An interesting article and two informative video clips from November 15, 2022:
CBS Baltimore - Where's Marty? Learning how the B&O Railroad Museum restores old engines, rail cars

As someone who was in Marty Bass's home market for 25 years, I would have rolled my eyes and fled the room when I heard about this.

Maybe we and museum professionals should look at these videos, and ask ourselves, "is it worth the supposedly free publicity to let an airheaded 'reporter' spout blather with all the substance of Cheez Wiz to their audience?"

The rest of my spiel would spin into general news media criticism, and probably stretch into calling for examples of the most vapid, unsubstantial media coverage any of us have had to endure for the cause of "free publicity"..........

No, tell us what you really think, Alex.

Right now, as I look about, it seems that every U.S. morning (and often afternoon) TV local "news" market has not only largely dispensed with any actual "hard news" coverage save for perhaps local traffic coverage or 20-second reports of that morning's fire or murder, but also has at least one station where some reporter has been designated the daily "report from the field" guy/gal with vapid, glib "reporting" of whatever event/venue/etc. was chosen (or for all we know, paid) to be featured that morning. We have one or two in Phoenix, Marty Bass was the one in Baltimore, there was one in Philly, one in Washington D.C., I've blundered into them in other markets when traveling.....

Often, it's the Fox-affiliate station, because they don't get pre-empted by the CBS/ABC/NBC network morning news shows (which have themselves largely also become entertainment programming equally news-less), and the "reporter" can stay there and give the same content-less two-minute "interview" for two to four separate segments.

I'll ask: Did anyone here actually learn anything about restoration from those two clips?

Very glad they didn't show ex.-Rdg. 2101 ( AFT 1) as they have allowed that locomotive to deteriorate so badly they should be ashamed of themselves.

I've urged them ( without success) to at least take it off display and put it out back somewhere until they can cosmetically restore it.

The deal I made when I donated it to them was that they would keep it cosmetically in good shape and I would do the same with the 614. We've kept our end of the bargain and sadly they haven't.

Ross Rowland

I remember visiting the museum in 2007 and asking where AFT 1 was. Not a single person knew. One frankly told me they got rid of it years ago. I found it myself after looking in the back of the yard...

Cleveland’s Fox affiliate has a morning show that features segments with Kenny Crumpton about fun things to do in Ohio called “Kicking It with Kenny”. They came down and did four segments about ORHS. I have to say that his reporting was better than most of what I’ve seen elsewhere. We’d gotten a nice bump in our event attendance and program participation after that with many saying they saw those segments when they aired.

It was better than the usual reporting and really had no downside. Overall, a good experience.

Every time I see the local newscast start off with the latest losing effort of whatever local professional sports team is playing that day I ask myself if there isn't anything happening in the area, some politician getting caught with his or her hand in the municipal cookie jar or something. Local news has just been so gutted in the last 20 years. My local newspaper published their Thanksgiving edition on Wednesday, so they wouldn't have to work on Wednesday evening, after having quit publishing a Monday print edition several months ago. They also combined the national and local news sections recently so some days there are only two sections to the paper; oh and there is no editorial section on Tuesdays or Saturdays. Mind you, it costs about $500/year to subscribe (I do it for my dad, it's his money). And this was Knight-Ridder's former flagship paper. Jack Knight would be rolling over in his grave...

Fun railroad fact about Marty Bass, Jackie Litzinger, the csx police chief from 2010 to 2016, had early in her career as a Baltimore city police, arrested Marty Bass for soliciting her as a prostitute (she was undercover, if you know her you know why she got that assignment). His word smithing and his inlaws who own WJZ got him off the charges.
I heard rumor she got an autographed Marty Bass photo as a retirement gift...

No pun intended?

Reporters are an interesting lot, most of them don't know anything about anything but get paid to sound like they know everything about anything. With the result being they sound ridiculous to anyone who actually knows the subject they're reporting on.

The things they do actually do can be pretty wild, too. I was at the scene of a truck hit train accident many years ago and a reporter actually climbed on the locomotive walkway to get better shots of the fire crew cutting the driver out of the dump truck.

Our local paper only gets published 3 days a week at this point because so few read it.

It's not that so few read it; it's that the advertisers are gone.

If you're the age of most of us, you remember classified ads in the back sections of papers, as well as full page ads from car dealers, department stores, grocery stores, tire dealers, etc.

The old rule was that advertising paid for the printing and paper; subscriptions/purchases paid for the reporters.

Fewer advertisers means fewer pages to fill. Fewer pages means fewer stories. The successful newspapers in 2020 have all found some niche to fill besides their old model, and most often that is local sports coverage/analysis (most weekly/local papers, some city papers) or pandering to a biased political viewpoint (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.).

I suppose everybody has seen the picture taken from the back of a commuter coach of everyone reading the morning paper. I think it was contrasted with a more modern photo of people with their heads down looking at their phones.
The newspaper in our area use to have both a morning and afternoon editions. The paper also had satellite offices in the suburbs with reporters working out of those offices getting the local news.