Last week our journalism class field trip to the KDKA radio broadcasting studio with the journalism/broadcasting class to see how the radio station operates, to talk with the people who work there, and to sit in with Marty Griffin as he does his morning talk show. To start we saw the main control room where some of the employees were watching tv and looking up articles to know what news to broadcast. I was interested to know if they watched both left leaning and right leaning news channels so that there reports would not be biased. I noticed on some reporters desks they had “Trump” stickers and some had stickers promoting left leaning views. I wanted to know how politics influence news reporting, especially with the recent “fake news” claim. Unfortunately this topic was never brought up over the course of the field trip. I regret not asking.  In addition to watching the news,  the reporters were listening to the police radio broadcasting for local news. I found the fact that they were listening to the police radio very interesting. I wondered at what point they decide that a police broadcast is important enough to be broadcasted to the general public and what the radio is allowed to broadcast and what they’re not allowed to broadcast.

After seeing the reporter center room, we got to see the rest of the KDKA building. KDKA was the first to publicly broadcast. Today the people who work for KDKA are very proud of this and show it off. This is an amazing accomplishment. It is crazy to think that a man went from broadcasting from a shed in his yard to a huge accomplished broadcasting network. Honestly I think that most people who live in Pittsburgh probably do not know the KDKA was the first broadcasting company. I personally did not know this until journalism class this year in class.

After touring the building we got to meet Marty Griffin and sit in on his morning radio show. Marty focused his show on the topics of education and youth because we were here. One thing that surprised me is that he does everything off script. There are no topics that he has to cover, no points he has to make, and no script to follow. I as very impressed by this. It shows that his radio broadcast show is  just a genuine person to person conversation. Marty is just an average citizen stating his opinion. He is not above everyone else and is open to here what other people have to say through the phone. Marty talked about parents giving their kids the best opportunity for success through education. I think that Marty’s topic was not a very deep digging topic. Obviously all parents are going to agree that their kids deserve the equal chance at success.  I would have found it interesting if he would have proposed a way for all kids to have an equal chance at success. That would have been opinionated and I think it would be interesting to hear how people would comment on that question. I understand it is a difficult problem, but I believe education may be the most important domestic problem of them all. Improving education, especially for low income families, would solve many problems, including the problem of teen violence which Marty brought up.

I very much enjoyed my time at KDKA and it definitely made me consider writing for the news and working for the radio at Penn State next year. I love to write, talk about current events, and listen to music so working for the newspaper or radio might be a good fit for me to get involved.

To hear the full playback of the broadcast, please visit: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/audio/the-inside-story-with-marty-griffin/