I was truly pleased to spend some time with long-ago co-worker Steve Sanders over the holidays. Steve was working at WERC in Birmingham when I joined the station in 1976. He was reporting and flying around in a little helicopter on traffic duty (till late 1975 when the chopper crashed in East Lake---both Steve and the pilot walked away without serious injury, testament to the controlled-crash known as "auto-rotation"--- and I was hired as the next guinea pig. (that's me in the picture) I did traffic most morning and some afternoons for several years.) Steve moved on to Ch. 13 in Birmingham as an anchor/reporter in 1979 and then, in 1982, to WGN in Chicago, where he remains today. There has been no shortage of waves in the media this past year, and Steve felt one when the station moved him from the 9:00pm anchor spot to their Noon news. Still, he's upbeat and getting used to his new sleep schedule. Because WGN is carried nationally on cable ("The Superstation"), my Mom used to watch Steve all of the time and would comment on his reporting. In addition to being a co-worker, he and his wife Julie were among my first friends when I moved to Alabama, and it was great fun reminiscing and talking about the new media landscape. We both wondered how we ever found information for stories without Google, and bemoaned the virtual death of local news on radio. Steve and Julie have a son who is threatening to get into broadcasting, despite his Dad's advice, so there may be another generation of Sanders on-air. Neither of us could begin to imagine what form "news" will take during his new career. After all, who could have predicted bankrupt newspapers across the land and youtube?
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