In my search for a job in 1993, I came across a help wanted listing for a company called Video Monitoring Services, known as VMS. They were looking for news monitors. I didn't know what that was, but I figured it was another telemarketing scam. I showed up at their office in Downtown San Diego. They told me they had filled up all their available positions, but asked me to do an application for their waitlist. I filled one out and left.
Soon after, I found another ad for news monitoring. This company was News Monitoring Services and they were located in the Kearny Mesa area. I went up and met with the office manager, Mr. D. He told me they had two types of positions available: TV News Monitor and Radio News Monitor. The TV News Monitor would watch local TV news programs and use specially-designed software to summarize the stories, take notes of people who get interviewed and any products or services that receive air-time. The company had a sales staff that would contact the companies mentioned in the stories and try to get them to purchase videotape copies of the news reports. The TV News Monitor position did not do sales. The Radio News Monitor was required to try to get the companies to purchase cassette tapes of the programs, but that person would get a commission off of the sales. Of course, I wanted the TV News Monitor position. (For as long as I worked there, they never had someone in the Radio News Monitor position.)
Because of my degree in Radio/TV Communications, I was pretty much hired on the spot. At the time, the company was expanding to monitor news programs from Los Angeles so that they could compete with Audio Video Reporting in Los Angeles. They hired about 20 people to monitor the news in a round-the-clock operation. We did not receive an hourly rate. Every broadcast was assigned a certain number of points. Those points were worth about 10 cents each. The one newscast that had the most points was 100, so that meant someone would get $10 for monitoring that newscast. And if they were able to complete it in an hour, they would get $10 for that hour. However, the point system also applied to when we were learning the monitoring, so if it took three hours to complete that same newscast, it would come out to about $3.33 an hour, which was below minimum wage at the time. I'm pretty certain that was illegal, but the person who owned the company, Mr. N, was trying to get around that by not having us use timecards.
I had trouble at first trying to figure out how to properly monitor. It took me three hours to do a 30-minute newscast, which was worth only 45 points. (Yes, I got $1.50 an hour for that.) Mr. D kept coming up and saying, "Fayd, this isn't working out. You need to get these done because other people are coming in and we're running out of stations!" Yes, my first day on the job was seeing me getting threatened with being let go because I didn't receive proper training. It was a lot more complex than the way he initially described and I had a lot of questions to ask. A LOT!
But I did improve my speed and was able to monitor on a 1:1 time ratio. Since a lot of broadcast time is taken up by commercials, zipping through those allowed me to spend a little time properly monitoring the stories. I was actually close to making that $10 an hour.
They started assigning me specific newscasts. I would come in around 4am to do the 3 1/2 hours' worth of news programming that KCAL had every night. After monitoring the first 1 1/2 hours, the last two pretty much repeated the same stories and I could get through them a lot faster. At the time, I wasn't really needing for hours because I had another job and I still had unemployment coming in, albeit on a limited basis because I still wasn't working a full 40 hours every week. But it was more dependable than the other job.
One night, I overslept and didn't make the early morning time for my other job (which required a three hour transport), so I called Mr. D and asked if they had anything they needed monitoring. He said they still had KCAL that needed to be done. It was nice to be able to make up for those hours I was going to lose from the other job.
Monitoring KCAL increased my enjoyment of a certain movie. I went to see "Short Cuts," which takes place in Los Angeles. I was with my brother Loyd. In the film, Bruce Davison's character is a commentator at KCAL. At one point, they show him sitting in the studio at the news desk. Sitting at the desk with him was Jerry Dunphy, the anchor for KCAL's newscast. When I saw him on the screen, I excitedly turned to Loyd and said, "Oh, my gosh! That's Jerry Dunphy! This is so LA!"
I was at work at 4:30am on 01/17/94. We felt an earthquake. The walls rattled somewhat, but there was no damage. About a minute later, Mr. N called and told Mr. D to start rolling tape on all the stations. Mr. N happened to be at the recording apartment and he started rolling on all the VCRs there. We didn't realize it at the time, but we were 100 miles away from the epicenter of the Northridge quake. There was all kinds of chaos for the next several weeks and I saw a lot of it unfold in the news coverage.
Through the next few months, we lost a lot of the monitors that were hired around the time I came into the company. A lot of them left because of the behavior of Mr. N. (I will go into more detail about him in a later post, but it should be noted that the majority of the problems with News Monitoring Service were directly related to him.) In addition, we were being so competitive with AVR-LA that they made an offer to buy us out. Because of that, the company went back to focusing on San Diego broadcasts. We even had a specific date that we would be considered an AVR affiliate. However, something happened that I don't have the full details to. Mr. N continued to own the company, although he made it clear that he was angry the AVR deal never went through.
During the LA monitoring era, we tended to ignore the local morning newscasts, which mostly consisted of repeating the same stories and reporter packages from the afternoon and evening newscasts the day before. When we were supposed to be taken over by AVR, Mr. D asked me to come in and monitor the morning newscasts as one of the local independent stations. KUSI, had just started a morning news program. Mr D noticed they were doing a lot of in-studio interviews on topics that we would be able to sell to our clients so he wanted us to be able to increase our inventory that way.
This meant I no longer had to be in at 4am every morning. I would come in around 7am and spend my time monitoring all the morning and midday news programs. I was usually done by around 1pm and had the rest of the day to myself.
Up to this point, this was the best job I'd ever had. I made a living watching TV. But like any relationship, it had its highs and lows. As usual, the lows would get very low.
More on that tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment