Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

What if you could take a snapshot of the workings of a business, understand it... and then fast-forward 25+ years to see how technology and marketplace would change how it worked? There are a few things you would certainly be curious about: Will the business operate in all the same way? How will its products change? Will it have the same kinds of customers? Will it even exist 25 years later? 

I've had a chance to do just such a time tunnel jump and ponder these questions, thanks to some very nice folks at WCBS Newsradio 88 in New York. WCBS is an all news radio powerhouse in New York City and the flagship station of the CBS radio network. The team there has invited me to their studios twice in 25 years to take pictures and write about their operations: My first visit was in 1978, when I compiled a pretty extensive college documentary about the inside workings of a dozen New York radio news departments. I spent about a week in November, 1978 at WCBS witnessing the humming complexity of an active newsroom.

A couple of years ago, I turned that college documentary into a historical New York Radio News web site, and that led me to reconnect online with some of my old New York radio acquaintances. One of them, WCBS Technical Supervisor Barry Siegfried,  invited me back two summers ago to see how things had changed.

The funny thing is, on the surface, a lot is the same:

• WCBS is still one of the world's most popular all-news stations
• The on-air product isn't terribly different today from the news format that was running in the 1970s.
• Though the writing style has changed a bit... the news headlines are certainly different (or maybe not, depending on your level of cynicism as a listener)... the pace and format are slightly more relaxed... in general if you had been teletransported into the future from 1978 you would still recognize it as WCBS.

But behind the scenes, operations have changed a whole lot. For instance:

• The old newsroom was drowning in paper, which needed to be copied on Xerox machines and delivered physically to the anchors who read it. Now, all stories are written online and stored on the local network. Anchors still work from printouts, but distribution is simple and instant.
• The old newsroom was figuratively ensnared in miles of audio tape, which was dubbed, editied, and shuttled to the production studios that would play it on air. Now, audio feeds are downloaded and edited digitally then made available via a network filesystem
• The station now has a web site (of course) where you can listen live.
  
• A lot fewer people wear neckties these days, unless their name is Charles Osgood and they are going to be on TV later.
  

I've finally got around to posting some of the yesterday / today pictures, so you can get a flavor of some of the changes.

1978: The WCBS newsroom, paper everywhere. With the world's news resources at his fingertips, a WCBS producer coordinates the work of writers, reporters and newscasters. Writers are in easy view, and the producer can communicate with anyone else in the station from his communication console here. On the desk, typed stories are wrapped around "cart" tapes which will be shuttled to production.  To his right, a filing system for current stories. Wire copy is Xeroxed for each of the 2-5 writers on duty.  There is a lot of  copying, shuttling, and shuffling of paper and tape -- all under intense deadlines.

2004: The WCBS Newsroom, computer screens everywhere. Same intense deadlines, but now WCBS producer Rob Hawley coordinates the work of writers, reporters and newscasters online and by phone. There are no more cart tapes -- all audio is electronic. And all the paper has been replaced with computer systems -- no more Xeroxing!

I've posted more last century vs. this century pictures in an online gallery and you can also visit my main historical WCBS Newsradio pages.

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