Available on over 300 stations Hundreds of Thousands wake up and tune into to Gordon Deal and his co-hosts for their daily dose of news. Even when the microphones are off, something in the world is happening.
“Next is always now. The news never goes off, you know?” Gordon Deal told Barrett News Media over a Zoom call. He continued to say, “There’s always some alert coming across in your phone. How am I going to process this? Is this something I’ll be talking about tomorrow morning? To what level does it rise? How is the radio show going to be prepared to handle this particular piece of news tomorrow?”
Deal added, “The news button never goes off. It’s not like it’s not like when the final buzzer sounds, you know, in a basketball game or the final goal goes in or something like that. It just never ends.”
However, Deal’s path to news wasn’t direct but instead developed from his sports passion. “ I was a student at Rutgers and I thought I was, going to have a career as a professional soccer player. When that didn’t work out, I thought, ‘I need to do something better with my time.’ I saw an ad in the Rutgers student newspaper about, looking for help at the radio station, which, the school has and operates.
“So I thought, ‘Wow. Doing sports play-by-play would be a good way to kind of keep my hand in sports.’ So that was how it all began. Just saw an opportunity and jumped on it in college.”
Shortly after graduating, Gordon Deal transitioned his talents from sports to news.
“The transition was hard at first because I needed to know a lot of things that I did not know. I could tell you who the assistant football coach was at Utah State University back then. But I didn’t know who the governor of New Jersey was, even though I lived in the state.”
Deal added he also needed to learn how to write. “When I was doing play-by-play, I really didn’t do a lot of writing unless I was making notes about a particular player or coach or team or scribbling down statistics.
“So I really learned how to write local news, breaking news, and how to deliver it differently. So there was a lot to learn, especially the writing part. But I had a really good mentor in my first job out of school, so it was really helpful.”
That mentor, Bruce Johnson, took Gordon Deal under his wing. “He agreed to take me on as a young news guy with the carrot. He dangled the carrot that I would be able to do play-by-play, since I loved sports at the time. But he said ‘You’ll be on the bottom rung. But through attrition and experience, you’ll get your shot.’”
This experience allowed Deal to learn news. He recalled, “[Johnson] was such a good teacher. He knew how to write and teach you how to write. It’s one thing to know how to write yourself, but to teach somebody else is a real skill. So he had a lot of patience with somebody like me, who didn’t have a ton of news experience. He really rolled the dice and took that chance on me.”
Deal later added this chance “Set all the wheels in motion for my whole career. Being able to have that [writing] skill allow me to do more than sports.”
Today on his show This Morning with Gordon Deal, the longtime radio host delivers hard news but does have some higher moments with his Executive Producer, Mike Gavin in their segment ‘The Mic Drop.’ Deal told us, “[Gavin and I] come in with a couple of stories, that seem to be funny or silly or worthy of talking about and it’s the only time we really share opinion.”
He added, “This is not an opinion-driven show. The news is just the news to us. So it’s a little chance to be a little lighter, since obviously, we do a lot of death and destruction and bad news and serious politics. So any chance to kind of make it a little bit lighter with that segment and then a little human interest story at the tail end of the show. We feel it’s just kind of captures life.”
While most of his show deals in politics, Deal believes most Americans are not focused on politics and don’t live in an echo chamber. “I think the folks that are in the echo chamber tend to make a lot of the news sometimes, but I don’t think most Americans fit in one. I think most Americans don’t bleed politics.”
Of his show, Deal noted, “We take our politics very seriously, and we do a good portion of it on the program. But I don’t go home and think, ‘I can’t wait to discuss politics again tomorrow.’ I have other fish to fry in my life.”
For young people looking to get their start, Deal said, “As somebody said to me one time, ‘There’s no substitute for being on the air.’ So if you want to do news radio, get on the air. It doesn’t matter how small the radio station is, how big the radio station is, or how small or large the network is. Do it. And these days, unlike when I started out, you can podcast and practice on your own.”
Deal went on to say, “You can link it to social media…There seems to be so many ways to gain at least some level of experience these days. It’s really up to you.”
Krystina Alarcon Carroll is a news media columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. She has experience in almost every facet of the industry including: digital and print news; live, streamed, and syndicated TV; documentary and film productions. Her prior employers have included NY1 and Fox News Digital and the Law & Crime Network. You can find Krystina on X (formerly twitter) @KrystinaAlaCarr.
