Episode 157 - The News with Andrew Stevens!

that is just everything's paywalled. And you couldn't even like look at the first two words of an article. I was just like, I just want to know what the weather's gonna be. But we won't name we won't name that other one. So, Andrew, what, what do you what exactly does being a news director entail?

about March of 2014. So not quite a decade, and I moved to Goldsboro, to be a sports writer for that other publication that you mentioned earlier, I did that for about did that for about six years. And then my wife and I started having children. And the thing about sports writers is, they're never home. And because sports, ultimately is a form of entertainment, right? It's like going to the movies or a concert or anything else. If you want to sell tickets, you need to have

these ballgames when people are not at work. And so I was never home. So I made the decision to walk away from sports journalism. And I spent nine years in sales, including six years with Curtis Media Group, selling radio, digital advertising, selling advertising on goals for daily, daily news, ironically. And then, we had this thing called COVID. Wait, so it's very difficult when I lost, that fulfills jobs in three years. And including one in February of this year, and

one in May of this year. And after the I lost the one in May, I kind of didn't know what was next, but I knew it wasn't going to be sales. And because when you lose four sales jobs in three years, God is kind of telling you, you need to look in a different

them that they gave me this opportunity. And they also gave me a chance to go back and do something I had done with him when I worked before which was to do high school football, the radio on Friday nights, with one of my very best friends who still works still works there. And that is, along with writing that is also where my passion is because it allows me to still be connected to the sport side, right and to be on the air. But also, I'm learning a lot about you know, being what it means to

cover them. It was on a daily basis. And I think local journalism is tremendously important. Yeah. Because you know, when you're in between when you're in between large markets like Raleigh and Granville, like Goldsboro is it's kind of easy to, to get sort of left out, right? Sometimes, and all of the all of the news coverage is about this larger markets and not what's going on here in our backyard. And so I think local journalism, especially in an election year,

like we're in right now, is super important. From from an accountability standpoint, but also, you know, Wayne County gets this reputation of there's a lot of bad things that happen here in crime, and there is a responsibility to report those things, right. But also, I've taken very seriously the responsibility to go out and find the positive things that

happened here. Because if you look hard enough, and you know where to look, and you know, people who can help you find positive stories, then you can find all of the positive things that are going on here. And as a journalist, there's a very, very real responsibility to find that balance between here's the unfortunate things that happened today. But here's all of the other here's all of the really good things happening that make Wayne County a great place to live. Yeah, we try

Speaking of which, I've got good news. Good news. I do. Hello, and welcome to Fun Fact Friday news with your lead anchor.

When I used to work it out back million years ago, we had this thing called the chocolate Thunder from Down Under the chocolate Thunder from Down Under was a brownie, big old brownie nice and hot. And then they would put a scoop of ice cream on top of it. And then they would put some whipped cream on top of it and then they would drizzle chocolate on top of it. Right? Yeah, chocolate Thunder from Down Under was

amazing. When I worked there, what we would do for like a kind of a hazing the new people is we would we would make a chocolate Thunder from Down Under. But except instead of a brownie, we would take used coffee grounds, just a brick of them and make a fake brownie out of used coffee grounds. Drizzle chocolate on it, so it looked more like a brownie. Then we'd take a scoop of lard, like crispy white, clean lard, scoop it, so it

looked like ice cream, put it on top of the coffee grounds. Then put some whipped cream, drizzle some chocolate on top of the whole thing, right? And then we would knock it over because we weren't allowed to serve a chocolate Thunder from Down Under that wasn't like stacked properly. If it fell over while they were making it. They would just, you know, push it on the table and say Alright, everybody have everybody gotta buy it. Let's go. Let's make a new one. Well, then we took the lard,

chocolate fake brownie thing. And we put it out for the new people and they'd all run over and grab it and eat two or three bites real quick before they even like tasted it. Well, they got me and I got a second bite in my mouth before I realized the ice cream wasn't cold. And it was super, super greasy. And the brownie was very gritty. See, we couldn't make concrete out of that they were wasting they were wasting concrete filler. Wasted sand wasted sand. Okay. So that's our little good,

good news segment. We do we don't we don't dive real deep into the stories. We're just kind of like something that that we liked out of the week basically. So we had a few questions for you, Andrew. Nothing hard hitting or hard or, or anything like that. Just just a few questions. Did you want to start Leila? Or did you did you pull up any questions?

website, the story is up there. Last Saturday, so not this past weekend, but the weekend before he sent me some pictures from a child that climbed on top of a toy vending machine, and a laundry mat and mount all the one with the claw from like Toy Story. And the child fell into the vending machine. The fire department had to be called and the pictures especially one in particular. It's only funny because the kid is okay. But like the picture of the kid inside the vending machine as if

he's a prize. I'm looking I'm digging in this had like off to the side with like his his arms folded across like I'm so mad this happened and the bears. Like he can't decide if he's more mad or more embarrassed. Parts of

ask about like, because I had a question sources. Like, how do you get the story?

relationships. journalism can be a lot like sales and that relationships and knowing the right people is super important. So podcasting to my time was, still helps me, but also having been in sales, and then just knowing a lot of people in the area, or working with people that know a lot of people is helpful as well.

world. And unfortunately, most of the time, when it comes to goals for Daily News, you're looking at it and speaking with him, Oh, wow. I can ask for help. I can ask for help when I need it. I try not to focus on like, the wide, I guess, width of trying as one person to put your arms around link counting, cover everything because that's impossible. And so for me, that helps me not to get caught up in the competitive side of news, right? Yeah. Because I think it can be easy to do that even on

the local level. And that's really counter if you're really just trying to serve the community. That's counterproductive to what you're trying to do. Because other news outlets are different than us. Like we don't have a we don't have a print publication. So the older generation that does not prefer to read their news online that still wants to hold the

newspaper in their hand. I can never compete with them old people or do I have a desire to. But like, for example, this past week, there was a situation in in Mount Olive says we're talking about mount off, someone stole a car and then fled on foot and the university and the middle school out there were locked down for a little while. But because we're online, only,

we're able to distribute accurate information. And I stressed the word accurate because there was a lot of unfortunate rumors going around that day, about things happening in Mount Olive that were not true and active shooters and things like that that weren't true. So we were able to get that information out on our website and on our Facebook immediately and put to rest a lot of those a lot of those

rumors. So that's why don't get caught up in, in like the competitive side of things because everyone's different. And we have the radio stations that we can that we can use at our disposal, as well. So even though I'm only one person, I try not get caught up in like what we can or cannot do, because we're just Oh, yeah.

rumors? I guess it's up to each individual person and where they go for what they consider to be facts. Right, like, right, yeah. You gotta use your own discretion on on where you go. And I guess that's the blessing and the curse of the internet. Yeah, look in the wrong places. You're not going to find the truth.

getting bad information from the news. And, you know, if it's across the country, it's whatever, but if it's if it's local, you know, you got to make sure you gotta get the right news out there. Make sure you're double checking everything. Absolutely.

is this picture needs to be showing up on the screen. So we ask chat GPT to write some questions for us. Sometimes they're sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're super, like, standard boring. So you want to read one of the chat GBT view?

don't have time to discipline that right now. We're on the verge of a championship or a private school in Wayne County that very much recruits, specifically basketball players. And it's not a secret. Like it's this pretty much open, right? There's, you know, a basketball player at another school in Wayne County, that they think would help them when they suddenly come up with the money to help that that kid afford to go to that school.

man. There's every like a Nebraska. There's probably a Nebraska man that all of New Jersey is New Jersey, man. Love you New Jersey, the. But yeah, so like, that's why you hear about all of it, because the news has access to like everything that happens at the police department. So I'm sure like, they've got people just scouring all those records every day looking for the funniest or most outrageous Florida man story, which this, there's some good ones, and you just don't

get that. You just don't get that elsewhere. One of the interesting things and then like I said, we just get off topic here. That's all we do. One of the interesting things, my older brother used to have a buddy up in Raleigh, that would pay somebody 50 bucks to go down to the courthouse every day and go through the records and get pictures of all of the mug shots

that were taken. Because that's public record. And he would find either the most messed up looking people or just goofy looking people or ugly people and he would take the his pictures and print them in the newspaper and sell them at gas stations for a buck 50 apiece, for a mug shot for it was a newspaper full of mug shots he publishes twice a month. And he said that it cost him basically 50 bucks a day to get the pictures, you just had some teenager go up and do, you know,

do the work. Yeah, and teenagers happy spent three hours at a courthouse, you know, getting copies of pictures, and then give them to the guy who gets 50 bucks for three hours of work. It cost him like 20 cents of paper to print them or I can't remember the numbers. But he was making like a buck on each one. And he would sell 10s of 1000s of these things all across the state. And I'm like, that's, that's, you know, using publicly available media to create to create an empire of, of mugshot

money. I used to see him I used to see his papers on the gas station. But not anymore. I don't know if he's just done with it or, but my brother was telling me that that guy was he just had an idea. He's like, I'm gonna do it. And he started out just printing them himself on his like, you know, Canon laser printer or whatever. And, and then found a place that would print them on newspaper stock for a cheaper per page. But, um,

so What are y'all like? Do you have to do like you said, you do most of the, you know, the stories keep up with the site yourself? Mostly? Correct. Are you like 24/7? Like, if you get a text in the middle of the night, you jump up and log in and post the story? Or do you have time for that? Or do you have set hours or

town if I had to go out of town for some reason. And as long as I have access to the internet, and have my cell phone with me in case I need to make phone calls or whatever, I can pretty much work working anywhere. There hasn't been a ton outside of last week, obviously with a lockdown and mount all of it all of the misinformation that was spreading around so quickly. There hasn't been a ton of what I would consider to be breaking

news in the couple of months that I've been on the job. Now, there's been some things that have happened with the sheriff's department here in Wayne County, if anyone's been keeping up with that story. And some of the unfortunate, we can just call it what it is corruption that has gone on. And some of that is what I would consider to be breaking news. And that goes back to a little bit earlier, you guys were asking about

sources and crazy stories and things like that. And that that one definitely falls under the what you can print and what you can't because it's not necessarily confirmed. There's a lot of things that we've been able to print since all of this began that have been confirmed. And then there's a lot of things that that you hear from people, different sources. People that you know, that have their own connections in various ways to

the sheriff's department inside and out. Right. As far as that story is concerned, and some of it, you know, we're aware of, but because we can't get anyone to go on the record for a million different reasons as far as that, you know, jobs and things like that. We have been able to print. So there's been some breaking news as far as the sheriff's department goes, but not a ton. To answer your question. But I'm sure I'm sure it's coming at some point.

sure you got all your ducks in a row before you print it. But you know, it's it's entering the web news business so you understand you do want to you want to have those facts nailed down as quick as possible because you want to be the first one telling the story. So you do get the clicks because the clicks matter. If you're you know if your ad based, which I'm assuming that's probably how you all, you know, keep things go on with the site.

powerful. And I can speak from firsthand experience of having sold goals, real news in the past to walk into a business because you get a lot of questions on the radio side, you know, how do I know this is financially benefiting my business? And that's, that's a more difficult question to answer for, for radio, on the web, you know, like for goals, or daily news, I think right now we're in the neighborhood of about 80,000. Readers, right, which is pretty strong in Wayne

County. So we're able to take those numbers into a business and put those in front of them. And it pretty much speaks for So yeah, that's there's also a lot of responsibility that comes with that, too. That's such a large number, like you've got to, you got to make sure that, like you said, that you're fact checking everything. And, you know, sometimes we because we do take new submissions, we get people that reach out to us, and they want us to look into things, but they also want to

remain anonymous. And I understand that from from their standpoint. But you just have to be really, really careful when it comes to that and make sure that if they're especially if they're submitting a complaint about something I got one right now that someone wants me to investigate. Now just say it involves,

see fit. monetarily, send us facts, and US corrections and arts and us music, anything, anything you can do to help out go to our merch store store at FunFactFriday.com store dot FunFactFriday.com. And we just asked for, you know, whatever folks want to want to help us out with and one of the cool things that we do is we accept Bitcoin payments through the new podcast apps that support the Lightning Network network. So basically, as people listen, they can donate money for every

minute they listen, we get a little bit of Bitcoin. So it's like, awesome, yeah. And then you can also do what's called a boost or booster gram, where they can send us a message and attach money to that message. And we say anything that you boost to us. We're gonna read on the air. We you know, we tell people that because all the booster grams are on the blockchain, or they're all They're all on the network. So

it's, you can't really hide them anyway. So we're gonna go ahead and actually, we're gonna go through we got a couple of boosts this week. We're recording on Monday night. So if you send us a boost after Monday, we will get you on that we will mention you on the next episode. But let's see we got Kevin Hallisey. Three days ago, for episode 155 mechanical keyboards with Emily and Kayla from QBO. 4321 Satoshis says counting down to my Saturday morning listen, I miss Car Talk.

Yes, yes. Car Talk was was a great show. Leila that was an old day. They talked about like fixing cars and whatnot, but I'm not huge into that but they were just really entertaining. Yeah, those guys click and clack Yes, they were fantastic. Listen to even if you're not into cars. Then Kevin says, How about episodes about glaciers or the Ice Age? Or, or the Great Lakes.

Fun facts about the Great Lakes. Life is much more fun listening to Fun Fact Friday calm Are you in the keeper and living up and down world all good people providing good value for value? Thank you, Kevin 4321, Satoshi, and then bareness love and light comes in. It comes in with with her 333 sets. And that was from the Antarctica episode. Nap science is something that I can get behind smiling

it's a really neat system the way it works. We didn't really, ever want to do ads, because we're just, we didn't like we don't like the idea of like, contracts and owing people things. And, you know, maybe somebody coming up with, let's say, a company we're doing an ad for does something we don't like, you know, you know, things can can get crazy when especially when you got a minor as one of the hosts of the show. One of the funny things Spotify messed up. And they put what was

it wild turkey? Yeah, yeah, wild turkey liquor ads on our show, like, display ads on a kid show. And I'm like, Huh. And what was really bad was that they put that same ad for alcohol, on shows about being sober. So they just across the board, just through an ad buy out there and just bought, I don't care what the show is, we want to advertise on it. And it just

went through like there was no discretion whatsoever. And if, if it was not a dark pattern to get off of Spotify, once your show is on it, we would have less we wouldn't be on Spotify anymore. It was it really made me angry. It makes me angry that they're putting ads display ads on our show anyway. Because we didn't agree to that. Technically, I guess we did when we when I allowed them to ingest the show. But yeah, not gonna get in the weeds with all that. But yeah, it's it's a neat

system. And we always like to thank our folks who come in with, with donations, we appreciate that. Did you have any questions for us about anything, anything at all? It doesn't have to be about the show or news or anything. You can ask us you know, what's the best serial mascot or?

so I had to tear down my studio. And anyway, long story short, we were in the car. We were every Friday when I pick her up from school. We would do like okay, fun fact time. Let's do a fun fact. Fun Fact, Friday, Fun Fact, Friday and we goofed around with it. I was like, let's just do a show. Why not? It'll be fun. And we did. And probably what 1520s episodes and we got mentioned on no agenda? Probably, yeah. 15 or 20 episodes, and there's a podcast named no agenda. And it is

massive. It's around a million listeners an episode. And both of the hosts are fans of our show. So they played like a three minute clip from our show on their show, which they, you know, I mean, that's, that's a big deal. So we kind of just took off and they made fun of us, which is fine. That's, you know, that's what we're here for. We were being really super serious at the beginning. Like everything was scripted, and everything was very NPR. Hello, and welcome to Fun Fact Friday.

My name is David. I'm Leila's dad, you know, everything was very like that. And we had a little criticism that we Are two NPR free. And but we got a lot of listeners that way. And then we just slowly we started off with a couple of what were they the Behringer, XM, 8500 mics into a Behringer, we had about 80 bucks worth of equipment, just a couple of cheap mics cheap interface. We recorded the episodes, I spent hours editing them, and cleaning everything up and blah, blah, blah, right?

Well over time, we started getting more and more support. And the support, numbers started getting a lot bigger. Money wise, and we just slowly as time went on, we bought better mics. And then we get more donations and we bought better cables. And then I bought a road caster Pro two. And then you know, we just slowly as the money comes in, we get new equipment. And then recently, we actually just had an anonymous anonymous supporter, just send us a couple of new laptops, because ours

were getting old. So we have we have folks out there that we provide enough value for them, for them to help us out in big ways. So we you know, it and that's when it's kind of become we're kind of trying to build a little community. And we do get a lot of help from people. We get a light and you know, we meet different people throughout the community. So like Bandra Scott, he was a he's a real real big. He's like the microphone guy on YouTube. We kind of traveled in the same circles.

And he's like, yeah, yeah, come on. Fun Fact, Friday, and then he came on and that brought us some borrow some viewers. And then we get a hold of people around other people. And like we just had Mimi Smith DeVore, AK on, she wrote the book on eggs to a 750 page book called too many eggs. And it has it's just a million recipes and stories about eggs and egg art, and just everything having to do with eggs. And we're like, oh, cool. Let's talk about eggs. So So yeah, it's just been awesome.

It's just been a very progressive and actually starting what was about February, I started on the studio. Yeah, I took the tour. That's where we're at right now. I took the tool shed in the backyard. Little 16 by 10. Just standard shed that you'd buy. Shed store on side of the road. And I put up insulation, wired it dry walled it, ran Ethernet out to it. Just got it all loaded down, put some sound,

sound treatment on the walls. I've got it all wired up, as I mean, you can see us we're not this isn't a video podcast, but you can see us and we just kind of set it all up little, little studio. And like you were saying earlier with being able to go into an office, like you said, you can go to that office out in Rosewood being able to go out to somewhere that is dedicated to work is something about that, to me that beats working at home.

Because you just you're in a different mindset. Absolutely. So but yeah, that's that's Fun Fact, Friday in a nutshell. And we just, we have fun. We are actually in the we're in the Goldsboro Christmas parade. And 2022. Yeah, 2021 Yeah, we had a float in the Christmas parade. That was really fun. And then we actually did a live broadcast from the float. Like, while we were on the float, we were doing an episode. So that was interesting. That was interesting. It was and it was,

that was the year that it was 2021 and 2021. So everybody was kind of coming out of the lockdown mode. And so like that was like the biggest, biggest version of the Goldsboro Christmas parade. There had been a long time. Once they they estimated What 2015 20,000 people there. And that was really neat for us to have that. That exposure. But yeah, that's that's us in a nutshell, folks who are new to the show. That's kind of how it kind of how it all got going and how it's been.

Yeah, and how value for value can really work for a show. Because it's so exciting. Yeah, it's gotten us all of our just gotta be able to provide value back to the listener. So they stopped valuing what you're doing. They'll let you know by not supporting you. So it's a it's a good system. Let's see. Let's see, I think I'm gonna check these chat GBT questions again, see if there's anything else. You know what? Oh my gosh. We didn't even say who invented the news.

politics in Italy in Europe. The first printed newspapers were published weekly in Germany in 1605. Typically, they were censored by the government oh and conquer that doesn't happen these days, especially in France. Reported mostly for news and current prices. After English government relaxed censorship in 1695 newspapers flourished in London, and a few other cities including Boston and Philadelphia, by the 1830s. High speed presses can print 1000s of papers cheaply allowing

low daily costs. And nowadays, you can run a an entire new site from your cell phone if you've got the the thumb typing speeds, or a really good speech to text program so Yeah, as long as you got an internet connection these days like you like you were saying, you can you can hammer out a article hit post right from your phone. Yeah, if we wanted to, since we do self hosting and and all we'd write our own RSS feed and all that stuff. We could do every anything from my cell phone to

we don't ever do that. We just like we're not doing an episode this week, y'all. We're out of town. Next week. Yeah. But yeah. If you didn't have anything else, Leila Andrew, did you have anything else you wanted to say? Do you want to plug anything? Or? No, I've got some links to put in your show notes for you. Well, first of all, thank you

football is going on. Then you can find our our broadcast on W GBR. Not 8.3 FM on Friday nights beginning at 630. And we also stream our broadcasts live on goals for daily news.com. So you can find us there as well.

on. It was very nice to meet you. We will definitely come check out the studio. Yeah, since we're both I'm more of one but we're both audio nerds. So yeah, thank you for coming on Andrew and everybody.