Do you ever watch a newscast on TV—assuming anyone watches them anymore—and say to yourself, “That was stupid. They didn’t have anything better to cover than that?”
Well, that was sort of my niche when I worked in local news back in the day, the “day” being the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was the goofy feature reporter with an odd twist on the news or life in general. I prided myself on knowing the difference between funny and silly but was still sometimes criticized by local newspaper writers who thought that what I did had no place on the news. Looking back, they may have had a point. (More than once, costumes were involved in my “reporting.”) But how many car wrecks and house fires can you sit through before you turn off the TV? Is that what local news was supposed to be all about? We preferred to think of a newscast as a slice of life. Bad stuff happens, funny stuff happens, and we wrapped it all up in a thirty-minute package.
I speak now as someone who doesn’t watch local news anymore. It’s moved from car wrecks and house fires to more car wrecks, more house fires, drug deals, and random gunfire, all delivered with great emotion and empathy. I have a lot against local news, but I’ll bore you with that some other time.
These days, I use my reporting skills to tell other kinds of stories. (You can read more about that on my web site.) But occasionally I’ll see something in the news and it will remind me that when I was a local feature reporter doing weird little slices of life stories, I would latch on to those news events as a peg, and then put my own particular spin on them. And it was fun. I was fortunate enough to have my own little spot on the news at WLKY in Louisville called “Ryden Originals.”
The other day, I read about a guy who scaled the Millennium Tower in San Francisco using suction cups. You can see the video on-line, of course. But it reminded me of the time a guy calling himself Spiderman—it may be the same guy, Dan Goodwin—climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was May of 1981 and I was at the height of my feature reporting madness. So I decided to “climb” the First National Bank Building in downtown Louisville.
Obviously, I lived to tell the tale.