A lifetime of storytelling, navigating a changing media landscape
by Tim Nekritz | nekritz@gmail.com
Dave Bullard has been telling stories for a living since the late 1970s and to say he’s seen a change in the local media landscape would be an understatement.
Bullard’s career spans a golden age in radio news, perhaps the last great hurrah of local TV news and the start of local online journalism.
He’s done it all while calling Oswego County his home.
A lifelong Fultonian, born in the long-gone A.L. Lee Memorial Hospital and a graduate of the Hannibal Central School District, the only significant time away from Oswego County was when he went to Penn State to study journalism.
He got his first taste of the business working a couple years during college at an AM/FM station that no longer exists in State College, Pennsylvania, before becoming part of the Central New York communications scene in 1981 after graduating from Penn State.
When the legendary Bill Carey hired Bullard at 62 WHEN-AM, “radio was among the dominant media,” Bullard recalled. “WHEN had an 11-person newsroom operating 24 hours a day.”
In the 1980s, Central New York had a very strong media market, with many operations providing well-paying positions for those passionate about the business.
“Syracuse is an example of what happened to media markets,” Bullard said. “When I started working, you went to a public event and in addition to the three local TV stations, you’d have four, five or six radio stations there. There were a lot of us.”
Now, 40 years after Bullard ended his first tour of radio journalism, substantial local radio news only exists with public media outlets, WRVO Media primarily. Newsrooms once full of passionate professionals and many local radio stations “exist in name only,” Bullard said.
Even in Syracuse, a handful of locally-owned radio stations continue to provide local programming and support for community events. But among the media giants, so much of what gets on air is automated and syndicated. “Basically it’s a computer and a guy who logs in remotely to sync up the music and the commercials,” Bullard said.
Strong pictures, now fading
Bullard joined WTVH-5 in 1985 as a reporter and producer. At the time it was the most popular station in a strong television market.
“I feel like I got to be there for the last great era of local TV news,” Bullard said.
Many people in the newsroom, like Bullard, came in with years of experience and would be happy to spend a long time working in the Syracuse TV market. The pay was decent, especially once you were there a few years, benefits were good and a nice 401K meant people could have a retirement plan.
Today’s Syracuse newsrooms have less staffing, including after a merger between the news operations of WTVH-5 and WSTM-3 into CNYCentral and many of the people entering the business are not looking to stay for that long.
Today’s newsrooms consist in large part of recent college graduates who, while earnest and talented, only plan to stay for a few years until moving into larger markets, public relations or some other field after working for low wages in a very demanding business. With that kind of turnover, local media lose a lot of institutional knowledge and people who have built up decades of trust, connections and judgment.
By the time Bullard wrapped up nearly a decade at WTVH-5, local media was seen more as a business and an investment than a public good. A couple years later, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the media industry, which accelerated mergers creating megacorporations controlling more radio and TV from further away, with less willingness to invest in its stations.
After the era of radio conglomeration, Bullard also worked at WSYR AM 570 as news director for three years. To show how the industry had evolved, at one point WSYR was asked to provide “local” newscasts for stations as far away as Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Changing demographics also made the bottom line worse for Central New York as a media market.
“When I started in the business, Syracuse was the No. 55 media market in the country,” Bullard said. “Now it’s No. 99. You lose a lot of national advertising dollars. You’ll get more national ads when you’re near the top 50. And Syracuse was a test market, too.”
With local media so gutted, Bullard said the region has lost a lot and could be even more impacted in case of a widespread emergency, even if any homes still keep radios with batteries in them as once was common.
“What happens if we have something like the big Northeast blackout and you can’t watch TV and every cell tower is jammed with people trying to make sure each other are OK,” Bullard said. “That’s what local media is supposed to be there for and it’s not any more.”
Online exploration
After opening his own media business in the mid-1990s, Bullard found himself drawn into the first serious local foray into an online-only news operation with the launch of Fulton Daily News in 1999.
For a few years, he worked with Fulton’s then-Mayor Don Bullard (no relation) and others with the city until a new administration was elected. But the group enjoyed working together and wanted to keep serving the community in some way.
“We decided to address the news desert that Fulton was at the time,” Bullard recalled. “A city of this size should have a daily newspaper but it didn’t.”
It seemed a gamble, pioneering a new form of daily journalism where conditions were already making local media profitability more difficult, but Bullard is proud of what it accomplished.
“Fulton Daily News was one of the nation’s first online independent hyperlocal media outlets,” Bullard said, which meant learning a lot while blazing the trail. But it didn’t go unnoticed either: “Editor & Publisher magazine wrote about us a couple of times.”
While it never proved an enterprise to make anybody rich, Bullard was proud of the efforts everybody provided to prove it was possible.
“We were covering things that weren’t being covered, did a lot of good enterprise stories, won some awards and provided a good service for the community,” Bullard said.
“The number of hyperlocal and online-only daily news operations that have emerged since shows that it can work,” Bullard said. “I enjoyed doing it and it made me proud of my profession. In the end, all we wanted to do is provide a decent service for our community and pay everybody and we did.”
While co-owner and managing editor of the online publication, Bullard still had to pay bills, so he stayed active working in local media, including as assignment editor with NewsChannel 9, news director at WRVO and web development manager of WWNY-TV in Watertown.
While Fulton Daily News and sibling publication Oswego Daily News still exist today, Bullard parted ways in 2013 when another exciting opportunity came along.
A Fair enterprise
Bullard moved back into the public relations side of the media equation in 2013 when he was hired as marketing and public relations manager of the Great New York State Fair, based in Syracuse.
“I was there for exactly one decade and a week,” Bullard recalled.
With then-director Troy Waffner, Bullard worked hard on redeveloping a lot of the goodwill the State Fair previously had.
“The director really wanted us to rebuild the trust from the community and the local media,” Bullard said.
Not only did they accomplish that, but Bullard said they became one of the most trusted communication offices among state agencies.
Bullard found ways to inject a sense of wonder and joy into the job, most notably media day. Anybody following local media outlets would know when that was, as journalists would happily talk about, among other things, what new deep-fried foods fairgoers could expect.
“It was a massive job,” Bullard said. “I was essentially a department of one, responsible for a $1 million marketing budget and special events. But I absolutely loved that job.”
A busy retirement
Even though he officially retired in 2023, Bullard remains active. He started FanFirst, an events and communications company where he works for three festivals: Oswego’s venerable Harborfest, the International Taste Festival in Syracuse and even the Lubbock Arts Festival in Texas.
The latter grew out of Bullard’s involvement as a foundation board member of the International Festival and Events Association, where he also writes a column for their quarterly magazine and provides seminars at conferences and regular webinars supporting PR work in the special events industry.
The desire to serve the Fulton community remains, as Bullard is president of the Fulton YMCA board of directors — “it takes a lot of my time, but I love it,” he said — and a board member for the Fulton Betterment Corporation, supporting the Fulton Events Committee in development opportunities.
“I also play drums a couple nights a month,” Bullard said of his other longtime gig, with the Stone River Band. “It’s all media, we’re still turning out content, even if it’s cover tunes on a Saturday night.”
And to show things sometimes come full circle, Bullard recently filed his first story as a freelancer back working with WRVO.
“I just found I missed radio,” Bullard said. “Radio was my first love.”
After a lifetime in an evolving media landscape, Bullard can look back at the changes but also enjoy some relative stability in controlling his own calendar.
“Life is pretty chaotic, but I love it,” Bullard said.
