[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm. Whether you're a new or longtime listener, we appreciate you joining us today. Visit
[email protected]. And now here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Today, I thought was a great opportunity to talk about news, news and radio, but more so, just news in general. My name is Leestro. I'm your host today. Welcome or welcome back, depending on what applies. And when I talk about news, I'm going to talk about in two different avenues.
First, today and those listening to the show will know and resonate with what I refer to today. We have a darth dearth of what I would call good news. By good news, I don't mean news that makes you smile. I mean news that's actually accurate, news that's of value, news that doesn't have somebody's opinion chucked in it, news that's informative and news that is locally relevant. It's that last one, I think, that we've lost a lot of. So when what used to be the case and I got a story I got a story to tell here in a second. But what used to be the case is you had young folks, usually young folks, chuck a newspaper at your front door or give it to you directly. But usually they just chuck a newspaper at your front door. And it was kind of a rite of passage that they're able to aim correctly and land right on your porch so you can make sure you get the paper without having to walk outside in your flippers.
Later, it moved to a business, an actual full on business because there was always this sense of child labor and concerns around child labor. Now, setting aside for a moment that that job was usually one of the first jobs that many of the younger folks had way back yonder, it gave them valuable experience. It taught them how to handle money. It taught them responsibility. It taught them how to get around right. It taught them a lot of valuable skills that we've lost. And because we've tried to protect, quote unquote, children from, unfortunately, what they needed to know, this turned into a business. Turned into grown people driving around in their car, chucking it out the window, frequently landing in your grass so that when the sprinklers came on, or it was due in the morning, the paper would get all messed up. Later, the bags come around to help protect the newspaper. But now you're having to walk outside in your flippers and it's no longer the experience that it used to be. It's very impersonal compared to seeing the young kid who's making a living learning a valuable trade and a valuable skill. The newspaper then took two forms. There was the daily paper. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and then the Sunday paper. And generally speaking, the Sunday paper was the large one. That's where most of the advertisements really were bulked in. That's where the classified ads were really worth something. That's where you learned a lot of stuff, was the weekly. The weekly had the greatest value, also had the greatest amount of junk. The one during the week had some value, but nowhere near the same as the weekly.
And so the stories that I wanted to tell around news and what we've lost. Now, part of this is, I would argue, a symptom of the rush to technology which I've talked about is improper and I think ill thought out. And people will learn, probably after I'm off the earth, they'll learn why it's a bad decision. But what used to be the case for jobs, right? I'll say jobs and even classified ads, but more so, jobs.
With jobs you would get the classifieds and there was a job wanted or help wanted section in the back, and you would contact them, usually by fax or by phone, to come in for an interview. Sometimes when email started to become more of a thing, and email is awesome, by the way, started to become more a thing, they would say email your resume across to here what you may not know. Like Elon Musk, he actually prefers to be emailed the resume. He doesn't like to have it scrubbed through all this technology because it's impersonal and it's a waste of time. So you would send your resume in there, or you'd go in for an interview, and usually it's a one round deal. The manager looks at it, they talk to you for a while, they ask very valuable questions about your ability to do the work. It's less about the Star questions. And I've talked about Star, and maybe on next week's episode I'll break down the Star interview process. For those that don't know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've went through at least one Star interview at some point in the last ten years. I can almost guarantee it. But they would ask basic targeted questions about the job that were relevant. And then you would get a call or an email telling you, or in some cases a letter in the mail telling you, yes, we've selected you and it's a conditional usually offer and you need to do the screening.
Now, back at this time, screening was a lot less involved than it is now. There was no thought of running credit checks unless if you were working with money by banks. But for your regular routine jobs that were non financial in nature, credit checks weren't a thing. Reference checks were less of a thing. And if they did check references, they didn't need to be work references because in some cases they knew you're fresh out of high school. So maybe it's a teacher, right? Somebody from your church, somebody from your street, a neighbor.
Okay, so references were nowhere near what they are now. Credit was nowhere near what it is now. And then the background screen was very light compared to what it is. And then the drug screen.
Thinking back, if I think back to all the early jobs that I had so I worked at the cable company. The cable company did not, which you now know of as Cox Communications, by the way, did not do a drug screen. Did not do it. The phone company, which you used to know as Pacific Bell and you now know of as At T, did not do a drug screen.
I worked for what was Sprint at the time. It was through a different company, but it was Sprint for the mobile. Did not do a drug screen.
My point is that drug screening was less of a thing back then than it became. It'll come back to news. Follow me on this train.
Banks. So when you would go in, you get your check, right? You need to cash your check because direct deposit was not it was an optional thing. It wasn't a required thing. So you get your check, and Union Bank, which I'm understood no longer exists, which is a terrible shame. Union bank, they were one of the few that would actually cash a check without an account.
Now, all of what I just described to you at the time, it was easier to get jobs, it was easier to find jobs, and it was easier to get paid, especially when you were dealing with neighborhoods, underserved neighborhoods, neighborhoods that don't have the opportunities that some of the other ones do. It was an easier time when we rushed towards technology, and then employers started finding excuses not to hire people by adding layers and layers and layers and layers of unnecessary garbage. What does that do? It disenfranchises a certain subset of the communities, the ones who are not able to get access to that technology, possibly ones that are homeless or near so homeless, possibly one that just simply don't have the technical competencies necessary. When the school systems went away from I'm talking real typewriter typing classes. I think that was valuable. More than computers. Typing on a computer keyboard is nowhere close in terms of accuracy and clarity and quality as it would have been if you started on a typewriter and then went to a computer keyboard. It simply is not even the same class for multiple reasons.
So the reason I told all that, and I wanted you to have the preface, is news. At the time, it was the go to that started the opportunity for those groups that were disenfranchised later when we lost access to those news. You can get a newspaper sent to you, but it's a fraction of what it used to be. I know that on the West Coast, it's still somewhat of a thing, but it's nowhere close to what it used to be. The assumption is that you would go online and you would search online for the news that you want. You would search online for jobs and there's indeed.com and monster.com and all these things. Here's what you don't know.
Everything that you access online has been carefully pruned out to target you with specific information according to what somebody else thinks is relevant to you. And by doing that, it makes it to where it's much more difficult to get access to the real opportunities that you would have had before. You probably only see 30% of what you might have seen before in the old era with Paper News. Why is that?
Paper news was regional. It was local. It was directly targeted to people that were in the local communities and the pool of candidates that would have been out there, or the pool of customers that would have been available, the stores that are available, everything was targeted around regional capability and regional knowledge and demographics that are local, regional. When you go online, you're trying to cater to demographics that are outside of your purview and you can't provide targeted advertisements. So what do they do? They reach out to advertising companies. These advertising companies toss a bunch of garbage on your computer or on your phone that track you everywhere you go to try to understand you so that they can deliver you targeted ads or targeted jobs based on your search history. That's of no good, because what it's doing is it's pushing stuff to you that you may not even be qualified for. Instead of the old news, that was a pull, you're pulling the news you want, you're pulling the classifieds you want, you're pulling the ads you want because they're catered around what seems to tickle your fancy at a given point in time. I can give countless examples coming out of high school where all people really needed to do was just get the first job. That might have been Burger King, it might have been Office Depot, might have been Staples, might have been the local toy store, clothes store, blockbuster, Hollywood Video, whatever. You just need to get the first job. Once you got the first job, you may or may not want to keep doing that. I know people that started in retail and didn't want to stay in it. They wanted to do something more, but they went from job to job that was available and it wasn't necessarily what they wanted to do. They did it because they need to make the money. They did it because they need the experience, because they knew that other companies weren't going to hire them without the experience. They had to be able to find those opportunities.
Yes, you can always walk around or drive around or bike around and see the help wanted signs, but the truth is, once you get past that level of job, now you want to seek out the office jobs or the call center jobs, or the ones that are not putting signs out in front. And the way that you would normally find those was in the help wanted section. Finding those online is a crapshoot. It's a crapshoot because you're assuming that they're actually posting them online. Not every job that's available is actually posted online. It's not a total pool in the local paper. They had no choice. It was the best way for them to get the outreach to say, we have jobs available for people out there. I remember workforce centers and employment development and all these other services that allegedly are there to help you get a job that really aren't that good at it. And they're not that good because again, those services assume that those companies are actually leveraging those services to make the jobs available, which isn't always the case.
News, local news, local newspapers. Its true value is understanding the demographics local to them, understanding the people that are local, understanding the needs that are local, understanding the available candidates that are local that just don't know that these jobs are available, that these services are available, that these products are available.
When you change that and you turn everything into a national newspaper, a national newspaper cannot cater to the unique needs of the local region. Your New York Times isn't going to make any sense to somebody in Oregon because it cannot cater to how significantly different it is living in New York versus living in Oregon. Oregon. I'm using Oregon pick. It art as an example. It's a horrible place, but Oregon has a very different walk of life to it. Everybody is treated differently. Everybody acts differently. It's a completely different walk of life. It just is what it is. You cannot take a nationwide paper and just distribute it to local regional and expect it to take. So then what happens? What happens is people turn to social media. Social media then presents news in a much more cultivated fashion because again, it's tracing where you've been and it's making assumptions about what's relevant to you.
The outcome is you may only be getting exposed to roughly 0.5% of what truly is relevant or that you should be caring about.
Certain of the content triggers certain parts of your brain to react. When you react. Things like January 6 happen. See how I did that?
I don't have a call to action here. I'm telling you something that you may or may not realize is happening to you.
The decline of local news, the rise of online sources, the decline of you going after knowledge, pursuing it, pursuing something that you want you're curious about, you're genuinely curious about, including stuff that you were not exposed to before, which was another piece of the local news. It gave you sections that you may not have even thought you had an interest in, like the horoscopes, like the sports section, like the food section. It exposed you to different things. That's all culture. It makes you richer mentally to absorb more so that you're not just tunnel focused on what you're being fed, which is what's currently happening. Especially when you turn and you focus only on online sources to get your information.
I understand it's hard to get the information outside of online these days because it's all a scam. So it is the reality. All I'm doing is sharing what's really happening to you.
With a podcast it's different. With a podcast you have only one choice get in online. It's an audio file. The podcast though, depending on the host, right? And hopefully I do a good job in this. But depending on the host, there are multiple different podcasts with multiple different messages. Every last one of us has our own approach to messaging.
Hopefully you understand the difference and you can perceive the difference in the messages. In certain cases, the message is a strong call to action.
It's palpable. You can sense that they are pushing a strong message upon you by way of their voice. Similar to some churches and sermons in churches, similar concept. Some of the podcasts are just general informational. They're teaching you how to cook, they're teaching you about education, they're teaching you about life, they're teaching you about something. They're just general educational things. Some are just general conversational. Similar as mine. I like to think mine is doing. The audio form of what I describe was lost from the loss of local news which is exposing you to things you may not have realized were available. And using a platform like Mine as an outlet to reach people that I wouldn't necessarily reach before. And I'm okay if I don't reach a lot of people because my goal is not numbers. My goal is to put it out there because it's something I like to do and it'll live long after I'm gone. I accept that myself. Some people, they won't understand till they're older.
All I'm saying is that with news in general, here is a call to action. Be thinking about the effect that online news has on you.
Look, actually look for patterns in the types, the common types of news that appear to be getting pushed to you. Try to identify where it looks like you're being steered to certain news in lieu of other news. See if certain voices are being suppressed in the content that is being delivered to you, whatever that may be. See if whatever is being presented to you is appearing to influence you to a certain way of thinking.
Because if you listen to Mine, I'm not trying to influence your mind of thinking outside of exposing you to something you didn't know, something you didn't realize, something that didn't click, something that wasn't even it's a new concept. It's something that nobody else is, I guarantee you not even talking about. There are certainly movements to try to help local news. People have estimated we're talking billions of dollars to help local news. I'll close with telling you the story behind that, the real story behind that. Local news requires ultimately three things, people.
It requires an audience. There has to be a desire to consume it, because if there's no desire to consume it, it's just an expenditure for nothing. You see all the time when papers get printed, and then they get discarded. This is because it's a relic of the older time when that's all we had. Right? There was no television at that time. Radio was a thing, but radio is linear. You can only get so much, and so newspaper becomes the thing. Everybody needed to consume it because it was basically their primary source of getting a lot of news information at one time. Well, we've changed. Certainly there is the appetite for news.
I would argue that the appetite for printed news has gone down. I would argue that the appetite for printed magazines, unfortunately, has gone down as well. If we accept what I just said, that these appetites for printed have gone down, I think we just took the wrong approach. I don't think the answer should have been to stop printing. I think the answer should have been figure out ways to print on demand and deliver faster. Improve the technology that delivers print, but optimizes expenses so that you're only printing when it's actually requested. Now, they tried to do this with subscription models. People subscribe, and as we count the number of subscriptions, and that's how many papers you give to the paper person, and they go out and deliver all the stuff, that's fine. But the subscription model is only as good, frankly, as the technology that does the printing. When I say print on demand, I mean literally, within seconds, you have a physical paper printed right when somebody requests it delivered in a couple of minutes. And before you say that such a thing isn't possible, I would question that. Because we have Amazon Fresh, we have Walmart's delivery in 2 hours, we have Instacart in 2 hours, we have shipped in 3 hours. Best Buy offers same day shipping. Shipping has improved, logistics have improved because we have distributed it to layman people, regular people. The only difference in what I'm describing versus what we currently have is I do believe there's value in having at least 14 and up be able to do this of just delivering the paper. You order it on demand, whether it's a subscription or not, I don't care. Somebody might just want to do a one off. Maybe they're at a hotel and they just want a paper. I don't know if you've traveled recently, but in the hotels there used to be a stack of papers right out in the lobby on a wooden table, usually near the rear door.
I was at three, and none of them had the newspaper out there, which was appalling. Not that I necessarily needed it, but when the hotels are taking them out there, and mind you, I did get one from the Pizza Hut that was on my trip so a Pizza Hut can do it, and that was in New Mexico. A Pizza Hut can do it, but hotels can't do it. And I knew why the Pizza Hut did it. And this is part of the wrap.
In New Mexico, there's a very high Native American culture, and they still embrace newspapers for regional local news. A lot of their stories aren't told by mainstream, so the newspaper was really their outlet to be able to do that.
And as I drove through New Mexico, I even in my head, and I had to stop myself, but in my head, I was like, I could retire here. It's that visually appealing, and I didn't expect that of New Mexico. It's not what I expected. It's arguably of. And I think I've been to almost every state at this point besides Hawai. Officially, I was there, but didn't go to the mainland. But New Mexico, of every state I've been, was the most just overall visually attractive place I've ever been in the United States, period, point blank.
I could contrast it with northern western Washington, headed up to Blaine. Yes, that's visually appealing, but not where I'd want to live there. It's more like a touristy look. It looks nice. I wouldn't want to live there. Oregon looks nice. It's a horrible place. Can't pump your own gas. I'm not going to get over that. Northern California beautiful. No, could not live there. Parts of northern Nevada. Beautiful. Could not live there. Colorado, nice. Could not live there. Utah? Absolutely not. Arizona? Absolutely not.
But New Mexico. And then when I saw that, okay, it's about the people and the local and the reason that they still embraced local news the way they have. As I read the paper, the stories that they needed to tell aren't told anywhere else. So if I ever did so if I continue doing this and I ever did decide to go down there and trust me, it's hard to fight that urge, I'm not kidding there. If I ever decided to do that, that would be interesting to be able to do a podcast for some of the tribals out there, because I was intrigued and fascinated by the stories that were told. And if they don't have another outlet, that's another outlet that helps get the message out outside the bubble so that people can hear these stories. But that's the value of them for them, of local news is, well, our stories aren't told anywhere else, which told me that there's another opportunity for local news, which is to tell the stories not told anywhere else. And trust me, there's tons of those. There's going to be, at some point in the future, more messaging coming from me about local news. Right now, I'm on the crypto side, and I'm watching with crossed fingers. And if it turns out the way I think it's going to, I do plan to try to contribute back to local news because of how important I think it is. And so you understand, casual talk radio is one of those outlets. It's one of those ways to talk about things where those stories aren't told anywhere else.
If there's something you wanted to hear that has not been talked about elsewhere, casualtalkradio net hit the contact form is your measure for me to do it, and I will gladly consider it if it's of value. I think there will be more of me at some point and perhaps I'm a first starter, maybe not, but I think I'm a first starter. And maybe sometime in the future we'll get more telling stories not told anywhere else and we'll see more value in local news overall and hopefully cross we get a return to print because I think we just need to do it better, not be wasteful with it. But there's still an appetite for it least here I don't know about anywhere else.
Oh ha, it all close.
