So very sad. I nearly coughed up my lemonade last night when I heard Paul Slavens announce on his show that Glenn Mitchell had died. Glenn was a very fine interviewer, booked consistently interesting guests, and just seemed like a really, really nice guy. Radio piece here.

There’ll be a memorial broadcast during what would have been the first hour of Glenn’s show today, from noon to 1 p.m. on KERA 90.1. Give it a listen.

On another depressing note, Glenn’s noon-to-2 show was the only locally-produced news/talk show left on KERA. When I got to Dallas five years ago, you had the Evening Talk Show each night and The People’s Agenda on Friday mornings. Neither was great, honestly — Marla Crockett is a smart lady, but she could never wrangle her TPA guests into interesting radio, and I’m on record stating the evening show was a snorefest. But they were local and on the air, and now they’re gone. I’m really curious to see what KERA does to fill Glenn’s void.

I’ve always thought that it would make perfect sense for my employer to cosponsor a show with KERA. First, there’s a big overlap between KERA listeners and Dallas Morning News readers — and the KERA listeners who don’t read our paper are prime candidates we should be chasing. Second, we, like every other newspaper under heaven, are in the midst of a multimedia push to get reporters more comfortable with working in other media. Radio counts as other media, I think. Third, it’d be a good opportunity to push DMN reporters and editors out into the public eye; with the demise of TXCN, we don’t get out nearly as much as we used to.

(My Grand Theory On The Future Of Newspapers, which will someday be revealed here, emphasizes the importance of branding your reporters as public figures — humanizing them in the reader’s eye so they provide the sort of value-added that TV reporters do. People look forward to a Brett Shipp story on WFAA or a Robert Riggs piece on 11 — just as they look forward to a Steve Blow or Jack Floyd column.)

21 November 2005

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