Okay. I’ve been talking about waiting and waiting, etc.  Here’s all I’m going to say for now since not everything is finished.  I got a job offer today outside of television news. I accepted it on the condition my station lets me out of my contract (five months left and counting).

I’m not going to say where yet (the answer will definitely surprise a few of you), but I will tell you the reason is simple: More time with my family.  A LOT MORE time with my family. I’ve talked to my news director, and while she is disappointed, she understands.  Now it’s up to my general manager.

That’s all I’m saying for now, but I will fill in everything else when things are finalized.  This is a very tough decision to hang up 16+ years of broadcasting, but the offer was too good to pass up.  Please continue to pray for me and my family while we see where this goes.

More later…

…everything. I have no update that I’d care to pass along.  Why?  Because I don’t have one to give.  I’m just being the most patient man on earth right now.

This was not the weekend to remember for me.  Thursday night, I got a very bad sinus headache.  Both sides of my head were pounding, and my eyes felt like they were going to explode at any moment.   I’ve never had a headache like this one.

It finally subsided today just before lunch. I feel human again.  I haven’t been outside in almost three days. I actually look forward to work tomorrow.

I can’t believe what I just heard while watching the Iowa caucuses on C-Span.  A caller from LaGrange, IL, had the following insight on the people of Iowa.

He was asking why anyone should care what people in Iowa think because “they’re nothing but cork jockeys and weed benders. They only want their 20 minutes of fame, and they’re nothing but sod busters.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, but that’s only because someone that stupid got on the air.

John Hockenberry, a fomer Dateline NBC correspondent, has an interesting article up at Technology Review.  It’s a good piece, and it really gets to the heart of TV journalism around the middle of it.  I think it nails the current state of my profession, and I tend to agree with him.  Here’s an excerpt:

“This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the ‘emotional center’ of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone’s lost kitty.

“It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.”

Full article here…