Ryan Millsap, Chairman & CEO of Atlanta-based Blackhall Studios, is one of today’s top entertainment executives! With a vision for Blackhall that’s ambitious, energizing and boundless, Millsap is blazing a trail through the heart of the South – and setting his sights on the future of entertainment. Listen and learn as Ryan Millsap journeys through the myriad industries, people and landscapes that traverse the complex and dynamic world of film production.
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Ryan: I'm Ryan Millsap, host of the Blackhall Studios Podcast from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm an entrepreneur mostly by necessity, because I have massive authority issues, and also by constitution – as the entrepreneurial life is filled with things I love: freedom, adventure, creativity and imagination. When I began this leg of my journey into the entertainment industry, you may find it interesting to know that my background before this was all commercial real estate.
And then I built Blackhall Studios as a specialty real estate project for production giants like Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Universal to have a place to ply their skilled craft of production. I'm from Los Angeles, but I moved to Atlanta six years ago. I've done business all over the world, and I know few places with the dynamism of Atlanta. It's a world-class city with a huge economic future as a center of commerce for a global economy. On this podcast, we get local and global and talk to people who are inspirational, sensational, sometimes motivational, but at all times somehow tied to the ecosystem. That is the culture and business of entertainment as it relates to Blackhall Studios.
Today I'm hosting an old school radio guy, Mr. Bob Houghton -- who just happened to evolve into one of the most important broadcasters in Georgia as president of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters. Bob didn't just start in radio. He was a sportscaster, and he's called his fair share of games over the years. He made the jump into television when he moved to Atlanta just prior to the Olympic Games in 1996.
Bob learned early on that sales and advertising are the backbone of successful network affiliates. Bob commanded this arena in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Dallas, and finally here in Atlanta. Recently, Bob led the first live multi-network statewide town hall broadcast to address the unprecedented state of the state and the COVID-19 outbreak. Grab a cup of coffee, lean in, and listen. Bob Houghton feels like an old friend, and I'm glad he's a new one of mine.
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Ryan: Welcome to the Blackhall Podcast. I'm happy today to be talking to a unique guy; a guy who's a legend in the community -- someone who has dedicated his life to creating accurate communication channels for the public. A quintessential newsman and the president of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters: Mr. Bob Houghton. Bob, good morning. Thanks for joining me.
Bob: Good morning. Ryan. Nice to be talking to you.
Ryan: Thanks for taking the time during this quarantine to jump on a call with us. Really appreciate it.
Bob: Well, I just finished doing my workout, so it's a good thing we're not doing it on a video conference.
Ryan: Got it. You know, I'm not a big fan of those Zoom conferences. I don't want to get ready – if I'm going to be home, let me be in my PJs or my sweats.
Bob: We’re off to a good start. I completely agree with you. I think a year from now, we'll be talking about the virus, and we'll be saying, “What was that thing we were all so excited about? Zim? Zam? Zoom? Whatever it was.” I think it's just too hard, too fast. Nobody had even heard the word before 30 days ago, you know. But then, I'm a stick in the mud sometimes.
Ryan: Well, either that, or you just have really good intuition – because when people started inviting me to all these Zoom calls, I thought to myself, “This is completely counterproductive to what we're trying to achieve in our quarantine state.” But it is what it is. Where are you quarantining?
Bob: I live in Dunwoody and I have a home office, so I'm set up here. But I am going into the office once or twice a week. I'm usually there by myself. So it's not like I'm making a big, wild statement by doing it. But somebody's got to pick up the mail; to check, and make sure things get distributed. Things like that. And I guess it's me.
Ryan: What kind of things are you seeing in this new world? How is your business changing?
Bob: Let's talk about my members. Because, really, my business is my members. And what our stations are going through, of course, is unprecedented. That goes for any industry. I'm going to talk about TV, even though my background is radio, and I'm a radio guy. But a lot of this will pertain to television – at least, especially, what we're talking about right now. You turn on any local newscast – or any national newscast, for that matter – and you're going to see 3, 4, or 5 locations that all have to be technically supervised. The people are really working hard: the people on the screen that talk, and the people behind the screen. But the real doers are the technology people: the engineers that just have to be there, monitoring 5 or 6 screens and keeping everything going. This is all-hands-on-deck, and it's a very new experience. You might be doing live shots and things like that. But the idea of being on live remote locations from half a dozen places has never been done before, and probably not really been planned before.
Ryan: But it's working.
Bob: It's working great. But every once in a while, people will stumble over each other. And there's a delay – especially, it seems like, in the network programs. But in general, people are cooperating with each other and understanding it. I think the next question, logically, is to say how much of this stays in place afterwards – and no one really knows yet. I think you'll maybe see some new efficiencies of doing things that this allows. But I think we're a people business.
You and I were talking offline about other businesses that are people-related. While broadcasting is certainly a people-oriented business – and people need to be with people, I think, to really effectively communicate and do their jobs – there's no question that it can be a more remote business. Maybe we'll finally see a way to solve the Atlanta traffic problem.
Ryan: Right now, the Atlanta traffic problem is being solved. So, if we can just harness some of this, our freeways will stay empty, which is glorious. When you're out there, it's amazing how fast you can get places when the freeways aren't clogged.
Bob: I was in the office the other day, and I walked out at 5 after 5. I would never have even ventured out at 5 after 5 most afternoons. But then I was back home in 20 minutes or so. So you're right. It is a totally different world. I think that technology has allowed us to do things that we wouldn't have been able to do before. Simple things, like the phone being so active, and able to allow you to go remote. The idea that you can go out and shoot broadcast quality on a phone is just unbelievable. And you can't tell the difference.
You know, when phones started being used like this a few years ago, people didn't trust that you were really a journalist. Almost like, “You're doing this interview on a phone?” Things like that. But things have changed a lot. You should look first at the people that are doing this, but the equipment they're using – the mobile equipment they're using – has really made their jobs different.
Ryan: Well, I know you're a professor at UGA. Imagine that I'm a 21 year old junior who's decided that they want to go into broadcasting. Tell me: what's going on in the industry, and where's the opportunity for a young person?
Bob: Well, I specialize in sports. I teach a class in sports broadcasting. So, those people are a little different than other journalists. But I'll just take the 30,000-foot view of the kids that are in journalism at the University of Georgia. The Grady College is 1500 students. There's a lot of varieties and different programs there, but in general, they're still very dedicated to the proposition of going into journalism to make the world a better place. There's still a lot of idealism in the students.
The concern I have is that a lot of the broadcasters – especially my sports guys – they want to be on network TV, or they want to do play-by-play on the radio, and you ask them how much of that they consume as individuals. And it sometimes isn't a great deal. They need to really understand what they're getting into; how the television station works. They're used to several different alternatives. They led the cord-cutting, and things like that. So that challenges me sometimes – when they say they want to do it, and then they don't watch it or listen to it. That's one thing that we really stress: they need to get out.
We give them an assignment every week that they have to watch. Either they have to watch football games, or they have to watch the talk shows that are sports-oriented, or listen to them, and report back on what they see and hear. And it's for a lot of reasons. It's to educate them, but it's also to indoctrinate them into the business they want to be in. This hasn't changed from when Bob Houghton went into sports too many years ago – almost 40 years ago. They have a passion for sports, and they all pretty much understand they're not going to start at the top of the heap; that they have to go out. In my case, I was in a small market doing high school sports for two years – two of the best years. I enjoyed the heck out of it, to be honest. But you had to get the reps. You had to make your mistakes. And in sports, you pretty much have to start at the bottom.
Now, I just had a student get hired at ESPN. She's a producer there; she interned there, and she was so good that they hired her. But most people are not starting at ESPN. They're starting at... my radio station was WWMM, which is a hard thing to say, then and still. That's where most people start. And they have to really be dedicated to want to go out – to move away from home, to maybe stay 2 or 3 to a room, or have a parent that can help them out, because the first couple of years are really tough in any line of television or radio, especially sports.
Ryan: Well, obviously, ESPN was really disruptive to the existing model when they rolled into the sports world. What do you see as the next disruptors – or, what's disrupting right now that you can see, but that the people that aren't in the center of this might not see?
Bob: I think everybody sees that it's mobile. It's the different choices you make. This may, again, show my age – but I don't understand watching television on a cell phone when you can watch it on a 16-inch screen. But the mobility that we have now makes people do that. There's an awful lot of people that consume video, again, on the small screen, or maybe on their tablet. They're watching things that way. And that's a huge change.
Of course, the biggest change goes back 10 or 15 years ago, when the sportscast on television used to have 3 or 4 minutes of commercials in front of it, because it was the most watched thing on the newscast – especially for that targeted male audience. Well, now, there's a 90-second sportscast. Everybody does not have to wait. They can go to their phones; they can go to ESPN. Those are the biggest changes – the immediacy of being able to get the news when it comes. And then, I think, the video coverage of it – you know, people watching the 10, 15, 20-second videos of something. The Great Dump; the home run; the catch; that type of thing.
So, that's the biggest change. And quite honestly, my students are pretty good at it. You know, I teach this class, and I emphasize the play-by-play, but we also have a part of the class that's on the field doing video – doing the type of thing that they would probably be showing on the 11:30 news on Friday night, where they do another sports highlight, and they're out there. That's their natural habitat. They're struggling a little when they do play-by-play for the first time, but if you put a phone in front of them in the morning and go, “I'm going to cover a story,” they're going to come back with a pretty good story right off the bat. So, that's the type of thing that we're teaching in the class. Traditional media along with the new media.
Ryan: What kind of philosophy are you teaching? How are you weaving in journalistic ethics, or a journalistic understanding of the world? I mean, what are some of those principles that you think are so important, that may be present and may be not present in today's journalistic society?
Bob: Well, that's a great question. And I'm going to try to take the high road, although I am prepared to talk about my alma mater, Northwestern, and the fiasco they had this fall, which was just the opposite of this. The head of our department, who is also a Northwestern grad, is a stickler for this type of thing. And it starts with doing your homework. We insist that most of the games we do are about 30 miles away from the university, and our students have to go out and interview the coaches – to try to get to players who are more difficult, in high school. It's very difficult when you see that getting the home team is easy, but getting the road team sometimes is a little bit less so.
The first and foremost thing is doing your homework: checking your facts, and being prepared with that type of thing. But fact-checking is still very important in sports. I think you're allowed a little bit more opinion than you would be if you were doing a newscast. But I think the first thing is preparation. The second thing is just making sure that you've covered as many of the stories as you can. We tell everybody – and boy, did this come true last fall – that you have to be prepared for blowouts. You have to be prepared for rain delays. We had two rain delays last year where, if there's lighting anywhere within a few miles of the stadium, they pull everybody out of the stadium. And then we've got to talk. If it's an hour delay, we don't do that. But you have to be prepared to talk about more than just the game. You have to have an hour's worth of work in a copy, and you might get ten minutes of that in a broadcast. And of course, if it's a good game, you might even get less than that. So, you're prepared to fill in as much as you have to, but know that the action should hopefully cover most of it.
But I think those are some of the basics. Be prepared. Have more than you need. And then, eventually, we're going to get into the repetition. Again, I'm not trying to talk about myself here, but when I started – and it was a tape recorder, not a phone; not as easy it is now – I would go up to a Major League Baseball game in Baltimore, sit in the football press box, and do games into a tape recorder. I'm guessing I might have done 50 games before I ever did my first on-air broadcast. And that's something that they need to do more of. They've got to practice. They've got to do the reps; then they're going to be ready to do the job.
Ryan: Yeah. Sometimes the only way to learn is to fail. I've been having this conversation in our quarantine life with my daughters. We've been playing chess, and I've been telling them to say, you know, “This is just like any other sport or new activity – where you have to put your ego aside, and you have to be willing to lose, and losing and making mistakes and having failure is how you then actually learn.” It's difficult for people to do the things that they don't feel like they're naturally good at, or that they're failing in.
Bob: You could not be more right. I 100% agree with you. And that's one of the problems in our industry, particularly on the radio side. I mentioned I was at a small station. I was selling during the daytime, but I was doing my sports at night, and maybe I wasn't as good as I thought I was. And I made a lot of mistakes. The key word is, I was doing that at night. I was doing that on the weekends. And I know a lot of the broadcasters now. They're doing national programs, or they're doing what they call ‘voice tracking.’ And there aren't as many places to make mistakes.
I couldn't agree with you more. The more mistakes that you make – when it's not a big, expensive, big mistake – the better off you're going to be, and it gives you more confidence that you can overcome that type of thing. You're giving your daughters very good advice.
Ryan: They're teaching me right back. The other day, I was playing my 13-year-old, and I made a blunder. I got a little too aggressive with my queen. She takes my queen, and then I spend the rest of the game getting my tail handed to me. You know, it's easy to get lulled into complacency. And, the only way to not do that is to get the reps – like what you're talking about. So, kids who are loving journalism – what are some of the characteristics of those students that you see, and what draws them in? What makes them really successful long-term? Who are those people? You’re the coach, and you're picking a team. As a professor, you see those kids walk in, and over the course of a semester, you go, “That one's going to do great. That one's going to do great.” Right? You can start to pick the team. Tell me about some.
Bob: Yeah. There's no question about it. And one of the things is, at the University of Georgia – they had to get into the University of Georgia first, which, as we all know, is not an easy thing to do these days with the HOPE Scholarship. Secondly, they've got to get selected into the Grady School of Journalism, and that is not easy to do. And then, thirdly, they've got to get accepted into the sports certificate program. So they've had three times where they've been picked and patted on the head and told, “You're good.” You got into this university, you got into this journalism school, you got into this program. And, if I can say so, there's a demand for the class. So you got into this class. So a lot of them come in with a cockiness that sometimes needs to be knocked out of them.
What I have found -- one young man in particular; he had more talent than most of the students that had come through the class. And we finally just had to say, “If you're not going to be a team player – if you're not going to go out and be the assistant producer on this show, and have a team attitude – you're not going to do play-by-play again.” And that kid now has paid more dues than I think he's deserved to pay. But he stayed with it. And I think it had a lot to do with sitting down and chatting with him.
But what I have found over the last couple of years is that the best talent in the class is also the leader of the class. These kids come in; they've got a way about them on the play-by-play, and yet they're great team players. This lady that got hired at ESPN – she was a producer, not really on the air, but she was just a tremendous team player. So I think that's very important to be successful in a broadcast – because when you're watching, particularly, a sports play-by-play broadcast, there's dozens of people behind the scenes, and you're only as good as that team. So they've got to learn that team attitude – and the good ones really do. If there's somebody in the class that doesn't want to cooperate, doesn't want to be a team player, only wants to do what he or she specializes in, they're not going to find a big job when they get out in reality.
Ryan: So, when you were growing up, how old were you when you started getting interested in journalism – and when did you start to get a vision for this?
Bob: I was a late bloomer. I cannot tell you how many times I did play-by-play. I was an only child, so I had to amuse myself. I would do play-by-play when I was playing in my yard; when I was doing games in the house. So I guess I was getting some practice at a very early age. But I really didn't get involved in it until after college, and after serving four years in the Navy. I started doing some stuff with the Armed Forces – that's when I started doing these games on the tape recorder in Baltimore, driving over from Washington.
So I didn't get into it until very late. And sometimes I regret that. But I also think I might have burned out if I had started earlier. So, I started out just doing a lot of games into a tape recorder; doing high school sports. I think the best thing I did do is that I ended up doing the play-by-play of DePaul University in Chicago, and I got to do it because they weren't very good at the time. And while I was there, they all of a sudden went from a team that was struggling to even stay Division One to playing in the tournament back when it was a 40-team tournament and almost beating UCLA on national TV. Also, the trivia question is – “Who was one of the other teams when Magic and Bird were in the Final Four?” DePaul was one of the other four teams in that tournament.
So, I got a chance to do play-by-play at the highest level, from a very humble beginning. But then I went to the sales side. And I've been on the business side for most of my career. But I get my fill of getting to do the occasional play-by-play. And teaching this class really gives me a chance to fill my cup.
Ryan: You know, talking to you, it sounds to me – and I might be wrong – but it sounds like you are from somewhere around Lake Michigan. Or at least the North. Is that true?
Bob: I am a Chicago, Illinois guy. Very proud of that. Don't like the weather too much, so I probably won't ever live there again. But Chicago is home.
Ryan: How did you end up in the South?
Bob: I was with CBS for 16 years. I went from Chicago to New York; back to Chicago; to Minneapolis; Dallas; back to Chicago. And I thought I was going to be made a general manager within the CBS organization. They seemed to be grooming me for that. But there were a couple of times where I didn't get the call – and all of a sudden, a small company in Atlanta, Georgia called me. They had just gotten the Atlanta Braves, and they had the Atlanta Hawks and Georgia Tech. And they were also news, which is my real strength – news radio. So I came down here to run WGST in the early 90s; that's how I got here.
I always have to say: that's when WGST was beating WSB, which people would just find hard to believe today. But we had Neil Bortz. We were on the first Rush Limbaugh stations. We had the Braves; we had Sean Hannity after Bortz left. We had some really great four years. That's what brought me down here. And then, I had a child that had been in three different preschools. We decided we'd better settle down, and she went to the same school for 13 years. That's how we got here, and that's why we stayed.
Ryan: Did you bring a wife, or did you find a wife here?
Bob: Oh, no. I had been married for 42 years. That's been tested a little bit now with this work at home, however.
Ryan: You haven't spent as much time in the same place for a long time, probably.
Bob: That is correct.
Ryan: Is it just the two of you quarantining, or do you have more than just the two of you?
Bob: No. Just us and our dog. Our daughter works for the Grand Hyatt here in Buckhead, as the sales manager – local sales manager. The last day she worked, there were five people in the hotel. So she was furloughed from the Hyatt. It's a great company, and we hope she'll be back doing that. But she's living in the backyard area right now, just waiting for the business to reopen.
Ryan: Well, you've seen a lot of change in Georgia; in Atlanta. How all the broadcasters work together. And just all of the life here, especially post-Olympics, which is where this place has exploded. Share with me a little bit about what you see in the broadcast community – how people are coming together in this time of crisis, how the broadcast community is helping out, and the roles they're playing in this COVID-19 era.
Bob: We’ve got a long time. I hope we can let the tape run for a while, because I couldn't be prouder. My motto is, “It's a great day to be a broadcaster in Georgia.” And that has never been more true than the last 40 days. I want to talk specifically about the town hall, in just a second. But let me preface my remarks by saying we're hurting; business is down 50, 60%; radio may be down more.
I mentioned that we're on several phone calls right now with our elected officials in Washington. We've been declared an essential business, which we are. But we need some financial support. So we're doing this with less people, and a heck of a lot less money, and we're not even thinking about that right now. We're out there producing 10, 11, 12 hours of live programming every day – and then, all of a sudden, there comes along a severe storm where, unfortunately, eight people in Georgia died, and 30 people in the South died. It hit in the middle of the night. And we were there, as we always are when there's an emergency, warning the people. I think we did a great job on Sunday of telling people something was coming. Being there during the storm, I actually listened and watched WSB television on the radio, and I heard streets that my new house that I'm building is on – you know, the route into Lake Oconee. They were mentioning side streets to get there by name when the tornado went through. And of course, they got hit pretty bad.
But the point is that we were there before morning. We were there during, telling the people; and then we were there afterwards, talking about the story, and providing public service announcements – where you could go if your house was damaged. Over the years, we've organized huge drives for food, water, et cetera, to help care for people. We say that, when we have an emergency, we're there before, during and after the storm. The Weather Channel may come in. CNN may come in. But they don't live here. They don't work here. And they're gone as soon as the story's over. We live here; we work here. And we're going to be covering the story extremely well. That's one of the things we do. So, I think the biggest thing is – under strong duress, financial duress, weariness of the staff duress – we are performing at a level that we’ve never performed at before. And I couldn't be prouder – if I can continue – because I am.
Ryan: Please. Yeah. Tell me about the town hall, because I heard really great things about what went on there.
Bob: Well, it might be the proudest moment of my broadcast career to say I was a part of this. The governor called – and I'm going to name his name – Ray Carter, who's the general manager at WSB, and asked Ray to produce a town hall for him. And Ray did something that would have been unheard of before. He said, “Governor, I need the help of all my other stations.” And they said, “Okay.” So we put together a coalition of the major stations – the new stations in Atlanta. If you saw the show – and 101.2 million people did see that show that night; we're very proud of those figures as well – we had the governor in one studio; we had the mayor in another studio. We had the head of the task force in another location. We had the head of GIMA in another location, and we also had the head of insurance – who also was a general in the Georgia Army National Guard – who was called up, and also speaks Spanish. So we also had Univision and Telemundo involved.
So, we had the four major news stations that you're familiar with, the two Hispanic stations, and Georgia Public Broadcasting -- all coming together to create this: live locations from five different places, with a foreign language element to it. So then, where I got involved was to say, “Well, this has to go to the state. We just can't have this be in Georgia.” We had every television station in the state that’s a network affiliate except one, and they wanted to be there, but they had a technical issue that just didn't allow them to take the broadcast. We had nearly 200 radio stations around the state carrying the broadcast. So when I say 1.2 million, that was just the TV audience. We had a lot more people involved. And then, we also streamed it. That got a tremendous response as well.
C-Span picked it up, and that gave us a national audience. The broadcast was high quality, informative and bipartisan. And the collaboration between the Atlanta broadcasters was just unparalleled. And how quickly -- the governor called and asked us to do it. We met within two hours and agreed to do it. And then it took a couple days to get everything worked out. So, by the time they finally gave us the go-ahead, that was Tuesday, and we had already decided to do the show on Thursday. We'd done some prep, but basically we had to put that whole show together in two days. And the work that the engineers did, the work that the news people did, and the work that the talent did was second to none. I take no credit for any of that. My job was to get the rest of the state covered.
At 9:01 that night, I was very, very proud and continue to be proud of the effort we did -- how the broadcasters around the state demonstrated what they do every day, and that’s to serve their citizens. And just one last thing. I just really need to remind people: we are not that thing that comes out of the box with Fox News, or CNN, or those type of things. We are live local radio and television stations. We live and work in the same neighborhood as our audiences. You know, I cannot tell you how important that is, and how different that makes us from those national talking heads.
Ryan: Well, your local community -- you know, you were integrated into the fabric of the local society, which is the society telling stories about itself to each other.
Bob: Couldn't say it better. That's exactly right.
Ryan: We're out of time. But I want to ask you one last question, which is: imagine I could give you a magic wand, and you could wave it, and you could see broadcast journalism transformed -- in obviously realistic ways, you know; not totally magical ways. But what are 1 or 2 things that you would love to see transformed in broadcast journalism over the coming years?
Bob: We're under a little bit of a test right now for the trust of local broadcasting. And we're getting tarred by the brush of national. That's why I got a little passionate there. So, we have to continually earn the trust of our audience. And we do that, I think, by just doing what we do better every day. I did want to point out that this is the 100th anniversary of radio; therefore, it's the 100th anniversary of broadcasting. We as an industry are very excited to recognize our past, and that we're looking forward to the future. And so, I think, the technology is our friend.
Again, I'm primarily a radio guy growing up -- and now we can do photos, video, text. And by text, I mean print. We can do all those things. We're not just limited. Now, I happen to think that the theater of the mind and audio storytelling is an art, and it's a tremendous skill, but it's nice to have those other things. So we're not threatened by technology. We endorse and embrace technology. I think that the future, to answer your question as best as I can, will just be, “Who would have thought there would be a mobile phone doing everything that it does now?” Who would have thought of the things that we now take for granted? Our future and our success is tied to what happens in technology, and the tools that come along -- which we will use and innovate ourselves, and reinvent ourselves, like we have done for the last 100 years.
Ryan: Bob, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate you taking the time -- and stay safe out there.
Bob: Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you. And I look forward to someday meeting you.
Ryan: I look forward to it as well. When we got out of quarantine, we'll do drinks or coffee.
Bob: That sounds very good. Thank you.
Ryan: Wonderful. Thank you.
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Ryan: I'll leave you guys with thoughts, which are reflections that I write on Instagram. ‘Sometimes people are far more broken than you ever realized. Sometimes only good information flow reveals the truth. Truth can be very sad, but the truth will set us free.’ This has been the Blackhall Studios Podcast, recording from quarantine in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Ryan Millsap, chairman and CEO. Thanks for listening.
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