Confronted by mega-ads, WLRN radio reporter thinks locally and nationally
This screen grab from the Marketplace website shows a billboard in Los Angeles.
Kenny Malone, reporter/producer at radio station WLRN, based at The Miami Herald, noticed big ads appearing on buildings in Dade County. Then he received a press release from a company announcing that a “mural” was going up.
“What caught my eye was how enormous it was,” Kenny says of the 32,000-square-foot vinyl ad.
His segment that aired on American Public Media’s Marketplace says:
“Mike Freedman is CEO of Fuel Outdoor Advertising. They’re the ones renting the side of the [county's] chiller factory. He says everyone wins with the Dade project. Advertisers get unique access; his company gets the contract, and the county gets much needed non-tax revenue.”
Kenny says in the segment that the Apple iPad ad on the chiller building will earn the county a $220,000 rental fee plus 16 percent of the sign’s profits.
Today’s Tip: Think both locally and nationally with your stories, Kenny says.
Kenny Malone
“I’m someone stuck between national and local reporting,” he says. “You have to answer the questions people think of on a national level.”
In this case, he produced a local and a national version of the story. The local version focused on the county effort to raise money by legalizing an increasing number of ads. It addressed the audience’s question of why the ads were springing up.
For the national story, which has the universal angle of municipal governments struggling to make ends meet, he set out to learn what other cities were doing, he says. If you have access to LexisNexis or Factiva through work or a public or college library, those information services can help you find the national context.
“You have to understand a beat doesn’t mean you need to focus on one area,” he says. “It’s about switching the lens on your camera.”
