Nostalgia or remembering?

Last week I went to a birthday party for a radio show.

World Report turned 40, sort of. CBC Radio's main morning newscast first went on the air as The World at Eight back in the early spring of 1968, and added editions at 6 and 7 a.m. sometime in the late-1970s (I think).

The party was a low-key affair, very Radio. There were newspaper clips documenting the program's history, snapshots taken by staff over the years and the people, working and retired, who put the program to air. 

I actually ran the show for a brief period in the mid-1990s, and worked as an editor on it for during my first few years at the CBC. It's where I cut my teeth in Radio and I have a great fondness for that time in my life, if not for the horrible hours working on a morning newscast requires. 

There was a short audio presentation, a bit of a "greatest hits" package of stories that aired on the program over the years. It was a short history of major events: MLK's assassination, the October Crisis, repatriating the Constitution, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Referendum Number Two. All worthy signposts of late-20th century Canada and the world. 

And there were a few speeches. 

Inevitably, the speeches focus on the people we worked with. Characters. Events were the backdrop for the people with whom we shared early morning misery. Afterall, we were not where the news was happening. We were packaging it. So it makes perfect sense to focus on the people we worked with rather than the stories we were well distanced from. 

Such is the difference between editors and reporters. When you get a group of reporters together, they will talk about colleagues, but they will also talk about stories; what they're working on, trips they've taken or preparing for. The guts of the reporting business. Go drinking with editors and the subjects tend to be more limited; colleagues, the mechanics of getting a program to air ("Did you hear the first three items were missing because of a computer crash?" etc.), moaning about shifts, bosses, missed opportunities.

One of the underrated things in operations like the one I work in is institutional memory. Experience is valued up to a point, but if an older, more expensive employee can be pensioned off in the interest of the bottom line, he's out the door. Oftentimes the experienced end up as cranks too, which tends to undermine the value of memory in a workplace. The last thing you want to face everyday is a know-it-all who has seen it all. 

I remember being at a retirement party 18 years ago for Rex Loring, one of the original hosts of World Report. Rex was an amazing performer. He could take badly written crap and make it sound like poetry on the air. He also had that voice of authority that is not so sought after now, but was a comfort to awake to. When he retired, the Big Bosses came down to toast his departure. The crowd spanned the generations: from pups like me in their 20s, through to people whose careers began after the Second World War when Radio was still king. A smart person would have grabbed a tape recorder and started interviewing the greybeards. They carried the memory of decades in the life of the Radio news service. That didn't happen, which is too bad. While the "history" of the program is recorded in the newscasts in the Archives, the history of the newsroom is oral, passed down from generation to generation, and usually embellished in the telling. 

Friday's party got me thinking about something else; how experience is sometimes seen as an impediment to change. People with experience (cranks or not) have seen things before, they remember what worked, what failed and what disrupted. They ask uncomfortable questions of Deciders whose worth is measured by their ability to change the things they manage. Sometimes the experienced end up as roadkill, like old Mr. Fezziwig, who chose not to sell out to the Vested Interests and found himself run out of business by Scrooge and Marley. But sometimes they are right. Things were working just fine, now they are screwed up. But the change happens and a great victory is declared. 

World Report is based on a pretty simple premise. It tells people what happened overnight and what is going on right now. It tries to answer the question, "Is it OK to get out of bed?" Delivering on that premise is a lot more complicated, and the way it is done has evolved considerably over the four decades the show has been on the air. We seldom put a phoned-in item on the radio now. We've long since abandoned quarter-inch tape. The language we use on the air is more modern and colloquial. The omniscient "Voice of Authority" has given way to something more conversational. The stories attempt to more on the lives of the decidees rather than the deciders. The show has adapted to its time as times have changed.

The show has adapted just like we do as we mark the years. We know that pal pictured in the wide-legged jeans and permed hair in 1978 is still the same person who is in front of us today in middle age. He's just packaged a bit differently. We're different, we're the same. We've evolved, we're true to ourselves.