then, it’s just a matter of checking the Rush signup page relentlessly.

But getting to that page isn’t intuitive:

Once you’ve logged in, the trick is to click on the Menu icon in the upper lefthand corner and then the “Schedule an Appointment” dropdown option.

Then, click “COVID Vaccine for Eligible Patients.”

Next, a few quick questions about your eligibility, a pledge to cancel your appointment should your situation change, affirmation you’ve read the fine print, acknowledgment of any allergies you may have … and then you’re on a quest no doubt familiar to anyone who’s been in the hunt for tickets to a big concert. (Remember concerts?)

That includes having to answer those same questions over and over again.

If fate smiles on you, a bunch of same-day appointments will show up right off the bat. In my case, at 4 p.m. Feb. 18, I saw a batch of openings for March 10. But by the time I entered my insurance information—not required, but if you’re going to enter it, do so in advance!—they were all gone.

I tried again around 4:28, and a few dozen appointments appeared for that very evening. Unthinkingly, I grabbed 5:20, before realizing Gee, that’s less than an hour from now!

I bolted out the door—all the while cursing myself, Would it have killed you to wait until 7?—and made it in time.

Note: Rush schedules a second shot at the time you get the first.

To recap: The main obstacles, aside from being lucky—and lucky enough to have a computer and an internet connection—are …

1. Creating a My Rush profile—entering insurance information if you have it—in advance.

2. Clicking that Menu icon in the upper lefthand corner.

Now imagine not having a computer and an internet connection.

And say an extra prayer for those who don’t.

_____

* I’m 66.

Email pioneer Aaron Barnhart interviewed in 1996

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 22:59:00 +0000

Of all the interviews I’ve conducted, none have influenced my career more than this 1996 sit-down with Aaron Barnhart, whose Late Show News newsletter pioneered the email news biz.

Listen to us discuss his model for how, in my words, “a lot of us in this profession will … do our work in the future” and you’ll hear the siren call that two years later would draw me from radio to the internet—and, not much later, to lead the Chicago Tribune’s email program.

Decades later, Barnhart’s work inspired the launch of Chicago Public Square.

First aired June 23, 1996, this show remains great and relevant listening, and it spotlights Aaron as one of the internet’s early visionaries.

Also: A cool time-capsule about the state of late-night TV in 1996.

Listen here.

Chicago 7 lawyer William Kunstler in 1994: That trial ‘changed me totally’

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 21:43:00 +0000

Prepping to watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix, I revisited my Sept. 16, 1994, interview with The 7’s defense lawyer, William Kunstler, who told me then that the trial “changed me totally. …

“I never knew what it was to really fight until I watched Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Hayden and so on fight in a courtroom—do things that would make the jury understand that they were being persecuted: Bringing in a birthday cake for Bobby Seale, a Viet Cong flag on their table, standing out and protesting the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale in the courtroom.

“There were so many things they did that showed they were fighting—they weren’t gonna sit there like bumps on a log and be railroaded.

“And the net result was they won.”

I realized I never shared this file to this blog and the accompanying podcast series. So here you go.

Check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

_____

P.S. I was apparently the first to inform Kunstler in 1983 of Judge Julius Hoffman’s death.

What is Meyerson Strategy?

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 19:16:00 +0000

Meyerson Strategy is intelligence gained from more than two decades watching audience behavior, often minute-by-minute, at some of Chicago’s most prominent digital news operations—including the Chicago Tribune.

Meyerson Strategy is insight built on decades in radio—where the mantra “Don’t be a tuneout” is baked into every story. Radio has fought tuneout almost from its inception. Now, when every organization finds its competition just a click away, “being a tuneout” is something no organization can afford.

Meyerson Strategy is innovation, honed on the startup frontier.

Meyerson Strategy is training, based on years of college lecturing and business consulting (American Bar Association, Crain Communications, Northwestern University, American Institutes for Research, Boeing Co., Direct Energy, Inside.com, The Brief Lab, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, and more).

Is your email newsletter going unopened? Is your website unvisited? Are your Facebook posts unshared? Is your podcast falling flat? Is your staff daunted by audience metrics? Meyerson Strategy will work for you.

A case study

A major professional organization, concerned its content wasn’t delivering the audience it could, asked for help. Meyerson Strategy gathered available analytics and then dissected subject lines, Web headlines and layout, social media performance, podcast structure and metrics.

That analysis demonstrated what was connecting and what wasn’t—and how to use insights from the one to improve performance of the other.

Outcome: Five successive months—and 10 of the following 12 months—of record pageviews for a site that previously hadn’t seen two successive record months. The owner of the company that helped develop the site calls the results “astonishing.”

Meyerson Strategy is about connecting great work with growing audiences—at the speed of news.

What is Meyerson Strategy? In a word: “Astonishing.”

If your great work needs to reach a larger audience, you need astonishing results.

You need Meyerson Strategy.

Read more recommendations.

Then email Meyerson Strategy.

Or call 708-TEQ-NEWS. Operators are standing by.

My hopes for journalism by 2030

noreply@blogger.com (Charlie Meyerson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:26:00 +0000

Invited by my friend and University of Nebraska Omaha Professor Jeremy Harris Lipschultz* to address the UNO Social Media Lab’s #Omaha2020 conference—assembled virtually today to predict the future of the news business over the next decade—I declined.

Events of the last four years in particular have dissuaded me from making predictions.

Instead, I shared my hopes for the future of the news business—adapted in part from a January piece I filed for Newcity.

Got five minutes to spare? Here you go.

* To whose book, Social Media Communication, I’ve been honored to contribute through several editions.