( Matthew Septimus )
Alison Stewart, host of WNYC's All of It with Alison Stewart, reflects on MTV News shutting down, and remembers her years as a reporter at the groundbreaking network.
[music]
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You've been hearing Alison Stewart with me this morning as we've been partnering on this one-hour fundraising special, but now, Alison's going to slide into the guest chair to discuss something in the news that's relevant and personal to her. MTV News, where Alison first came to prominence, has ended its run after 36 years. Now, for a certain generation, that might include you. Some of your TV news stars were Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, John Norris, Sue Chin Pack, Chris Connolly, Gideon Yago, and Alison Stewart.
MTV News, of course, is only the latest news organization once hailed for innovating that has recently been lost. Vice News is also in the news for this right now, BuzzFeed closing its newsroom entirely just recently, and there are others as the digital media business model continues to be challenging. We'll take the privilege of Alison's presence at this time of day to do a short appreciation of MTV News and of her and talk about the state of the delivery of journalism.
Alison, can you do this slide-over thing from the pledge drive chair to the guest chair?
Alison Stewart: I already scooched. I scooched. I'm in the guest chair now.
Brian Lehrer: All right, I want to take you back as far as college. You went to Brown, class of '88, English and American literature major. Tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong. You were a music director of the campus radio station WBRU. What kind of radio were you doing in college?
Alison Stewart: Oh, WBRU was an amazing place. It was a 20,000-watt commercial radio station that was run as such. Our ad sales folks, this was their real job, but it was run by the students. I really got into the music business quite early, like at 18 or 19 years old. Because Providence was the capital of Rhode Island and this cool little town, you could really, really have an impact.
I actually picked Brown partially for that reason, because I knew they had this campus radio station and I was enamored with it. It's funny, we got a call the other day on my show from somebody who used to listen to WBRU in Providence because it went all the way to the Cape and it went on to New Bedford. It was really music, and big acts would come on because it was a commercial radio station. That's sort of where I got my chops in interviewing, starting there.
Brian Lehrer: You graduated from Brown in '88. MTV News had just been launched in '87. You latched on right away. I guess you really made your mark publicly for the first time covering the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton versus Bush 41. How was MTV trying to do that differently from the old networks at that time?
Alison Stewart: Yes, so the MTV, proper, started in '81. The news division started in '87. The idea was that young Americans weren't really being served by mainstream news. I was sitting in the newsroom and my boss, Dave Sirulnick, who's now at Radical Media, came in and said, "Oh, Tabitha, right? You know Tabitha?" I'm like, "Yes, I know Tabitha." "Okay, I really want you guys to get on a plane on Sunday because we're going to go cover the presidential election."
Honestly, we kind of made it up on the fly at the beginning. We thought, "Okay, what's important to us because we are our audience, we are young women in our 20s? Student loans, access to reproductive health care, all those kind of things." Our big mantra was we didn't talk at our audience. We spoke for our audience. We were the conduit for our audience because we were our audience.
It was a combination of being very present for the people for whom you are reporting, and also trying to be different, and also just actually trying to be authentic, not trying to be the voice of God News people. We're just real people. We're real young women on the ground trying to figure this out.
Brian Lehrer: Let me say I'm going to call an audible here. This one-hour fundraising special that we're doing that ends at eleven o'clock, we're going to end it at 11:05. I think I can take that much license because I want to get in a few more questions to Alison. We ran a little over with Judy Woodruff and Roy Wood and Katie Thornton, and I know you're all enjoying listening to Alison, so we're going to stretch this just a minute and take five minutes of license.
What do you think has replaced MTV News? Because I assume it got shut down because it didn't matter to young people anymore recently like it did for people in an earlier generation. If you say TikTok and Instagram, I'm going to scream because they're not news organizations.
Alison Stewart: I will not say TikTok and Instagram. By the way, the numbers 888-376-WNYC if you want to make a contribution during this interview. I think it's podcasting. I think the organization, and not because it leans left, but I think Crooked Media has really kind of captured that community aspect.
The authenticity of it started with one thing and then the One Bros Save America podcast, and then it's branched out into podcasts where it's an entire- all the hosts are women and they have a trans woman news anchor. It's very representative of modern America, and the way that they have such a dedicated following and a community and you know what you're going to get and the guys who started it actually worked in this field so there's a certain amount of expertise. I think that's really the podcasting world.
I think like Sam Sanders podcast, some of the stuff that NPR is doing with their podcast, with the Politics podcast. I really feel like the audiences that coalesce around certain podcast hosts and certain podcast topics. That has the same feeling to me. I think that's because of the authenticity.
Brian Lehrer: Continuing to look back, it wasn't just straight news or issues of relevance to that particular demographic that you were primarily appealing to. It was arts and culture, as you do on your show now, mixed in. Here's a clip. This may make you blush, but you are hanging around with a certain group of musicians.
Alison Stewart: Chris, I'm surrounded by Blowfish. I don't really know how this happened. I'm here with my good, close, personal friends, Hootie and the Blowfish. Now, we know that there's nobody in the band named Hootie, but who do people come up and decide is Hootie?
Speaker 1: Darius.
Darius: I'm not Hootie, though.
Alison Stewart: They were nicest guys, southern gentlemen. Hootie and the Blowfish. Poor Darius.
Brian Lehrer: You know what? You still sound the same, which is a compliment. How did the music part weave in with the news part?
Alison Stewart: Oh, I think that first of all, anybody who worked at MTV News was a music head first and foremost. The music was the joy of it. The music was sometimes the vehicle to get to the politics, to get to the issues, because many musicians obviously write about issues that are important to them. Many of them were politically active at this time and were very proudly politically active.
It was really an interesting-- It was a balancing act. Sometimes it was just fun.
I can remember at Webster Hall hosting a live event with Madonna's bedtime stories in our pajamas. A good time was had by all.
Brian Lehrer: Last question. Do you think the passing of MTV News, BuzzFeed News, and Vice News, all in short order, reflect something about the business of journalism today that you can put your finger on or a new hole that needs to be filled? Yes, do you see part of our role in public media is to fill part of that gap?
Alison Stewart: A couple of things. One, I think that everybody is competing for time now and I think that's very, very different. It's not necessarily like your competition is one network or one other show or something. It's competing for people's time. That's really tough, and if someone knows how to solve that, give me a call.
The thing that I think is going to be missing and missing from all these outlets is the growth and nurturing of people who are a little bit different and people who fall outside the mainstream. I would never have had a career in news had it not been for MTV News. There would have been no local news organization that would have put me on the air at 23 with my crazy big hair and weighing more than a buck 15. It just wouldn't have happened. I think that we're going to lose a lot of really good alternative journalists.
Then again, there's the other side of the Internet. There are no gatekeepers, so if you got something interesting to say, go do it.
Brian Lehrer: We are very fortunate to have you here with us now with all you've done previously. Landing at WNYC, Alison Stewart. Thank you and get ready to slide over into that other chair.
Alison Stewart: I'm scooching over here.
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