DAVID HELWIG: How a rock radio superstation helped shape (debauch?) SooToday's news style

When I heard earlier this month about the passing of Canadian radio news legend Dick Smyth, my thoughts turned immediately to my upbringing in Sarnia, Ont.

My grandfather was a radio repairman in the broadcast industry's formative years, so our house had no shortage of old radios and other audio equipment.

Every night, I'd do my homework with one ear to CKLW-AM in Windsor on a pre-1938 Northern Electric radio receiver. I know it was pre-1938 because it had an official-looking paper pasted inside the Bakelite cover warning you needed a licence to listen to the radio in those days.

CKLW was unique because of its Motown-heavy playlist and its way-way-way-over-the-top newscasts.

Dick Smyth ran The Big 8 newsroom at the time.

He invented the station's 20-20 news style, still talked about for its brutal, poetic honesty.

Today, we would more likely call it sensationalism.

Okay. We'd definitely call it sensationalism.

Blasting 50,000 watts day and night, CKLW's signal steamrolled across 28 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces.

It was #1 in Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Ft. Wayne and, of course, in hometown Windsor.

On every other radio station, audiences dropped during the newscasts.

Not at The Big 8.

Night after night, I waited for those newscasts, full of Motor City murders and mayhem.

The Motown playlist was awesome, but the news was even better.

It was mostly Detroit crime reports, presented in a hardscrabble style similar to what a crime boss might use in conveying the day’s business to his cronies.

But CKLW knew how to dig and tell a story.

Smyth and his CKLW colleagues included such broadcast legends as Bryon MacGregor, Mark Dailey, Randall Carlisle and Lee Marshall, voice of Tony the Tiger on breakfast-cereal commercials.

I ended up working for CKLW News myself for a spell, but not during the glory days.

I met Dick Smyth a time or two, mostly at Radio-Television News Directors Association of Canada events.

Today, I'll tell anyone who'll listen that those 20-20 newscasts at The Big 8 CKLW, as crazy as they were sometimes, were a seminal influence when I came to Sault Ste. Marie in February, 2002 to launch this little enterprise that grew into SooToday/Village Media.

By then, I'd also acquired decades of experience working for some of the most respected and demanding broadcasters, newspapers and magazines in Canada.

From one side of the business, I'd learned to write to the highest standards of accuracy and fairness.

And from rock radio, I'd learned to mix in a few dollops of humour, terse narrative story-telling and elements of human interest. 

The plan always was to be a little more strident and bold in the early years of SooToday, then dial it back as we grew, inevitably I thought, into the biggest media outlet in town.

I'm hoping that after almost 20 years, SooToday may have captured some of the characteristics that made CKLW great, while avoiding its obvious excesses.