Wednesday morning dawned with rather less on our plate than we had anticipated, due to scheduling difficulties, so we took advantage of the free time to blow lots of dough at the New England Mobile Book Fair in Needham before heading in to Boston to visit the WBZ facilities and have lunch with assistant chief David Goldstein. Joining us this day was Mike Fitzpatrick of NECRAT fame (also chairman of the Connecticut River Valley SBE chapter and an engineer at Springfield's WWLP). While Scott went right to the cubes of his former colleagues at WBZ, David took us around on the nickel tour of 1170 Soldiers Field Road.
When the studios were renovated in 1995, "synergy" was the watchword throughout the broadcasting industry. Previously at WBZ, radio and TV had been two entirely separate domains, and woe be unto him who tried to cross that line. In the renovation, it was decided that radio and TV should share the same newsroom, so a big open room was created in the middle of the building (I think in the former location of one of the TV studios) and cubicles erected for all of the news staff (with edit rooms and some offices arrayed along the outside). But radio and TV people still pretty much kept to themselves.
At some point after the renovation was complete, it was decided to install a "pod" in the exact center of the newsroom for weather segments during some TV news programs.
The radio air studios and master control are lined up along the far wall.
Copyright 2005, Garrett Wollman. All rights reserved. Photograph taken 2005-06-08.