[SBE] Industry retirement situation

[A9xw at cs.com]

In a message dated 3/16/2008 10:25:39 AM Central Daylight Time, 
john at freberg.com writes:



> 

> Is membership in SBE encouraged? Does the station offer to pay SBE  

> dues, or pay for attendance at industry seminars?

> 


It used to be required that the MC op get at least the SBE MC op certificate. 
That fell by the wayside although I a trying to resurrect it again. I 
have-not met anyone in a long time that wants to get into "engineering."  I did a 
seminar at a Chicago high school, the interest was "i want to be a DJ."  Lots of 
luck. More likely they will be party DJ's, not radio. Where are the entry 
points that small market used to provide?  No where. We get applications for 
internships for news people, weatherpeople, occasionally production. None for 
sales, programming, engineering, etc. The industry has killed its source of new 
people by eliminating nearly all the entry level positions.  I tried to get one 
MC op that was interested, had 30 years experience as a combo guy, MC guy, but 
lacked the basic understanding of how stuff worked. But he did learn to be a 
really great cable maker, knows pin 2 is hot on an XLR, can solder better than 
most, and can recognize when audio is out of phase. But no trouble shooting 
skills, no logical skills, no electronics knowledge. I can't be professor half 
the week for one person. I do write up a lot of explanatory memos on how stuff 
works so the button pushes have some chance of figuring out what they screwed 
up. I even taught TV Production for a semester at the local Big 10 branch in 
hopes of someone "getting it."  But the standards were so low, the Ph.D. in 
charge even permitted hand written pencil on paper "papers" so I brought in a 
proper term paper I did so the had a clue about title page, executive summary, 
text, conclusion presentations.  I was happy to see 4 students "get it" and rise 
to a professional presentation level, but none of them could do squat in TV 
production because they had no prior requisite courses in script or ad writing, 
journalism, performance, photography, lighting etc. I brought in an actual 
network news script, broadcast publications etc, as handouts because all they 
had was Zetl, 

Henry   </HTML>