[EAS] Cybersecurity for broadcast stations

[Adrienne Abbott]

Bill--
Autopilot or not, somebody better be there when I arrive or the station
doesn't receive a certificate! 

True story...ABIP Certificates are renewed every three years. You and I know
that a lot can change in three years. The engineer for a station I inspected
recently met me in the lobby, explaining that when she retired the long-time
receptionist was replaced with security cameras and microphones. As we
walked through the silent hallways the engineer noted the empty offices
where jobs had been eliminated, automated, consolidated, transferred to
corporate or "hubbed" to a central location serving multiple sister stations
since my last visit. 

My inspections include a tour of the station news facilities. In this case,
there was a brand new news studio, full of bright and flashy technology--new
robot cameras, LED lights, green walls that could put the weatherman in any
part of town the producers wanted, a morning news set, a set for the noon
news, a set for the evening news, an interview set, all with sleek desks in
front of massive city scapes. The producer's booth had a wall of HD TV
screens and computers on desks, no boards to punch, no tape machines to
load, no Teleprompter to run. The engineer shook his head as he told me how
many news positions had been eliminated by these latest whiz-bang gadgets. 

I expected to find the newsroom as empty as the rest of the station.
Instead, we stepped into a large, open room that was humming with the voices
of dozens of people, many on headsets and cell phones, editing video and
writing stories. Waves of people washed around the raised island of The
Desk, rolling out the back door or to a row of glassed-in edit bays. Before
I could ask, the engineer answered: "Social Media. Social Media is a big
part of our news department now. They're 24/7, just like our news folks." I
asked how many Social Media staff they had. The answer was a number very
close the running total I was keeping of jobs that had been eliminated by
the switch to automation-consolidation-corporation--hubbing. The new Social
Media department had even absorbed a few of the employees whose jobs were
lost in the all the changes.     

Out in the garage, it was a little sad to see the old consoles, mixers and
tape players piled around empty file cabinets, broken chairs and bundles of
wire. The equipment that was once state of the art and dearly purchased had
done its job, told its stories and was now set aside, silent, next stop the
recycling center. Our generation struggled to learn that equipment, making
the transition from one inch tape to Beta and VHS, from cameras with decks
and mic booms to cameras with cassettes and shotguns, from analog to
digital. The current generation, our kids and grandkids, were born digital.
They learned to shoot and edit right after they learned to talk and text on
their cell phones. It seems to me like they haven't had the challenges of
trying to coax a cold transmitter to life at 5:00 AM, load a 12-inch tape
reel from a pancake or untangle a cassette with a pencil or edit with a
razor and block or build a crawl from a roll of black paper and sheets of
white rub-on letters. 

Where am I going with this? Maybe we made it too easy for them. Maybe in all
this automation and computerization we should have provide the Next
Generation with a struggle to learn something. Maybe we went from Ohm's Law
to Windows 10 too quickly. We used to build boards, now we grow black boxes.
Maybe we've forgotten that there's a place for responsibility, that someone
has to take charge of the machines and not depend on them to do everything
and that there's no such thing as a perfect computer program. We forgot to
show them how to turn off the equipment. We certainly had a lot of warning.
Remember those old Sci-Fi B movies we watched on Saturday afternoons?...Now
the alien monster isn't some oversize scaly reptile from the back side of
the moon or militant automatons from Mars, it's the enormous lack of passion
and dedication to future of the business of entertaining and informing the
community.     

I think I have laundry to do...
Adrienne

Adrienne Abbott
Nevada EAS Chair
NVBA  ABIP  Inspector

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Bill Ruck