About Mike
The Redding's... minus one.
The Redding's... minus one.
StopandSmellthePeople.com is for storytelling and storytellers. My hope, over a long steady haul, is to grow this site into something anyone anywhere can turn to for a daily reminder that the whole world is not going to hell in a hand-basket. But if it does, I’ll just keep writing this in hell. I love denial.
I believe local television news (my career of choice), for the most part, has run off the tracks. It has to return to its roots to survive and thrive. You don’t have to look past your local newscast to see what’s broken about news: the car accidents, the over-hyped crime du jour and the constant crying, no, screaming WOLLLLLLF! has turned off viewers in record numbers.
But you don’t have to look beyond “60 Minutes” to see what still works: stories that matter told in a compelling manner. No hype. Just intelligent story selection and great writing. Same as it ever was.
In my 14 years reporting the news it has always been about the story & the writing. Every story that deserves to be told deserves to be told well… and with context. The awards I’ve won reflect my commitment to that:
2 National Edward R Murrow Awards
28 Emmys
11 Associated Press awards
3 National Gabriel Awards
1 Missouri Broadcasters Association Award.
(I also have a handful of bowling trophies from my youth and a Golden Hammer awarded by Boardman High School for my nifty woodworking. Good times.)
Today I work behind the camera. I’m the Managing Editor for WDBJ7, the CBS station in Roanoke, VA. I’m also the Journalism Coach for WDBJ7’s parent company, Schurz Communications. My job, in a nutshell, is to teach others to be better news storytellers.
For those of you who need it, what follows is my history prior to right now.
1960s
I was born in 1960, the youngest of eight children. I have four brothers and three sisters. My mom’s family is from Italy. Dad’s from Ireland. Not a great mix, unless you like your tempers short and soaked in alcohol. They met in the late 1930s in high school in a coalmining town along the Susquehanna River in Eastern Pennsylvania. After high school they married and dad sailed off to Europe and WW2. His friends have told me he had a drinking problem as early as high school. No surprises, the war gave him more sorrows to drown. Post war, my parents started having my older brothers and sisters and moved from Pennsylvania to the booming steel mill city of Youngstown, Ohio… where I was born.
Too young to be a hippie like my older bothers in the late 1960s and too oblivious to be anything else, I was a happy-go-lucky kid, so thin I looked like skin stretched over bones. Being the runt of the neighborhood I specialized in “not getting beat up.” I wasn’t always successful so I learned to take punches pretty well. These are the days where my twisted sense of humor was forged.
1970s
Youngstown’s boom went bust in the 1970s. Sadly, I wasn’t dazed and confused like so many in my school. When Bruce Springsteen writes a song about your hometown, it means something… something depressing. This is a section of Springsteen’s song “Youngstown” …and I think it nails the tragic tale of a depressed town full of work-a-day men and women who can’t catch a break…
Well my daddy come on the Ohio works… When he come home from World War two… Now the yards just scrap and rubble He said, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”… These mills they built the tanks and bombs That won this country’s wars… We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for… Here in Youngstown Here in Youngstown My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down Here darlin’ in Youngstown
Perhaps what is saddest of all about this song is that it was released in 1995… 20 years too late to matter or make a difference.
I mention that song because the lyrics accurately capture the 1970s. I was in Jr. High and High School when the bottom dropped out of Youngstown. When I graduated at 17-years-old in 1978, I left town and never moved back. The heart of my family, however, my mom and sisters, still live there on the south side of Youngstown. My brothers and I are speckled around the country. Saddest of all, my father drank himself to death around the same time they started shoveling dirt on Youngstown… we buried him in the fall of 1973. I was 13. Hard to believe… but I haven’t been back to his grave since.
1980s
I left Ohio and moved to the west coast and tried my hand at a number of careers (some of them ending disastrously) but always slipped back into architectural design work of some sort. I was a fine draftsman who could draw anything to perfection. I worked with and for some amazing people. But I wasn’t thrilled with my job. Drawing people’s dream homes was interesting but left me unfulfilled.
Far and away the best part of the 80s (and the rest of my life) was the birth of my #1 son, Trevor. Of course I fainted a few seconds after the birth, but have been mostly conscious ever since. Trevor is still a joy and inspiration to me. He calls me 1.0 and I call him 2.0…. he is a newer, better version. Fewer bugs and crashes, smarter and faster.
1990s
By the end of the 1980s I was burning out. Check that. I had crashed and burned I just didn’t know yet (I guess sometimes you die and no one tells you). In the early 1990s I was a dead man walking. Doing period design work on movie star homes in “Hollywood” and absolutely lost.
In 1992 I walked away from my drawing board and enrolled in college. I was 32 years old. I guess you can call me a late bloomer. It was writing, not drawing, which was my first love. So I waited tables at a Country Club and went back to school. I would have stayed on the west coast but the 1994 Northridge Earthquake forced my hand. I sold most of what I owned, including my antique convertible, and moved to Athens, Ohio. I rented a room within walking distance of school and finished my last two years at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.
In 1996 at 35 I proudly graduated with my journalism degree and shipped off to my first TV gig in Springfield, Missouri. I was making almost no money and happier than I could remember. I was writing for a living. No longer lost.
Things went well for me in Springfield. I was broke but content. And eventually a man from a TV station in Charlotte, North Carolina, called and said he was looking at my work and wanted to fly me in for an interview. In June of 1998 I accepted his job offer and started reporting in Charlotte. I was half as broke but just as happy.
2000s
The Redding's... all.
A few years into my Charlotte gig, my boss conjured up this “Carolina Traveler” segment for our newscasts. Four days a week I would cover murder and mayhem and on the fifth day I would do a feature story on a person or place in the Carolinas. That segment grew into a popular primetime news magazine show for a couple years but then the economics of life and business forced it back into a segment in the news.
Today my life is sweeter than ever. I re-married in 2006 (eloped in Italy) and just a year ago my #2 son, Crowley, was born. So one son is in the United States Air Force learning to fly, and the other is learning to walk! The adventure grows!
Okay, back to the word pile…
