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Thursday, December 6, 2007
12/7: Dave FM’s Call to Auction, new morning host (UPDATED)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dave’s former Program Director Michelle Engel may not have been known for her great communication skills, but she did come up with a fun charity event with Habitat for Humanity: Call to Auction in 2005, raising more than $220,000 over the past two years. The event started today at 9 a.m. and runs through Saturday.
People donate money to have their songs requested on air. The more obscure or offbase, the pricier it gets. This leads to some unusual picks. Someone at 6:20 p.m., for instance, bid $150 so Dave FM played Taylor Hicks’ “The Right Place,” a song that certainly has never played before on the station. DJ Mara Davis, a big Hall & Oates fan, spun “Kiss On My List” today. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” not a normal song on Dave’s playlist, made the cut. Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” was played during the noon hour. And the funnest, most off-the-wall pick so far: The Time’s “Jungle Love.”
According to the Dave FM Web site, here’s how the bidding works.
Each song will have a minimum bid of $75 via credit card over the phone, with all monies going to Atlanta Habitat for Humanity. When we say minimum bid, we mean, if the song is not questionable in content or length, and is a song that is in the familiar “playlist” of DAVE FM, it will cost only $75. But the more obscure or unusual the request, the more it will be taxed (and thus, raising more for the effort!).
Auction items, including a piano lesson with Rolling Stones’ Chuck Leavell and a Tori Amos autographed piano bench, are available here.
Also, Dave on Friday introduced Zakk Tyler to the world as Dave’s primary morning host. It’s clearly going to be a personality-based morning show.
I posted info about him back on November 27 here. His Web site is www.zakkster.com
Dave’s General Manager Rick Caffey said both Holly Firfer and Tim Orff, the current morning show lineup since Dave dropped Steve Barnes in September 2006, are still being considered for spots on Zakk’s show, but nothing has been finalized. He hopes to have the show ready to go by January.
“We’re not going to launch with a big hyped campaign,” Caffey said Friday afternoon. “He’ll earn his listeners one at a time. He’s very funny, very driven. And he’ll be out and about in the community.”
In the print edition, I did a piece about Adam Murphy, the WGCL-TV reporter who does the weekly “Restaurant Report.”
We’ve given WGCL, whose news telecasts usually lag behind its rivals in ratings, more media coverage in the past week than the previous 12 months combined thanks to Cari Champion’s firing, the departures of Gene Norman and Cynne Simpson and now Adam Murphy.
12/6: Adam Murphy’s Restaurant Report Card
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s a story I wrote for the print edition about Adam Murphy and his Restaurant Report on WGCL-TV:
For TV reporter, rats and roaches part of show
By RODNEY HO / Staff/ rho@ajc.com
At a quiet strip center near Gwinnett Place mall, WGCL-TV consumer reporter Adam Murphy and cameraman A.J. Willen enter Super New China Buffet.
Dressed in a crisp Brooks Brothers suit, Murphy confronts an employee about a recent health inspection report that included comments about salad dressing kept at improper temperatures and roaches.
“Have you cleaned up the roach problem?” Murphy asks. She just smiles helplessly, a deer in the headlights, and says, “Sorry. I can’t speak English.”
“There’s got to be somebody in charge or managing the restaurant right now, ” he says impatiently.
Normally, Murphy gets booted from restaurants he confronts each Thursday by angry store managers. But in this case, there’s no manager in sight.
“That was frustrating, ” Murphy said later. “My mission is to go in there and make sure they’ve cleaned up their act.”
ABOVE: Duluth, GA: WGCL reporter, Adam Murphy, and photographer A.J. Willen, confront a worker at the Super New China Buffet as part of his Restaurant Report Card” which zings restaurants with failing health inspections. Murphy also visits restaurants with good health inspection scores and praises them for their good work. (Brant Sanderlin photo/Staff)
This is a mission 34-year-old Murphy has been on for nearly five years with his “Restaurant Report Card” on the local CBS affiliate. Managers have called the cops on him. They’ve verbally cussed and threatened him, but nobody has hurt him —- yet.
“People have shoved me out the door and placed their hands on the camera, ” Murphy said. He notes that he has the legal right to enter the premises and stay there until told otherwise. Sometimes, he does feel uncomfortable at ethnic restaurants when there’s a language barrier. “But if these restaurant people don’t understand me, then they don’t understand the inspectors, ” he said.
Murphy doesn’t take credit for the tougher state restaurant inspection regulations, which went into effect Dec. 1, but he’s happy about them. “The state was behind the game the last few years, ” he said. He likes that restaurants now must post scores on drive-through windows, employees must wear gloves in the kitchen and inspections are now standardized.
Naturally, restaurant owners and managers targeted by Murphy aren’t exactly fans. “I don’t like it at all, ” said Erica Chang, a spokeswoman for Super New China Buffet, who says the restaurant has regular pest control visits. “TV reports like this are not good.” (The restaurant, which received a failing score of 64 last week, improved to an 89 at a reinspection earlier this week.)
For balance, Murphy highlights a restaurant with a high score every week. Last Thursday, for instance, he spent more than an hour at Depeaux, a new Cajun restaurant in Decatur, which received a perfect health inspection score. “I’ve had a number of people come in and say they saw the piece, ” manager Frank Coughlan said Wednesday. Watching the segment with Super New China Buffet, he said, “I think it keeps people honest. Personally, I’m a stickler. We are cleaning the kitchen constantly.”
Georgia Restaurant Association executive director Ron Wolf took a Switzerland-like approach to Murphy’s “Restaurant Report Card”: “It’s part of what the media does. I’m sure some find it useful. Others don’t take it seriously.”
Murphy, who scans hundreds if not thousands of inspection reports every week from health departments in metro Atlanta, has captured a live roach on camera scurrying across the floor of a Henry County pizza place. He’s had employees of a Chinese restaurant run out of the place en masse when he arrived. He watched inspectors shut down a Wendy’s in Lawrenceville during lunch hour.
Vernon Goins, a Gwinnett County Health Department spokesman, loves Murphy’s reports. “He’s an indispensable asset to public health education, ” he said. “He exerts pressure on the food service industry we can’t provide. It’s also extremely entertaining.”
Murphy, a Dunwoody native and Marist High grad, has wanted to be a reporter since he was a kid and says he’s now “living out my dream.” With a folksy style and boyish face, he also possesses a distinctly raspy voice that sounds like he’s smokes two packs a day but is merely genetic.
He’s also a good marketer, promoting his weekly reports on top 40 station Q100, country station South 107 in Rome, the Sunday Paper and Jezebel magazine.
Listening to Murphy gab about rat droppings and rotting meat “is like a traffic accident, ” said Q100 morning host Bert Weiss, who’s had Murphy on every few weeks for several years. “You don’t want to watch, but you can’t break away from it.”
Murphy readily admits he’s not the first reporter to go after dirty restaurants. Since 2000, hundreds of TV stations have done this type of “gotcha” reporting nationwide, said Michael Castengera, a University of Georgia media lecturer and consultant to seven TV stations, none in Atlanta.
“It’s not broadcast or promoted as much as it once was” at other stations, said Castengera. “But Adam has taken this on and made it really personality driven. It’s not only the restaurant report, but it’s also Adam. People identify with him and feel he’s going to bat for them.”
Murphy’s job doesn’t deter him and his wife, Angie, from eating out four times a week. He just checks inspection scores everywhere he goes. If it’s below 80, he walks.
And better yet, he has not had a case of food poisoning since he started doing the reports. “Either I’m lucky, ” he said, “or what I do actually works.”
ON TV
“Restaurant Report Card” airs during WGCL’s 4 p.m. newscast on Thursdays, usually in the second half-hour, and during the noon news on Fridays. Watch the reports online: www.cbs46.com/restaurantreport/index.html.
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I’m over the cuteness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The high: A winner is announced right away with no “little chat” on the part of the judges.
The low: Everything old is new again.
In the words of the Hyundai commercial: Duh.
Given that worshiping at the altar of retro is a rite of passage for everyone under the age of 30, interpreting the fashions of 20 or 30 years ago doesn’t seem to be that much of a challenge.
I mean, don’t we see flared jeans shuffle past us every hour, hems trodden underfoot? And haven’t leggings outlived the novelty stage? Even the poodle skirt fails to embarrass. You want outdated? Do the bustle.
Anyway.
I think everyone in the “PR” viewing audience was sufficiently impressed by Team Jillian’s winning lightweight denim collection. The pieces were modern, wearable and - all together now — cohesive. They could go straight from the Parsons workroom to Macy’s (or Bluefly.com) to my closet. And that’s the problem.
It was a knockout of a collection, and I would have worn any of those designs, but its professional polish lacked the grit that makes fashion fantastic, outrageous, desirable. The more I watch “PR,” the more I want winners with edge, not just winners who can make an outfit that’ll fly off the racks in the hands of spend-happy teens and 30-somethings alike. I want less cute.
Consider Kit’s black-and-white mismatched prints, or Sweet P’s tulip dress with — whoa! — yet another ’80s trend, the sleeveless mock turtleneck.
The last word: I want to make a bold statement: Chris March got sent home not because of the wingspan of his shoulder pads, but because he didn’t make good TV.
Over the last four episodes we’ve been surprised and bored and annoyed and intrigued. So now it’s time to make a prediction. Who are the early favorites? I like the soft-spoken Steven, but I don’t think he’ll last, especially after this week. I’m looking at Kit or Sweet P.
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