Broadcasting Oct 31 - American Radio History

studio and Silver Spring, Md., ham radio
operator Dick Sobell, who was listening to
conversations between students on Grenada
and officials in the U.S. Connolly said the
station had a scoop last Wednesday morning
when at 10:15 a.m. it reported that evacua-
tion of the students from the school was
about to take place. According to Connolly,
that report aired nearly two hours ahead of
most other stations and networks.
Michael Ludlum, executive director of
news for the CBS -owned stations, said
KMOX(AM) St. Louis scrapped all its regular
After nearly 16 months of live
news coverage, Group W /ABC
service signs off after sale
to competitor, Turner's CNN
Satellite News Channel signed off for good
at 6 p.m. last Thursday, ending a 16 -month
"all live, all the time" effort-good, by all
accounts, but obviously not good enough to
overtake Ted Thrner's Cable News Network.
SNC stayed live to the end. From sign -on
on June 21, 1982, until the sign -off, officials
said, the service's live hours totaled 11,825
and had been interrupted only once. That
was for the hour from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. on
Oct. 12, when management called employes
together to tell them that Group W Satellite
Communications and ABC Video Enter-
prises, partners in the SNC venture, were
selling the service to Turner for $25 million
and that it would be closed down (BROAD-
CASTING, Oct. 17).
"We gave them the opportunity then of
cutting down on live reporting and inserting
tape replays," GWSC President Harlan Ro-
senzweig said last week, "but they said
they'd rather go out as they came in -live all
the time."
Bill Scott, SNC president, said his people
"wanted to go out first class, and they've
done it." His first priority now, he said, is to
help as many as possible find good jobs. (As
for his own plans, he said he was consider-
SNC fades to black
I TOP OF THE WEEK r
MOR programing last 1Lesday for special
reports and talk shows on the Grenada inva-
sion. Ludlum said that one of the station's
talk show hosts, Jim White, is also a ham
radio operator and during the course of the
day, was phoning in updates to the station
from his home on conversations he was
monitoring. CBS's seven owned AM sta-
tions (five of which are all- news), as well as
CBS affiliates WWJ(AM) Detroit and w'rots-
(AM) Washington, can share material among
themselves over a mini -network known as
CBS's Radio Stations News Service.
ing "some interesting possibilities, both
within Westinghouse and outside. ") He was
lavish in praise of his people and the job they
had done. "If I had to do it all over again,
even knowing how it would end," he said,
"I'd certainly do it again."
Up until the final hour, others agreed,
SNC people "tried to keep everything going
just the way it had been going before."
Viewers may not have noticed anything
different, but there was a lot of difference
around the studio in Stamford, Conn.,
SNC's home base, and in its Washington bu-
reau. Between the two shops, SNC em-
ployed some 400 people -250 to 260 work-
ing on the news side directly, plus 140 to 150
technicians -and most were busy, between
Waving goodbye from Stamford
Broadcasting Oct 31 1983
30
assignments, trying to track down new jobs.
GWSC took ads in the Washington Post
and in Stamford area newspapers to tell busi-
ness leaders that these people, all profes-
sionals, were losing jobs "through no fault
of their own." The ads listed job categories
available and urged businessmen to get in
touch with GWSC to fill their personnel
needs.
"The broadcasting and cable industries
have responded wonderfully," Rosenzweig
said, with letters, phone calls and visits. As
of last Thursday morning, nine organiza-
tions had sent representatives to do on -prem-
ise interviews among SNC employes: NBC,
ABC and ABC News, CBS News, WPtx -TV
New York, HBO, WMAR -TV Baltimore, Wes-
tinghouse's KPtx(TV) San Francisco and Gen-
eral Telephone & Electronics.
Judging from employes in the 85- person
Washington bureau, the ABC -GWSC em-
ployment service was not particularly effec-
tive. The employes there said only a handful
of the bureau's staffers had managed to find
work elsewhere. But they had hope that their
resumes would receive top priority at ABC
when it begins gearing up for the elections
and the Olympics early next year. SNC offi-
cials said that with only two weeks elapsed
since the announcement of closing, it was
too early to expect many firm offers.
Rosenzweig said GWSC would continue
to employ about 170 persons. With SNC
gone, GWSC is left with a marketing and
promotional agreement with the Nashville
Network, the marketing and distribution of
Group W's own Home Theater Network pay
movie service, plans for two unconnected
regional pay sports networks (one serving
Baltimore- Washington, the other Seattle)
and SpotNet, a commercial distribution ser-
vice due to start the first of the year.
For SNC's closing hour, things were a lit-
tle different. SNC's 10 anchors took turns
giving the news. There was a little piece on
the history of SNC. And Anchor Ken Alvord
wrapped it all up with a report that ended on
a note both realistic and philosophic.
"What does all [our] time and effort
mean? Probably not very much. We've
learned and grown. Possibly we've added to
your knowledge a little. Perhaps we have
helped you through the day or night once or
twice.
"In more cosmic terms, like the name Sat-
ellite News Channel implies, we come to
you from space. In [our] 11,825 hours, our
first words and pictures have traveled nearly
eight trillion miles, almost one -third the dis-
tance to Proxima and Centun in the Milky
Way. And they'll just keep on traveling out
there even after we disappear, and maybe -
just maybe -somebody out there will see
some of this and learn a little bit about all of
us, what makes us tick, what makes us laugh
and cry"
Cut to the SNC logo and the vital statis-
tics -June 21, 1982 -Oct. 27, 1983 -and
then to a list of names of the producers,
anchors and technicians that made it all pos-
sible, superimposed on shots of the impend-
ing parties in Washington and Stamford.
They called them "fade -to -black par-
ties."