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WBT Reporter Brett Jensen Couldn’t Avoid Ukraine

“I’m sure they would have killed me just because I was a journalist because the Russians don’t want any of the information of what they’re doing getting out to the rest of the world. That’s when I really started to get nervous. I was stuck in Ukraine and was a potential target.”

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Yes, Brett Jensen went to war-torn Ukraine during his vacation time. But it wasn’t like he went for a vacation.

“I do these long trips every year,” the Breaking with Brett Jensen host on WBT in Charlotte said. “I try to take my vacation days around July 4th to get that extra day. I’ll use 11 or 12 of the days and make it stretch through three weekends or 19 days.”

Jensen had been thinking about revisiting Ukraine after having been there for a week last year as part of an actual vacation, even though part of it was spending 36 hours in Chernobyl. He found his opening for the return visit.

“The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office in Charlotte donated 30 sets of bulletproof vests to the charity Samaritan’s Purse, to be given to its aid workers on the frontlines,” he said.

Jensen explained Samaritan’s Purse is an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization that provides help to people in physical need. They specialize in going to disaster areas. They’ve gone into Somalia, as well as other major disaster and war-torn areas.

“They’re generally the guys on the front lines,” he said. “They make sure the area has electricity, food, and basic supplies. The CEO is Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham.”

When Jensen learned of the body armor being donated, he knew this was serendipitous with a connection to Charlotte.

“I wondered how cool it would be to be in Kyiv when the armor arrived there,” Jensen said. “I was already going to be in the Baltics so I looked into the possibility of it actually happening. I contacted all kinds of people in Poland, which people had told me was the best route to get in and out of Ukraine. I contacted all the governments and authorities I needed to and then talked to some people I knew in Ukraine. I was on my own time, but I was also a journalist.”

The plan was to fly from Lithuania, to Krakow, Poland where he’d take a bus the rest of the way. The safest route to Ukraine is through Poland; nowhere near the fighting. But it’s also a very long bus ride from Krakow, 21 hours in all. The journey itself proved to be one of the most taxing parts of the trip.

Initially, Jensen was repeatedly told not to go to Ukraine by the State Department. If he insisted, Jensen would have to fill out forms with next of kin information and they wouldn’t be coming in after him if he got in trouble.

“That made it all real,” he said. “They said they weren’t responsible for me.”

But it was that bus ride that Jensen knew was going to be a problem the moment he sat down to settle in for the long ride.

“I sat in the front of the bus with my legs at 90 degree angles with a railing in front of me,” Jensen said. “Periodically I was able to stand, but not all the way up. It was kind of bending over at the waist. We stopped every two or three hours and I was able to stretch my legs.”

When he got to the Poland and Ukraine border, he said he was amazed at the long lines of trucks, trailers and supplies lined up for miles parked on the side of the road. It could take as long as a week for the supply trucks to get across the border.

“First, they’d take everybody’s passports, then we’d sit for a couple of hours,” Jensen explained. “They’d give the passports back and we’d drive a mile, and the exact same thing would happen over again with the Ukraine border patrol.”

Jensen was the only one on the bus with an American passport. There were 66 people on the bus and only four were men, with Jensen being the youngest male. The women were going to see their husbands, sons and brothers left behind.

While at the border, Ukrainian soldiers inspected his passport and asked why he wanted to come to Ukraine.

“There’s two words that everyone in Europe understands, even if they don’t speak English: American journalist,” Jensen said. “It doesn’t matter where you are. If it was Lithuania, Romania, everyone there understands ‘American journalist’.”

Jensen arrived in Kyiv at 8:45 PM after having left the previous night at 11:55. He quickly learned there was a curfew from 11:00 PM to 5:00 AM. Every restaurant shuts down at 9:00 PM, so employees could clean up and be home by 11 pm.

“I made it to my Airbnb at 9:45 PM and they had a little kiosk outside on the sidewalk,” he said. “I got the essentials; potato chips, Coke Zero and a muffin. That was my first meal in Ukraine.”

Like most of us, Jensen didn’t really know what to expect when he arrived. He said the western part of the country hadn’t been leveled, but there was still a lot of rubble the closer he got to the capital.

“Once we got 60 miles outside of Kyiv, you started to see the devastation,” Jensen said. “Many of the warehouses and homes were decimated. That’s when we started going through road checks. Picture driving down I-95, then all of a sudden a four-lane highway slimming down to one lane in each direction. You have to do an ‘S’ through the barriers at 10 to 15 miles per hour. They’ve built all these barricades with steel and concrete and you weave your way through. Then it straightens and you go back to 60 miles an hour.”

He said you could look around and see where Russian missiles struck, destroying apartment buildings and creating immense rubble. Jensen said there were soldiers everywhere. There were what they call Czech hedgehogs, similar to the obstacles they had on the beaches at Normandy. They are protecting statues and important entities with sandbags and built structures. Many streets are blocked.

Once there, it didn’t take long for Jensen to experience the haunting air raid sirens.

“At 1:55 AM, I first heard the sirens going off,” he explained. “Of course, I was a little nervous. I was staying in the ‘Times Square’ in Kyiv, Independence Square, where they have all the statues and rallies. I got dressed, grabbed a few extra phone batteries in case I needed to stay in the shelter for a long time, then ran down to the subway. I got there at 2:07 AM. It’s a very deep subway, some of the deepest in the world built by the Russians in the 60s as fallout shelters.”

When Jensen arrived at the shelter, there were only five other people. None spoke English. After a short time, they left, started to head for home. Jensen was perplexed. The next day he talked to his Uber driver, who spoke English, about the situation.

“I asked him why people don’t go down to the air raid shelters. He told me they don’t react to the sirens anymore. He said if they reacted to every siren, they’d never get anything else done. It just wasn’t worth it. The driver then laid some math on me and explained that with 3 million people in Kyiv, he still had only a 1-in-3 million chance of getting hit. He figured he’d roll the dice.”

After the first time, Jensen didn’t bother to go down again. He figured he’d be the only guy down there. On what was to be his last day in Kyiv, Jensen met up with a university student that he had interviewed during his first full day there. The sirens went off five times over the course of nine hours. After one of the sirens finished sounding, the 19-year-old took Jensen to a bar near the university, where tourists generally don’t go. When they walked into the bar, it
was relatively full because nobody had left.

“Five minutes later, a lot of police came in yelling because they didn’t evacuate, nobody in the bar left during the siren,” Jensen said. “They shut down the bar. That was the only time I’d seen anyone in Kyiv chastised for not going to a shelter.”

Jensen arrived on a Wednesday and was scheduled to leave Saturday. He was supposed to take a bus to Warsaw, Poland, and from there take a flight to Estonia to continue his vacation.

His bus was canceled and Jensen was forced to stay in Ukraine and couldn’t get out for another four days. It was Friday and Jensen knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Another Uber driver, who Jensen described as highly educated, had just come in from Poland to take care of his father. He spoke English and this was the only job he could get.

“I asked him if he was working the next day and he said he wasn’t,” Jensen said. “I asked if I could hire him as my personal driver the next morning, not as an Uber driver. We didn’t talk about money or location.”

The driver arrived at 9:30 the next morning. Jensen said he got in the front seat and asked the driver if he’d take him as close to the front lines as he felt comfortable. The driver agreed and they drove for nearly three hours toward the front lines.

This is where Ukraine started to look like a war zone.

“We went through villages that had been completely bombed out, but there were people still living there. They had nowhere else to go.”

Jensen interviewed an older woman in front of her bombed-out house, his driver serving as interpreter.

“Her daughter and grandson were next to her by the side of the house,” Jensen said. “The only thing left standing were the four walls and you couldn’t see the floor through the rubble. I walked around the corner and saw another woman hanging laundry in front of her destroyed apartment building. I asked them if they were scared and they said of course, they were still scared, but that there was nothing they could do.

“The woman told me the Russians still popped in every so often. I’m sure they would have killed me just because I was a journalist because the Russians don’t want any of the information of what they’re doing getting out to the rest of the world. That’s when I really started to get nervous. I was stuck in Ukraine and was a potential target.”

On another occasion, Jensen said things had gotten pretty hairy. During the final day in Ukraine, the sirens blared many times. Then there was the alert that wouldn’t stop and Jensen knew something was different.

“In the streets people were walking very fast toward the shelters. I figured I really needed to take cover. If they were nervous, then I probably should be, too. I’m not sure to this day if something was hit or not.”

Jensen said he was struck by the confidence and determination of the Ukraine people. “To a person, from the landlord of my Airbnb to my Uber driver, they all said the same thing,” he recalled. “ ‘If we have the firepower, we will win.’ In a poll, 80 percent of the people said they were not giving up a single acre to the Russians. They argued that if they did, the Russians would come back and want more.”

According to Jensen, Ukrainian’s have an internal fire. They truly have something to fight for.

“I got out of Ukraine a week and a half before all the crap hit the fan with the nuclear power station and the increased bombardment. They are so steadfast in their beliefs. They’ve got that fire. They’re not going to stop.”

Finally, after doing live reports back to Charlotte on WBT several times a day, interviewing the head of Samaritan’s Purse for 45 minutes about the need for bulletproof vests, and talking to many citizens of the country, it was time to head to the next destination – Ireland, via Poland.

On his train trip out, only sleeper cars were made available. They hold four people in a very small cabin. Jensen was the first to arrive and had to imagine who he’d be sharing the car with. At the very least he knew he could stretch out his legs, and not be forced to travel again like a pretzel.

“I prayed for an electrical outlet to plug in my laptop so I could watch movies,” Jensen said. “I didn’t know if I was going to get a petite woman or a heavy Ukrainian guy living off cabbage. I also prayed there wasn’t a bathroom in my cabin.”

There wasn’t. He lucked out as his cabin mates were two females in their 20s and a woman in her 40s. “There was a power outlet and the women didn’t snore. It was uncomfortably hot in the room, but at least it wasn’t like the bus.”

Crossing the border back into Poland, a guard walked into his cabin. He spoke in Polish and the women answered him. Then the guard looked at Jensen and said, “American journalist.”

“I’m thinking, how the hell did he know that? He asked where I entered Ukraine, and I told him from Krakow on a bus. He asked when, and I said a week ago. He took my passport and about an hour later, he came back and told me to show him the stamps on the passport that proved I had done what I said. The Ukrainian stamp had faded, but you could make it out. He gave me a
weird look that said, ‘Yeah, okay.’”

From there, it was another five hours to Warsaw, Poland, where he finally checked into his hotel at 7:00 PM. Jensen was finally safe and in the comforts of a room with a real bed, not a vinyl bunk bed on a train for 19 hours.

“There are a few things that I would change in hindsight, but I would absolutely go back if given the opportunity,” Jensen said. “There are a lot of great and horrific stories to tell and I’m glad I was able to help tell them. The Ukrainian people basically want two things: weapons for journalists to tell what’s happening there and I was able to do at least one of those.”

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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