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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Beep rule kept radio interviews in the open A majority of the people living today were not alive some 50 years ago when the Federal Communications Commission adopted a rule allowing radio stations to broadcast telephone calls. There was one catch, though. The station had to have a device on its telephone line that beeped every 10 seconds so people would know their conversation was being broadcast. The beeps were quite loud at first, but the industry persuaded the FCC to reduce the volume. The beeps had to be loud enough to be easily heard, however. This one rule change made it possible for a radio reporter to compile interviews without leaving the office. Small radio stations began adding news people to their staffs as they found that newscasts could pay for themselves. The beep line also could be used to add a person from outside the station to a roundtable discussion with local newsmakers in the studio. One of the hardest-working radio reporters I ever knew was the late Shirley Campbell of KAJO in Grants Pass. Not only did she use the beeper phone for news gathering, but as a one-person news department, she also lugged an audio recorder to every council meeting, commissioners� session and school board hearing. She had a knack for asking the right question at the right time and was on a first-name basis with all of the public officials in Josephine County. Over the years, she alerted me to numerous stories in Josephine County, such as the one about a district attorney who committed bigamy, or the one about the cause of the fire that came close to destroying the historic church across from the courthouse. With her, news was a 24-hour business � as when I met her at about 2 a.m. at a huge fire at a lumber mill. Not that she was breaking hot stories on a daily basis � small towns don�t supply much of those � but she was ready in case one happened. Her persistence in following up on a story was well known in the trade. The rule requiring beeps on telephone lines was finally rescinded by the FCC a couple of decades later. I guess it decided there were plenty of civil actions that could be filed against a station that failed to tell people they were being recorded. When I took office as a county commissioner in 1983, the weekly sessions of the board were attended by three or four radio reporters; TV reporters turned out when there were controversial items on the agendas. One major action the commissioners took was to refurbish the courthouse auditorium. We ordered the construction of a ramp at the side of the room to allow anyone in a wheelchair to have access to the raised podium. We also installed plug-ins to the sound system at the back of the room for use by radio and TV people so they wouldn�t have to put mikes and recorders on the podium and the sound was better. Radio news people continued to attend the meetings until the early 1990s, when they slowly stopped coming. The apparent reason was that the FCC had dropped the requirement that only one AM and one FM station in a market could be owned by a single company. When that restriction was dropped, buying up half a dozen radio stations in a market made a lot of business sense. Owners could operate all the stations with one set of managers, fewer engineers and a pool of announcers who could be assigned tasks on several stations in a single day. Four to six stations could be operated out of one building with one set of administration. The stations could share studios, record libraries and sales people. Suddenly, local radio stations were being sold for over a million dollars each. The old mandate that broadcasting should be operated in the public�s interest no longer seems to mean as much as it did in previous generations. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA