Hmmmm

If your station could be ranked #1 in Persons 18-49 by playing uninterrupted whale noises all day every day, would you do it? If not, why not?

What would make you most proud at the end of your budget year: (a) Your station is the most profitable in your market, or (b) the knowledge that someone on your station said something, or your station did something, that actually saved one person’s life, even if by doing so it cost you your bonus, and even if you never met that person?

If you personally had to choose between winning this quarter-hour or throwing your format out the window because you felt like you had to respond to some urgent local issue with human voices, which would you choose?

If you’d worked with someone at your station for a decade or more, knew them to be good and honest and productive, but saw that because of age or illness or issues outside your building, their performance was declining this year, even though it hadn’t (yet) affected ratings, would you fight to keep them, to help them, to carry them if necessary, because you know it’s the right thing to do — or would you let your superiors talk you into firing them, saving some money and moving on?

Does “winning” supersede your own humanity at times? Is that justifiable because it’s “work”?

Does “winning” mean only money or ratings, or can it be a measurement of how you treat people, how you serve your local community, how you grade your own humanity each day?

Should “success” mean grabbing as much as we can while we can, or should it include how we’ve treated those around us?

Would you voluntarily surrender a chunk of your pay to save the job of a co-worker threatened by another round of “consolidation cut-backs”?

Is the way we treat people as important an indicator of success as how much we earn?

Do you think we should ask ourselves these kinds of questions more often or just accept that work is work and since we don’t make the rules, ignore the human carnage our industry produces as long as it doesn’t cost us our jobs?