Jamey Tucker’s BlogSquat

Joe Larkins rolled the “breaking news open” and scooped everybody on the departure of Andy Wise from the station on the river.

This is big news. Andy is a name most mid-south viewers know well. Some love him, some hate him. The important thing is…people look for him. Andy came to WREG a few months before I did in 1997. He soon became a household name in the Memphis market with his tenacious style of consumer and investigative reporting.

Andy’s one of the best at what he does and don’t let anyone kid you: this is a big coup for WMC and a big loss for WREG. It’s not every day a reporter is able to gain anchor-like status at a station but Andy certainly reached those heights quickly. And he’s done it the right way. He works as hard or harder as anyone I’ve ever known.

All of his hard work has paid off for him as I suspect (but don’t know) that WMC will write a handsome check every two weeks to have him on staff.

But what drove me to post here tonight is how stations let people walk out the door for the last time. I guess it’s been a NYT policy to escort employees from the building once their time is done. It happened with dozens of people I worked with and it happened to me.

I understand there’s reason for concern that a former employee could cause a scene as they walk out of the newsroom for the last time. I also understand the concern stations have for allowing someone to work out a notice if they’re going to work for a station in the same market.
But escorting a long-time employee from the building without so much as a farewell wave has an effect on newsroom morale.

That’s the way the NYT has always done things, but WREG is not a NYT station anymore. I wonder if the Oak Hill folks kept this policy in place. I doubt it. From what I’ve learned from managers who made the switch, the Oak Hill owners have given them the directive to “use your best judgement” on things big and small.

I think Andy being escorted from the building, which I’ve heard from several people, was a mistake. Sure…you probably couldn’t let him work out a two-week notice since he’s headed to WMC…but let the guy leave with a little dignity. No…I don’t mean Andy left without his dignity, but WREG lost some dignity with the way he left this morning.

He’s a big guy. He’s a professional. He’s an adult. He’s worked there for 10 years for crying out loud and worked his tail off for that station and the people who run it. At least, let him gather his things, say a few goodbyes and leave on a positive note. Instead, WREG escorts him out of the building like they would a transient who wandered in off the street.

Here in Nashville, they’ve had several people leave either to go to work at another station in town, out of town or who were let go or fired. But they’ve allowed them to say goodbye to their co-workers before walking out of the building. They didn’t have an “escort” like they might run by the supply cabinet and grab a couple of free pens and highlighters.

They said goodbye to their co-workers and friends and left with a smile on their face and their dignity.

I hope for the sake of the everyone working at the former NYT stations that the new managers choose to be a little more human when a good employee chooses to leave.

Good luck on Union Ave. Andy. But I don’t think you’ll need it.

I’ve somehow missed this viral video which was posted last June on YouTube.

The reporter is covering some community event when she tries to interview a kid who’s just had his face painted. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look.

But what’s even more entertaining is what’s happened since this clip hit the internet. Someone posted it on YouTube and it became a hit. Nearly 2.5 million hits as of tonight. But like most viral videos, half of the fun is looking at what others have done with or to the video.

There are 26 songs, animations, and long form music videos dedicated to the boy who “likes turtles”.

Thing is, this short clip wasn’t all that fantastic…was it? I’ve seen hundreds of things happen when a reporter puts a microphone in front of somebody on live tv. What made the difference with this one?

For some reason that lyric has always seemed very sad to me. It’s the last line to “Same Old Lang Syne” from Dan Fogelberg.

“The beer was empty and our tongues were tired
And running out of things to say
She gave a kiss to me as I got out and I watched her drive away
Just for a moment I was back at school
And felt that old familiar pain
And as I turned to make my way back home
The snow turned in to rain….”

It’s funny what you think about when you hear someone has died.
When I heard Dan Fogelberg had passed away at the age of 56, I thought of Kim Matthews. Kim was one of my friends in high school. A pretty cheerleader who was fairly new to our school.

I had just gone to the record store and bought Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne”. A 45. For you young folks reading this, a 45 wasn’t a gun in 1980, it was a single. A small record with a big hole that required a squiggly plastic center piece so you could play it on your parent’s hi-fi record player.

Another friend, Jimmy Stirling was having a Christmas party at his house and Kim and I went as a couple. As best as I can remember, it was my first “make-out party”.

At some point after we ate the chips and cake and drank the 7-Up and Cokes Jimmy’s mom put out for us, the lights went off and everybody started making out. “Same Old Lang Syne” was the hot new single that week and everybody wanted to hear it over and over again. Fogelberg’s slow-ballads were what some of us guys called “closing the deal” music.

Since I brought the record and since I sort of took the role of “dj” at all of our parties, I was in charge of the music. That posed a bit of a problem for me “getting busy” with my date since I had to stop what I was doing every 5 minutes and 21 seconds, to put the tone arm back at the beginning.

I must have repeated that about a dozen times that night. Playing it over and over and over. No wonder teenage pregnancy is such a problem today…makeout parties have cd players with the “repeat option”.

Later, when the lights came back on and everybody starting finding their rides home, someone pointed at me and started laughing. Soon, everybody was doing the same thing. I had no idea what they were staring and laughing at until somebody said “hickie!”.

There, on my neck were at least 4 round maroon and purple marks. Kim had practically sucked every drop of blood in my head to the skin of my neck. It was my first hickie. Actually my first, second, third and fourth hickies. Thank goodness someone noticed them before I got home because I doubt I would have known what they were and would have thought I was dying.

I wore at least four little round bandaids on my neck to Sunday School the next day.

So when I heard that Fogelberg passed away Sunday, I couldn’t help but think of Kim Matthews and wonder what I’d say if I “met her in the grocery store” some snowy Christmas Eve. If she’d go to hug me and spill her purse and whether we’d laugh until we cried.

Thanks Dan Fogelberg for one of my favorite high-school memories.

If you haven’t heard this song before, don’t listen unless you don’t care if someone sees you cry.

http://actsnetwork.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/bring-him-home-santa/

I used to be way ahead of much of the world when it came to new technology. But only this week have I joined the iPod revolution.

Let me say…it’s changed my life. And soon, it may change my tv habits.

I got the new iPod 4gb Nano which plays video along with music. It is my first mp3 player. The reason I’ve waited this long to jump on the mp3 wagon is because I don’t have much of a reason to listen to music on a portable device. I listen to cds in my truck along with the radio.

My mom gave me the nano for Christmas. And already, it’s made my life better. Tuesday I had a root canal so I took my new nano with me. I put in the earbuds while the endodontist started drilling. I put the nano on shuffle and closed my eyes. I turned it up loud so as to drown out the work.

Beautiful. My music, and probably my attempts to control the device with my eyes closed helped take my mind off the root canal.

But I didn’t get the nano for that, I got it to watch tv.

I’ve been an iTunes store fan for some time and I’ve downloaded a number of programs, mostly videoblogs to watch on my computer. Since we often have trouble finding something on cable to watch as a family, we’ve recently spent the evening watching video online. Now, with the nano, I can download the show, plug the nano into my big screen tv, and watch.

It’s where we’re headed. In the next five years I believe we’ll all be watching tv this way. Maybe not through an iPod, but through our computers hooked up to the television monitor.

A friend told me about this YouTube video today. I hope you laugh like I did.

I don’t go to many Christmas parties but the one I make every effort to go to was held tonight on Music Row.

I get to the party tonight and a valet takes my car. As I walk through the doors I hear a choir singing Christmas carols and as I’m standing at the coat-check I look behind me, and there’s Ray Stevens.

I can remember singing “The Streak” when I was in first grade. Then there was “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”, “Everything is Beautiful”, “The Shriner’s Convention” and of course, “It’s Me Again Margaret” which still makes me laugh even after hearing it hundreds of times.

I introduced myself, and exchanged pleasantries, and he was off in the crowd. I wanted to tell him how much I’ve enjoyed his music but people in Nashville don’t really do that when meeting celebrities. But it was really really cool.

And a funny thing happened on my way through the crowd. A guy walks up to me and asks “Aren’t you Jamey Tucker?”. After he introduced himself he told me he knew me from tv. Not in Nashville…but he remembered me from Huntsville. I started thinking this guy was probably in grammar school when I was still on the air there. Interesting market in Huntsville. I’d love to see ratings and numbers from all of the tv stations’ newscasts there and compare them to other markets. I would imagine, at least in the 90s, that cumulative numbers for the news broadcasts must have been gigantic.

It reminds me of a story I heard Tom Brokaw tell on Letterman many years ago. He said he was in Omaha, shopping in a department store when a man walked up and said “Aren’t you Tom Brokaw?” The NBC newsman said yes and the fellow said “My wife and I used to watch you do the news here in Omaha in the 60s. We watched you every night!”.
Brokaw told the man he was flattered that he was remembered from those days in the 1960s. Then the man said “what kind of work are you in now?”

The sign shouldn’t have surprised me. Walking out of Wal-Mart tonight it nearly slapped me in the head: “20 Shopping Days Left Until Christmas”.

I’ve bought nothing so far.

Not that I don’t know what to get. My youngest two both handed me Toys R Us circulars marked with enough red ink to put small countries in debt. Then tonight, our college freshman daughter sent me the first e-mail I’d gotten from her in months. It was her Christmas list.

*digital camera (cybershot)
*North Face jacket
*Patagonia jacket
*Uggs
*Wallabees
*Mac laptop

the asterisks aren’t my addition, those are the gifts she really really wants or needs. She got both a laptop and digital camera in the last 18 months!

I’ve made a promise to myself that I’m not going to get carried away with gifts this year. I figure the kids will get most of the things they want, but I’m not going to get them any junk. When I went through their toyboxes last week I found dozens of things that were under the tree last year that they either never played with or that broke.

Cameron called this morning to say she found some mp3 players for about $20 and a digital video camera for $30. I told her to put them back on the shelf and walk away. All of the really cheap techno gifts never work the way they’re supposed to. I wasted $ on a digital still camera for Trey last year that came with its own software. We never got it working. Dad gave him another one, nearly identical, for his birthday and we never got it working either.

I think if we cut out the junk and crap we usually buy and only get the good stuff, we’ll save money and they’ll all get things that will still be around come February.

But it’s time to get busy. The next 20 days will fly.

For maybe only the second day since I came to Nashville, I wore a suit and tie to work. I walk in the morning meeting and everyone stopped talking. “Wait” my news director said “Alright….what’s going on?”

I wore the suit and tie, I explained because I needed to go to a funeral. The mother of my good friend Jerry Hayes passed away this week and the funeral was this morning. I hoped that I might be able to arrange my story so I could go.

My attendance at the funeral seemed to be as important to my boss as it was to me. I can’t say how much I appreciate that. I’ve worked in other newsrooms where that might not have been the case.

Jerry Hayes anchors the news at WHNT in Huntsville and is a great guy. His mom died suddenly and I felt it was important for me to give him a hug and let him know that I was thinking of him.

There were several people there from Channel 19. People I didn’t just work with, but are part of a family there. I say that it’s like a family because there’s no other way to explain it. I’ve worked in, what six newsrooms and I’ve never felt the same atmosphere anywhere else.

Nonda, Dan, Marian, Steve, Amy, Greg, Stan all made the trip up to Nashville to be with Jerry. I’ve been gone from there 10 years but yet I still felt like a part of that family. I not only love those people but feel that they love me too.

Maybe the family thing is more evident in smaller market tv stations. Maybe it’s because when I was at WHNT it was during the time in my life when I got married and had my first child. Maybe it is simply the people who work there. But whatever it is, it is rare. Especially in the businesses of television.

There have been only a few places where I felt at home. One is home, where I was reared and lived nearly all of my life. The other was at Carson Newman College where I spent 5 years either going to school or working. But more than at CN and almost as much as my hometown, Huntsville and WHNT was a perfect fit for me. It was where I most felt like I belonged.

I spent only 5 years at WHNT and Huntsville but it seems now like it was much longer. The friends I made there have stayed close to me through the ten years I’ve been gone. And I truly miss the people I got to know through that job.

Actually, thinking about that station and the culture that I found at the other New York Times station, it’s impressive the WHNT people managed to form that family. I’m not suggesting that there weren’t good people DOTR (the station in Memphis) but management there never seemed interested in cultivating that type of atmosphere for the people who worked there.

I left WHNT for more money. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve regretted that decision.

P.S. the post title refers to an old Cindy Walker song about going to a funeral.