Leaving the Anchor Desk: Mark Istook Bets on Himself | Engel Angle

I recently took my daughter to see Lady Gaga live.
A couple things.
I didn't realize how popular Lady Gaga is with gay men.
Secondly, I don't think Jean's tennis shoes and an orange golf shirt
was appropriate attire for Lady Gaga.
Mack Engel, Fort Worth Start Telegram.
Engel Engel podcast here on the Sunset Lounge.
Thanks for joining me.
One more thing about Lady Gaga in a trend in concerts
that I've seen occasionally, not all the time.
Lady Gaga has been performing for 20 years.
It's a great show.
She's an amazing performer.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
However, little irritated.
She didn't play Edge of Glory.
That's why I wanted to go see the show, by the way.
She didn't play, hold my hand.
Again, I want to say this.
I went to see that concert because I wanted to hear Lady Gaga perform
one of my favorite, my favorite Lady Gaga song, Edge of Glory.
So too much to ask.
Apparently, this has become a thing now.
Where performers go into a city, big city,
and they play multiple shows over two or three days.
But they vary up the set list by a track or two.
I noticed this when Metallica came to DFW.
However, many years ago, Arlington, a couple of years ago,
and they were making a killing.
They had more people at AT&T Stadium for their show
than Taylor Swift did the month before.
Because Metallica set the stage up right in the middle of the stadium.
Whereas Taylor Swift's stage was set at the back
and you couldn't sell seats.
I'm surprised I didn't try.
You know, you're basically eliminating about 10,000 seats.
Whereas the theater in the round, my theater course in high school
really coming through right there,
allowed to sell out every seat in the place.
Just fine.
I get it.
Show business, business.
But I'm like, I want to see Metallica play Enter Sandman.
I said too much to ask.
Play me your biggest hit.
Well, they didn't on Friday night.
They did on Sunday night.
I'm like, no, I'm not spending another $200 to hear you play one track.
It's total bullshit.
Just give me that one song.
You can play all your new stuff.
I like the new stuff.
I bought the $50 t-shirt.
But if I'm going to go see that performer,
I want to see the biggest hit that you've got in your bag.
Hey, Gaga, I know you played it on Friday night.
I want to hear it on Sunday because I didn't get to go Friday night.
I think it's the doing busy.
Give me edge of glory.
Metallica, give me Enter Sandman every night.
Bruce Springsteen.
Every show he delivers.
Every show for like a thousand years.
Born to run.
He never sits down and says, hey, guys,
you know, we're not playing tonight.
We're not playing born to run.
Bruce Springsteen was made because of born to run.
I had a chance to interview Johnny Resnick,
the great singer of the Goo Goo Dolls,
who knows one of the biggest reasons
why he has had sustained success for all of these years
are hits that he created back in the late 80s,
early 80s, early 90s or whatever.
And you know what he always plays?
His hits.
He always closes.
The Goo Goo Dolls show always closes with this.
And he always thanks the audience because he knows
without that song, in the fact that the audience loves that song that much,
he would not have the life that he has today.
Lady Gaga is great.
She's got a 20-year catalog.
She could have played for 10 hours and not played everything.
I want to hear edge of glory.
Damn it.
And I really want to hear hold my hand.
But I didn't add that to my list of grievances and disappointments,
which I will be taking up a big man upstairs when it's time to introduce my guest
for this week's or this episode of the Inglangle.
And that is with a veteran of the TV news and entertainment scene.
Mr. Mark Istuk.
Now for people who are familiar with the NFL network, they know Mark Istuk
because Mark was an anchor on the NFL network for quite a few years before he decided to come back to his native North Texas
where he was a staple on the morning television news scene at WFAA.
Mark recently made an announcement that he was leaving WFAA to start his own media company,
which is something that is possible now, but very much was not when he and I were coming up in college.
Now I say that we didn't go to college together.
I didn't know Mark until a few years ago.
We're kind of in the same range, age range-ish.
And these possibilities that exist now in media, thanks to technology,
were not even on any radar 27 years ago.
The idea of starting your own media company or being your own brand or a sub-stack or any of those things
or your own podcast, none of that stuff existed.
So now he's going into that world which has worked for a lot of other people in this industry,
but he has a very interesting career and this is a great conversation,
not only just about that in his career and how he got started,
which can be inspirational for young people out there who want to get into this business,
but also the current landscape of news media today.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Please welcome, Mr. Mark Ishtook.
Mark, thanks for joining me on this.
I appreciate it.
You made an announcement in the last couple of weeks that you made a momentous life decision
and that is to leave your long-time spot at WFAA on its award-winning morning show.
Anytime an anchor leaves that position, that's kind of a newsworthy thing
because the audience gets to know you and feels like you're almost a part of the family.
So what made you decide to make the jump?
Well, thanks for having me, Mac.
You know, it's funny that relationship with the audience that you mentioned
was really, really, really meaningful for me and I think over the past few weeks
I saw it more than ever, the power of kind of the other side of what we do.
Like you said, that relationship.
But I had been ready for a while to make a change.
A couple of years, really.
And I think there were a few factors.
One, I was ready for some new challenges and some new opportunities.
And I felt like that was going to be limited at WFAA.
I had pitched some opportunities before that they hadn't really been keen on taking the F on.
I felt like the schedule.
There are a lot of great aspects about a morning show.
So one, I love the content.
I love the team.
I love what we got to talk about.
But the getting up at two o'clock in the morning thing.
When I started, we could make that work.
It was very much like, you do the morning show, you get out of here.
And over time, they kept adding, adding, adding, adding, adding,
adding responsibilities and expectations.
And I'm pretty hands on.
I do a lot of my own stories, a lot of my own packages.
I was doing those, you know, other people can't do those at 10 in the morning.
Two in the afternoon, I have events in the evening.
You know, my day was the number of times I was up until 10 o'clock with a work function or a work event.
I can't even begin to count.
And the amount of four hour asleep nights just really added up.
And it just felt like, okay, this is the way I do this is not tenable.
And I don't know how to do it any other way.
So it felt like the clock had been ticking for a while.
I did that schedule on a very limited basis when I worked for CBS radio.
It was then CBS radio in the morning shows.
And that was only two to three days a week.
Now, I had other jobs, obviously my job that I do now at the Fort Worth Start Telegram.
But I was doing other things too.
And I don't know if you went through this regarding that sleep schedule cycle.
I would feel sick.
Like, literally, I would feel sick.
I had no viral and nothing.
I just felt sick.
Did you experience that on those days?
Not so much the physical sickness, although the toll was real.
It probably took me a good five months to adjust.
And I would notice, especially in the beginning, the brain fog, where I'm there in the morning.
And I just, I words don't come out.
I'm making mistakes that I haven't made since I was, you know, just starting out in this business.
And it was like it dawned on me.
There's a reason why we have pilots time out.
There's a reason why people who do high level work need to be rested.
And I'm not comparing anchoring a morning news show to piloting an airplane.
But you get that sense of like, I can't read the teleprompter.
Why am I, I'm in a haze and a fog.
So that part was real.
And here's what happened to the number of nights where again, I got three or four hours of sleep.
And I would function normally.
That was a little alarming as well.
Like I should not, I should not be used to this.
And this cannot be healthy for my body.
We do all these health segments.
And every single one of them is get regular sleep.
And you weren't doing any of it.
No.
So when you, I read, I read a couple of things that in interviews you've done since you left.
And that was about starting out your own media company, which is possible now.
All these different, you know, all the software and all these potential platforms exist now that didn't when you and I went to college.
So when you start to enter the space of owning your own content, which is essentially what I think you're going to do in starting your own media company.
Mark, what is that going to look like?
Well, kind of back to the beginning of the, the leaving.
I felt like it was going to be kind of two options.
It was either go look at options or opportunities that on the national level.
Because, you know, we're in market for here.
There's not many more markets you can go from here.
And I was really kind of hungry for a national opportunity.
I'd come from the NFL network.
I'd worked at that level.
And then that was a challenge.
I wanted to tackle.
And I thought it's going to be that or out because what's what's, you know, you know, kind of at a bust.
And over the past year, social media content really took off for me in a way that turned the light bulb on and made me realize, oh, there's something there.
There's something to this.
My brother is a online influencer with a massive following.
He does the content I can't possibly replicate.
But watching him make a living doing it.
And then seeing other people in the industry, Katie Curry, Jessica Ellen, Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, you know, kind of forged this path, making Kelly's all online now.
It made me realize, oh, there's, there's a real opportunity here.
And somebody I had a meeting with folks at Facebook once a decade or so ago.
And they were really pitching me on, you know, the power building your own network.
And I had just never really built that.
But over the past year, I saw social following take off in a way that I thought, oh, well, now there's something there.
And I think I'd be foolish not to wing into this.
Do you know Megan Kelly by chance?
Never met.
Okay. So I'm going to make this comment.
And if she wasn't, if she was a friend of yours or somebody along those lines that you were acquaintance.
So I've seen her and I followed her career for a long time.
And what I've seen her do, and it's not just her is that they have leaned into these spaces that that are not for me.
Sure.
They're, they're not for me.
But they've leaned in these spaces and they've obviously made a ton of money doing it by being borderline toxic with political and societal commentary.
That's just my own personal observation.
But clearly, it can work.
And what I'm talking about, it can work.
This isn't about journalism.
This is about making a lot of money.
When you see that part of the evolution.
And I realized the question set up is put you in a bad spot.
Is that kind of space where you think, oh, I think I could, I could go there and make a difference and carve out a living.
Or do you see that that part and say, yeah, I don't want to be a part of that.
Well, so I have a friend who'd worked for Ben Shapiro's company for a while.
And he said, behind the scenes, he doesn't believe half the stuff he says that he gets, he gets the grift.
That has zero appeal to me.
I, I, I got into this business because I believe in the power.
I'm an idealist when it comes to what journalism is and should be in the role it plays in a functioning democracy.
And, you know, I still believe in that.
I think that whatever Megan Kelly, Clay Travis, Ben Shapiro, whatever they have done, I feel like there's room on the other side to call out things that need to be called out.
And to, I don't pretend that I don't have opinions, but I also know that I take a journalistic approach and how I form my opinions.
I really try to look at a subject and research it and look at the numbers and look at the people that are affected and arrive at a conclusion.
And I think that there's room, journalistically, to approach some of these topics without selling your soul.
And that's the hope.
So there's room for it.
Do you think there's money in it?
I think if you do it well, the audience is big enough.
I don't know what critical mass looks like.
I don't know the brass tax where, you know, how many people do you need to have watching you?
How many people do you need to have downloading your content or following you?
I don't know what that looks like, but I think that there are people in the space that have done well with it.
I like to listen to the pivot podcast with Cara Swisher and Scott Calloway.
You know, they take a, I mean, there's a lot of opinion of what they do, but she's got a journalistic background.
They attack news of the day.
They built up an audience.
So I do think that you have fragmentation where, you know, I'm just going to make up a number here, but what did ABC nightly news do 15 years ago?
You know, 10 to 10 million people a night, 20 million people a night?
Where's that number now?
Those people still exist.
They still get information from different sources, but they don't get it from the traditional sources.
And I don't want it to become, I can't complain about the bloggers that are out there feeling, filling the space with misinformation.
If I'm not willing to try to do something about it, so I feel like this is part of that attempt.
So you worked in the morning news world, which for a long, long, long time, 50 plus years dominated television.
I mean, just iron fist.
And even to this day, as I sit here and hear about the demise of local TV and all these other things, I looked.
I was watching the Olympics, the Winter Olympics, and I was turning on NBC, expecting to get live coverage on NBC at 8 a.m.
Instead, I got the today show and I was looking at the block of content that NBC still reserves for what is basically morning programming around its news shows.
And I was stunned by it.
So am I wrong in thinking that the demise of the morning news talk shows, be it ABC, Fox, NBC, CBS, the demise of those shows is greatly exaggerated.
Again, without being privy to all the financials behind some of that narrative, I think a big part of it is driven by corporate ownership that has a different bottom line to hit than if you just wanted to make money.
And going back to Scott Galway and Cara Swisher, they talked about this on their pivot podcast that they said, you know, the idea that this media is dying.
It's just it's not growing at the same rate or it's not having the same margin it used to have.
But I still think local stations make money.
Now, do they make enough money to keep a big corporate owner afloat?
Maybe not.
But if you had a local owner, I think you find that there is still a need for local advertisers are still in need for local journalism.
I think those needs are still there and they still are very valuable.
The business model maybe looks different where you don't have.
I mean, we are saying more and more of these resources, considering the hands of fewer and fewer companies.
And when you get private equity involved, when you get the market involved, they want ROI.
And at the expense of everything else, I think you're right that that narrative that there's there's no future for it is overblown.
And I think there's also a reason why I think the streamers are probably going to get into the news game sooner rather than later as well because that live audience is so valuable.
And one thing that I saw in the last 20 years and obviously I work at a newspaper, which has become, you know, so small in the media landscape compared when it used to be the dominant source.
And my father and my father was in business, I was a business executive for almost 38 years of his career.
And we were talking about that point about what are your price, what are your expectations on ROI and newspapers used to make 40% a year.
And I'm sure local TV news was even greater than that.
And now these companies are down to where most companies really exist.
And that's four to five percent.
I mean, you can make it and you can make a profit.
But most businesses do not operate 10, 12, 50 newspapers and news organizations were just printing money.
And now they've been completely scaled back.
And my question regards to that.
Did you live that massive cut back where they said, Mark, sorry, man, we love to pay you X.
But we don't have to. We're going to pay you Y.
Or we're not sending you on these trips. We're not doing it.
Did you, did you go through those cuts and did you feel it yourself?
I don't, I didn't directly personally have the cut.
I think it was more, you know, when it comes to what you see broadly is annual raises.
You see that. You see people who've been around for 30 years.
Let go in favor of someone who's younger.
And there's an aspect of that that, you know, gets people a foot in the door, you know,
without them having to move to 10 different cities like it maybe used to be.
But certainly you saw cutbacks.
And sometimes that's hard to square with the corporate financials when they have their earnings calls.
And they're talking about how much money they made and you're like, well,
they're waiting a second. Why is this happening?
And again, I'm not privy to all those numbers.
But I can do math.
And I can read financial forms.
And I can see what executives at publicly traded companies make.
And sometimes you, you know, tilt your head to the side and you say, okay,
we let go a 24 year old producer who's barely scraping by someone else.
Meanwhile, bought another house in the Hamptons off of their annual bonus.
Or the person we're paying a lot of money at the top to keep around with the golden parachute.
I mean, look, that's corporate America.
I don't, you know, I mean the yellow clouds, but I think at the end of the day,
if you believe the journalism local news is something that we need for a thriving democracy,
it's something we should all pay attention to.
Mark, I'm sure you have heard this term a lot.
I have been bludgeoned with it.
Legacy media.
When you hear the term legacy media, which has basically become a four letter word,
what do you think of?
I mean, some of what we're talking about.
I think it's the traditional way of telling and delivering news stories.
It is what we would have seen 10, 20, 30 years ago,
would be familiar to, you know, traditional news gathering.
It's the big behemoths, the CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, you know, Fox News.
It's kind of those types.
I mean, that's what I think of.
I think of not very nimble.
You know, that comes to mind.
So, I mean, those terms are sure.
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I'm sure you've been asked this question.
I get this one a lot.
Hey, I just want to go someplace just to get the news.
I don't want to hear any opinion.
I don't want to read any opinion.
I don't want to see any opinion.
I just want where, where can I go just to get the who, what, when, where, why?
What do you tell people?
That's a tricky one because I think there's this ideal that news is objective.
But the only reason news is news is because somehow some way it affects people.
So we're making choices based on who's affected and how they're affected.
In what news we choose to present, which side of the story we choose to give them.
I absolutely think that we need to have a holistic picture.
We need to see all sides of the story.
I think that's super important.
But I think at the end of the day, it's okay to in some way be a bit of an umpire
to be able to say, that was a ball.
That was a strike.
And I'm not biased for saying so.
I'm not biased for saying, you know, look, this one's outside the bounds.
And I think we kind of all agreed or the bounds we live by.
Or another anecdote is, if it's raining outside and nine people tell you it's raining
and one person tells you it's not, do you present those as 50-50?
Or do you go outside and check that it's raining and you tell the truth?
I see it in this evolution.
And I thought about this a lot.
I blame the consumer.
There certainly is some blame there.
So for instance, I'm sure growing up, you go to the grocery store as a kid
and you see the tabloids in the checkout stand at the grocery store right?
And it's kind of like, I can't believe they print this stuff.
Well, they only print it if somebody's buying it.
Right.
You know, so I don't know where we allocate blame there is a 60-40 on the consumer,
a 60-40 on the printer.
At some point, people get what they pay for and what they demand.
And when there's a market there, people go that direction, typically.
I don't think that's, it's not a perfect system, obviously.
But there certainly is some responsibility on the behalf of the consumer about the state of news.
And you could say even the same thing about we got so used to getting our news for free on, you know,
Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, that we think we shouldn't have to pay for it.
And it's kind of like, how do you think this works?
I've heard that, and like you can imagine, you can only imagine I have been in a lot of those discussions.
But to me, one of the more interesting evolutions that I could never have seen coming.
You know, I hear about an 18-year-old who aspires to take a journalism course
or maybe even as a major.
And I've taught those classes.
And I see the textbooks and things like that.
I'm like, oh boy, this needs some updating.
Because one of the biggest pieces to this evolution is that now we're catering to,
and I don't know if you were part of these discussions in television or not,
but I know I've been, we are catering to audience trends and audience desires,
which is the audience wants that.
I don't want updates on Kim Kardashian's latest liposuction or whatever.
They really don't want the election news coverage, or they really don't want to know about that stuff.
And it's no different than the consumer who walks through the grocery store.
And what do we see at that checkout aisle where you saw the national inquire?
Candy, junk food, all of it placed within easy reaching distance of the consumer.
And to me, as I see that and we have these editorial discussions,
it is what is trending, what does the audience want?
And to me, that's been one of the more dangerous evolutions to this as well.
We're giving you exactly what you want.
You don't want the green beans and vegetables.
You'd rather have the candy bar.
And I don't know how you possibly undo that in this, when you have a fourth of state
that really functions no different than Best Buy or Chillies.
Well, I think you're right.
I think there's a couple of layers to that.
One, I think that the vegetable analogy holds up that people don't want to eat the vegetables
when it comes to the news.
There's also the complaint about, you know, they only cover the bad news.
Well, it's not news when a plane lands safely.
It's not news when a house doesn't burn down.
So there's an element to what makes something newsworthy.
It's always going to have a bend there.
But I think one, it's incumbent upon outlets and journalists to figure out better ways
to make stories relatable or tell them why it matters.
So I think there's that challenge.
And that's how you can meet the audience where they are.
Hey, maybe you're not paying attention to this district nine race,
but here's why it affects you.
Two, I think you see in some other countries where they have allocated state funds
for media that, you know, at least sets a standard.
I think the BBC is a great example.
We can complain about, you know, potential bias.
Like I said, I think news will always have, you know, a certain angle to it.
But at least you have some semblance of, okay, this will always exist.
And it's not as susceptible to market fluctuations as a traditional news outlet might be.
So I want to go to your career, graduate of Southwest high school, Fort Worth,
and a graduate of TCU.
I'm not going to say the year out of respect for you.
Mark, what was your lowest thing?
2014.
Okay.
That's good.
Is it raining outside?
Yeah.
What was your lowest paying job in this industry?
My first on-air job out of college was the weekends sports anchor at K-10,
the NBC affiliate in Denison.
And I think it was $14,900 a year.
And if I remember correctly, so I think we got paid twice a month.
And I feel like, I feel like the take home was maybe $3.95.
Did you have insurance?
No.
I can't remember having it.
How much was your rent?
Rent, I think, was $3.50 or $3.25 maybe?
Yeah.
And so I didn't have a bed.
I had one of those egg crates as big foam egg crates on the floor.
That's what I slept on.
My first job out of college was $490 a month.
And I rented a room from a guy who was basically a pyramid scheme guy.
Yeah.
That was my first one.
You just gave five guys underneath you.
They didn't matter.
Totally didn't matter.
And I remember one time I was going to, I was, I had a date.
We were going to go back to my apartment.
I'm like, this is, I needless to say, we never went out again.
Well, it's funny.
I've been there.
I was very fortunate at K-10.
And it was an awesome place to cut my teeth.
And I've been there maybe four or five months.
And both of our six and ten news anchors left.
And they offered me the six and ten news anchor job.
So I mean, I've been into the business five months.
And here I am, people's main anchor, which is really not good.
But it was great for me.
And I got, I got to raise to $26,000 a year.
And I thought I was loaded.
Well, I can't even imagine what that did to your life.
$12,000 additional dollars.
Seriously, I mean, I know you're laughing at it now.
But I remember when I got, you know, a $5,000, whatever, whatever raise.
Like, oh, my God, what am I going to do with all this?
And then you can get the ramen that had the little shrimp in it as a book.
And just basically, I was really up great.
So you move on to, I was looking at your bio, speed channel.
And a kitchen gadget show for the Food Network.
Mark, what was the kitchen gadget show that you did for the Food Network?
Gotta get it. Gotta get it.
Gotta get it.
And let me tell you, I mean, if you're looking at the resume,
it is the most circuitous random roundabout resume.
Yeah, it's been pretty crazy.
But yeah, I moved to Los Angeles after being at K-10 for a couple of years.
This is, I'll say the years, this is back in 2001.
And I'm just struggling to like find TV jobs.
I was the sportscaster for the City of Santa Monica's cable channel.
We would take the net.
We would take a newscast every two weeks.
So I'm juggling these opportunities.
And just like, you just trying to clawing my way.
I learned to shoot.
I learned to edit.
I learned how to do After Effects, which is like kind of a graphics program.
I'm like doing all this stuff so I can just work in one man band and just call and scratch
and fight my way to these opportunities.
And randomly land this Food Network job.
And I think the reason I landed it was I was in New York.
And I was having lunch with my agents at the time.
And the head of the Food Network was there.
And we ran into each other.
And I think they called me for this job thinking I lived in New York.
And I didn't know it was in Los Angeles.
And I remember it was a whole big deal that they had to like figure out a hotel
for me up there for two weeks to shoot this this six episodes of the show.
Because I think they had already hired me before they realized that.
Oh wait, this he doesn't like here.
But it was it was a dominoe falling that led to countless other opportunities.
Smallest nothing event that you can recall ever covering.
Man, I mean the two a high school football games.
I mean, it means a lot to the people there, but but I mean tons of those.
Favorite interview of all time.
This is a tough one.
I feel like I should work because you did you did Hollywood stuff.
So I'm sure the list is forever.
Let me think about this for a second.
I feel like I could tell you who it was consistently a good interview.
Interview Tom Hanks a few times and he always brought it.
He always showed up.
He was always very gracious, funny, witty on.
It may be when I was 14 years old working for the star telegrams class acts.
Section of the newspaper was like a by teens 14 section.
We go to the national cutting horse show and four worth and I'm supposed to interview Johnny Rutherford.
He's sick.
She brings these there because she's into cutting horses at the time.
I don't interview her.
We already have someone else there to talk to her, but her husband Billy Joel is there.
And so they approach and say, hey, you want to go talk to Billy Joel?
And as a 14 year old kid, I say yes.
I mean, that was the first of I think many, many just like I can't believe I get to do this experiences.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
I did the cutting horse one and I got Joe Montana and you know, in that setting,
there's nobody else there.
So it's just you and the other person, which in those, you know, to get somebody of that caliber,
I'm not Joe Montana who cares.
Billy Joel would have been pretty neat.
That would have been neat.
And I'd really like to figure out how to full circle, you know, kind of come back and just even if I got to chat with them for five minutes to say,
thank you for being kind to a 14 year old kid.
Yeah.
I totally understand what you mean.
So, you know, you talk about the security circuit is circuit is root that you took.
And one of them was I think the first time where I really became familiar with you.
And that was when you were on the NFL network.
And one question I've always wanted to ask people who work for those and I know a lot of people who've done this is
those didn't exist when I first started in the industry, right?
The idea of a league or a team having its own reporter, its own network.
That didn't exist.
None of that stuff, the bandwidth didn't exist.
So to speak.
Well, now they're very much part of the landscape.
But one of the concerns has always been from the traditionalists like me is can the NFL network cover itself the way say I could could it.
So I had a very positive experience there and it's funny as a guy who started his career in sports.
I got away from sports because it's kind of like if you like sausage don't work at the sausage factory.
It got to be so much of a job.
It was tricky.
It was hard.
I had an NFL network full disclosure.
I'm a big college football fan.
I was not as big of an NFL fan and it was I fell in love with a game again working there.
Did you really?
Yeah.
The people I got to work with the it was it was a lot of fun.
And we it was a good group of people.
And so the question you're asking.
We would have this symposium every summer.
We'd all get together.
We'd meet with league execs and we'd go over new rules and we'd go over, you know,
we're going to try to accomplish a season that kind of thing.
And there was a roundtable where one of our journalists kind of brought that up about some difficulties he felt covering the league.
And the way they framed it was.
They said, look, we have incredible access at other outlets.
Don't get and we have pretty widespread latitude.
So this was I was there when the Ray Rice debacle happened.
And our opinion guys, I never saw them as to hold back.
I never saw them.
I think they were critical of the league in some situations on the legal website.
I think that there was room for that.
I never saw someone come down and say, you know, that's a bridge too far.
So I didn't have that experience in a perfect world.
I don't know that you can 100% fulfill your journalistic duties when you work for the entity you're covering.
But I felt like we got pretty wide latitude.
Colin Kaepernick, that happened there and you saw no shying away from us taking that issue head on internally.
So I feel like at least from my experience, it never was an issue.
Do you think in this day and age, the fan, the viewer, the reader, the listener cares?
If the person writes for or creates content for Dallas Cowboys.com NFL.com for start telegram Dallas Morning News.
They're just talking about the Dallas Cowboys.
Do you think the person who's consuming all that?
Did they really discern one from the other?
I think they should.
I mean, whether they do or not, I don't know.
That may depend upon the person to, you know, I worked with Edward or quite a bit at W.A.
He's spent a couple of years there as our cowboys insider and I hope they keep him on because he's just a great talent.
But I add somebody who I think is very public about it.
There was a conflict.
I think he would disclose that.
You know, and I think that.
If you have someone like that who's telling the audience, I think it builds a level of trust there.
So maybe there's a situation where it depends answering your question depends upon who the journalist is and how forthright they are about any potential conflicts.
So go ahead.
I'm sorry.
No, I just can say.
So on the morning show at Channel 8, whenever we had stories that were sensitive, it was really important to me that we try to let viewers know.
People are getting up, getting ready for school, their kids are having breakfast.
Whether or not it was at that objectionable, I just wanted people to trust that if it was, we would tell them.
And to build that expectation.
So maybe there's a sense of that.
If the journalist is building the expectation that he's very forthright with any issues, you know, full disclosure.
You know, I'm Jerry Jones signs my paychecks.
But here's still what I think.
I think then the audience becomes aware and they should be.
What do you think will happen to the NFL network now that it's being basically run by ESPN?
Great question.
I think the cool thing about NFL network was it really was NFL coverage for NFL fans.
Certainly we catered to the audience.
But there was a lot of content on there that was, you know, really informed by.
It's open up Brian Baldinger's playbook and I haven't breakdown.
The audience isn't there that you'll find for a fantasy football show.
I think ESPN is going to be more driven by the bottom line and I propped up my league money the same way.
You know, if that's good or bad, I don't know when it's all said and done.
It did I was surprised that the league made the decision to move away from it because.
You look at the carriage fees at the NFL network got.
And the fact that they're propped up by, you know, one of those popular sports in the world that prints money over and over again.
It feels like even if they're making if it's they're taking the loss.
It's a it's a loss leader for them and then you've got this really awesome marketing arm for your game.
They already have a couple of questions for you let you go.
Yeah, this is my memory is bad.
Because there's one.
I knew who you were.
I knew you had Fort Worth ties.
I knew your TCU ties and I'm in the press box at a Cowboys Redskins game.
So I'll see this before they change their name.
And I'm sitting there just being some wise ass on Twitter.
You took a shot at me.
Oh, I know.
And I can't remember what it is.
And when I asked you to come on this, I'm like, what did he say?
Because I was so I'm I am completely okay with anybody taking a shot at me.
I totally get it.
I totally deserve it.
But it just stunned me when it came from you.
I'm like, Holy something.
What did I say?
And I'm sitting there racking my brain.
And it was something about the Cowboys.
I'm trying to I'm trying to Google it right now.
Because now I'm.
What would I have said that would have pissed you off enough to especially as a member of the media say.
Blank this guy.
I'm going to take a shot at him.
And I can't remember what it is.
Oh, man.
Do you know what?
Here's what's funny is that.
I think I'm a pretty.
I get along with people pretty well.
I don't I'm not argumentative.
I don't think I don't I don't not the blow hard.
I try not to be.
I feel like I'm.
I'm.
Pretty.
You know, affable.
I guess.
Very.
Yes, but very.
I never realized until one of our network analysts.
Got Daniel Jeremiah made a comment.
He's like, man, you're a sniper on Twitter.
And I thought.
Is that how I'm coming across?
I just think it's fun to mix it up and have these back and forth.
I'm not trying to be a jerk.
So it was almost like I never realized it's some of the stuff that I would say online would come across that way.
And I appreciate that he.
He wasn't calling me out.
He was just like, man, you came from the top rope.
And so I feel like I probably.
I feel like I probably had a few of those.
And I will say this.
If I say something online and I deserve.
Someone to come on the top rope at me.
Like bring it.
And I know you're you're kind of the same way.
But I hope at least if if I do.
Jump off the top rope that someone deserved it.
I'm sure again.
And I know it's about it.
There was a mix in it up with Baylor fans a lot.
I've calmed down on my old age.
Favorite all time on air screw up.
Oh, I've had some good ones.
I've had some good ones.
I got in trouble.
I was doing the American Music Awards.
This is back in 2013.
And I'd never worked for this outlet before.
It was the people producing the whole thing.
The people who were in the audience.
Sam Sung was a big sponsor.
And okay.
Cool.
So we're there.
We're on the.
Red carpet and they've got this like 360 cam that's swinging around
getting shots of people like they pose.
They would get this.
Funke view.
And it literally was an iPad.
And they just get in my ear.
They go, hey explain explain how the camera works.
And so I said, yeah, we've got our 360 camera.
It's just really it's an iPad.
It spins around.
And they went nuts.
because Sam Sung was a sponsor that I said the iPad and I remember it was the most innocent mistake but they lost their mind about it.
Yeah, but man, I've had so many mistakes over the years and I think you know in this business you just you build up calluses to your mistakes.
You're okay.
Totally.
I mean, they're impossible to avoid and you have to kind of lean into them.
You don't want to make them routine but you have to be okay with it.
Say you're sorry and move on because if you're not doing it you're not going to put yourself in a position to make a mistake
and a mistake is a big part of living and certainly the career.
Last question, I need you to go last question.
Mark, how do you want your professional career to look like in five years?
Boy, that's a great question.
I'm still figuring out the answer to that but I think right now it feels like rolling in this direction of creating digital content,
whether it's podcasts or online journalism, fact checking videos, explainers about controversial or interesting topics.
I'd love to see that continue to grow and build a team of people or we can do that at a high level and serve an audience.
I have been I mentioned before just blown away by the response from viewers in the public here in North Texas.
Over the past couple of months after announcing that I was leaving, we're in a room where we talk to a camera and you know there are people on the other side but you forget how many there are or you don't have a sense of that.
And it has been really, really meaningful to hear from folks that they had coffee with us every morning and that they trusted us and that was a privilege that I.
I think is a responsibility.
So to get a chance to continue doing that is that would be a dream come true.
Congratulations on your decision and I wish you all the best in this future endeavor.
I look forward to it and I think you got all those compliments because of your sincerity, your talent and humility.
I think that comes across on the screen.
I don't want to say that lightly or just.
I mean that I think that's that's a tremendous asset and it's a gift and I think it's translated well and it's probably aided you in your career to support your talents and I wish you nothing but the best.
I think you very much for your time wish you and your family continue good health and I hope our paths cross soon enough.
I hope so to back I'll just say this I think I think deep down I'm still this eight year old kid from Fort Worth who just was watching the news and reading the star telegram cover to cover every day.
There's that that is very much still a part of me and and I hope hope that comes across.
It sounds like it does so I appreciate it.
It does. Thanks Mark. I really appreciate this. I know you busy.
Thanks for having me back. This has been awesome.
All right. Likewise.
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