Charlie Meyerson interviews

I haven’t posted much here lately about my work with the talented team I helped assemble a decade ago at Rivet (now formally known as Rivet360)—mostly in secret at the beginning. That’s partly because, as I’ve shifted focus since 2017 to my award-winning Chicago Public Square email news briefing (subscribe free!), I’ve eased into a role as Rivet’s Vice President of Editorial and Development—or, as I call myself, Nagger-in-Chief. And it’s partly because the company’s shifted its focus from journalism to become an innovative podcast consultancy—producing audio for others as well as shows of its own.

One of those shows, PodWell—a guide to becoming better podcasters—is hosted by my friend and colleague Terri Lydon, who was kind enough to share the mic with me in her June 6 edition (recorded May 3, 2023, when I was just getting over a cold or something else that really wasn’t COVID-19).

That gave me nine minutes or so to nag on one of my favorite topics: How best to open a podcast.
If you like this, check out more of my podcast guidance on Rivet’s website and elsewhere on this blog.

And hear more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora or Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square. (Meyerson headshot: Steve Ewert.)

[Updating this original post—from March 1, 2015—on Nov. 20, 2022: Greg Bear is dead at 71.] Science fiction writer Greg Bear in a 1994 interview with me on WNUA-FM, Chicago, on the future of the Internet:

“It’s going to be a huge intellectual telephone line, with graphics and library materials, all available at a few minutes’ notice. That, I think, will be revolutionary. ... We have a lot of people from the entertainment industries thinking it’s going to be a lot of the same old, same old — where they can simply market movies in new ways, and I don’t think it’s going to be that way at all. ... The people who are loosely called Generation Xers are going to have their say on this. And I think we may not be able to predict what they’re going to do with it.”
Update, Jan. 4, 2018: A later interview with Greg Bear, from 1996, when we talked about the prospect of life on Mars.

Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky was kind enough to invite me on his show this week—we talked Wednesday, the podcast was published Saturday—to answer questions about how and why I do what I do for Chicago Public Square.
I was honored along the way to express my admiration for columnists Neil Steinberg and Robert Feder, Reader critic Jack Helbig, The Onion, WXRT-FM News pioneers C.D. Jaco and Linda Brill, Square reader Angela Mullins, radio DJs Bob Stroud and Marty Lennartz, my college radio station WPGU… … and to deliver an ill-advised musical tribute to my alma mater, Carl Sandburg High School, whose fight song I was—for reasons that elude me now—moved to butcher. You’ve been warned. Here it is. If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora or Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

[It’s been a while since we dove into the archives. But now that hour’s come round at last—again.]

In 1995, the comic book industry was approaching what later became known as “the Great Comics Crash of 1996”—triggered in part by Marvel Comics’ 1994 purchase of the business’ third-largest distributor, converting it to distribute Marvel’s stuff exclusively.

So that was a significant topic June 30, 1995, when I sat down at WNUA-FM in Chicago—just ahead of the 20th annual Chicago Comicon*—with acclaimed comics writers Peter David and Chris Claremont, maybe best known then for their work on Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk and The Uncanny X-Men, respectively; and the convention’s CEO, Classics International Entertainment President Gary Colabuono, also then the proprietor of Moondog’s comic shops. Here’s how it went.
Looking back on that time now, Colabuono recalls: “Marvel’s decision to distribute their own comics was not only the death knell for direct market distributors, it was also the beginning of the end for the vast majority of comic book specialty shops in the U.S. Of the 21 stores in the Moondog’s chain, 20 were out of business within a year of Marvel’s move.” I’ve also asked David and Claremont for their perspectives on that time. I’ll share them as they arrive. But here’s David’s July 28, 1995, reflection on that year’s con: “If Gary Colabuono… asks you to be guest of honor, two words—Do It. Gary is the consummate host, making sure that you want for nothing and taking care that every need is anticipated.” If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Pandora orSpotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.
* For a show that was broadcast July 2, which explains David’s joke at the end, “Boy, am I exhausted from that!”

Back in 1993, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune sounded an alarm about the growing conflict between the drive for corporate profits and traditional journalism’s social-reform agenda. That was close to six years before I joined the Trib and close to two decades before that trend inexorably led to a gutting of the paper’s staff. As the paper welcomes a new editor, now seems like a good time to revisit the words of Jim Squires, talking about his book Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers—in an interview recorded Feb. 3, 1993, and aired Feb. 7 on WNUA-FM, Chicago. Listen up. If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

Of all the interviews I’ve conducted, none have influenced my career more than this 1996 sit-down with Aaron Barnhart, whose Late Show News newsletter pioneered the email news biz.

Listen to us discuss his model for how, in my words, “a lot of us in this profession will… do our work in the future” and you’ll hear the siren call that two years later would draw me from radio to the internet—and, not much later, to lead the Chicago Tribune’s email program.

Decades later, Barnhart’s work inspired the launch of Chicago Public Square.

First aired June 23, 1996, this show remains great and relevant listening, and it spotlights Aaron as one of the internet’s early visionaries.

Also: A cool time-capsule about the state of late-night TV in 1996.

Listen here.

If you like this, check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

Prepping to watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix, I revisited my Sept. 16, 1994, interview with The 7’s defense lawyer, William Kunstler, who told me then that the trial “changed me totally.…

“I never knew what it was to really fight until I watched Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Hayden and so on fight in a courtroom—do things that would make the jury understand that they were being persecuted: Bringing in a birthday cake for Bobby Seale, a Viet Cong flag on their table, standing out and protesting the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale in the courtroom.

“There were so many things they did that showed they were fighting—they weren’t gonna sit there like bumps on a log and be railroaded.

“And the net result was they won.”

I realized I never shared this file to this blog and the accompanying podcast series. So here you go.

Check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.
_____ P.S. I was apparently the first to inform Kunstler in 1983 of Judge Julius Hoffman’s death.

This hasn’t happened much in my career, most of which I’ve devoted to profiling people far more interesting than I am. But, twice in less than two weeks, I was honored to be interviewed about journalism, politics, radio, the origins of Chicago Public Square and my personal journey:
On Friday, I was a guest on Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky’s podcast—and that was just seven days after Matt Baron had grilled me for the Common Ground Oak Park podcast.
So here, in the Charlie Meyerson interviews series, is—for lack of a better phrase—Charlie Meyerson interviewed…
… and Charlie Meyerson interviewed again.
Check out more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.

You’d think if you’d met the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, in the flesh you’d remember it.
Especially if he told you the real reason he made Mr. Spock look a little… devilish (about 32:17 in).
Well, I did meet him, and he told me that—and I confess that I forgot all about it.
Only when a longtime friend and neighbor lent me a vintage reel-to-reel tape player and I opened a long-filed-away box labeled “Gene Roddenberry” did I recall that I was actually in a studio with Roddenberry at college radio station WPGU in 1974—a half-decade after the original TV show had been canceled and a half-decade before the first Star Trek movie was to debut in theaters. (Photo: Roddenberry in 1974 by Nolan Hester for The Daily Illini .)
Not only that, but I got him to autograph a book, which sat on my shelf forgotten and unloved for years.
Here’s how it sounded, Nov. 7, 1974: A long-unheard interview with the visionary Gene Roddenberry , hosted by Phil Robinson with help from Jim Gassel, Bill Taylor, a so-young-and-nerdy-you-could-plotz 19-year-old Charlie Meyerson and a bunch of call-in fans.
Bonus 1: Keep listening past the end of that show and you’ll hear my second Roddenberry encounter—raw audio of a 1976 phone interview followed by the finished feature that resulted: An episode of WPGU’s mini-documentary series, Probe .
Bonus 2: For completists, here’s the aircheck of the full 1974 hour —including ads and a newscast by WPGU anchor Maggi Pratt.
Related listening: My interviews with “Trekspert”Mark Altman in 1995, science fiction writers Ray Bradbury in 1999, Cory Doctorow in 2019, Greg Bear in 1994 and 1996, William Gibson in 1993 and Douglas Adams in 1997 and 1992.

Check out even more of my conversations with thought-leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Music, on Spotify, via Amazon Music or throughyour favorite podcast player, and at Chicago Public Square.
And thanks to Dave Mausner for lending me that tape player.

This week’s transformative Chicago City Council development—the historic livestream video presentation of a committee meeting—brings to mind a time when the council was maddeningly tough to follow.
In 1988, I was a newbie City Hall reporter for WXRT-FM. It was an assignment I relished not—partly because the council’s procedures were bewilderingly opaque and byzantine.
But I channeled my journalistic frustration into creation of a series that won a nationwide United Press International award for documentary radio reporting.
So, let’s return to the year 1988. Eugene Sawyer was briefly Chicago’s mayor, and a young journalist was pissed off at the difficulty navigating… Chaos in the Council.
Related:
■ Me, far more enthusiastic about covering City Hall in 2012 .
■ Another award-winning WXRT News investigation from 1984 .
■ And check out some of my interviews with thought-leaders through the years on this website , in Apple Music , on Spotify , via Alexa-powered speakers , through your favorite podcast player , and at Chicago Public Square .