Channel One News: The healthiest youth marketing company in NYC.

December 7, 2012

From Jim Metrock: It’s good that Channel One employees are so health conscious. Intern Alexis Morgan says she’s a vegetarian. She thinks it is great that Maggie Rulli brings healthy snacks to the office every day. Ms. Morgan relates how the Channel One staff members love to exercise and how they all “eat a healthy lifestyle.”

None of the current on-air talent were around just a few years ago when Channel One regularly advertised Snickers, M&Ms, Skittles, Twix chocolate bars, Lay’s potato chips, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Mug Root Beer, Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes to a captive audience of students down to 10-year-olds. Channel One’s junk food advertising lasted for over 12 years! 

What Channel One News did to students was mean and irresponsible. Two people who were responsible for the junk food advertising assault on kids are still with Channel One: Kent Haehl and Dr. Paul Folkemer. 

The junk food advertisers walked away from Channel One in the first half of the ’00 decade. Channel One News never recovered from the massive lost of ad revenue from the junk food companies. 

There has to be a lot of young adults now who have weight problems in part due to having to watch daily junk food ads while they sat at their school desks. 

I find it hard to believe that any ethical young person would want to be employed at this reprehensible youth marketing company.  

 

 
 
 
You’ve seen the shows but what really goes on behind the scenes in the newsroom? 
 
“Newsroom”? CBS has a newsroom. What Channel One has is several desks with a few employees sitting in front of computer screens. Channel One takes content from CBS and the AP and modifies it to fit into the classroom TV show or the channelone.com site.

One thing that surprised me was how health conscious the entire staff is here.

Glad the staff is health conscious because historically Channel One News has been all about promoting bad health among kids. True, Channel One has run feature stories about how exercise and good eating are 

All the producers, anchors, and reporters love to exercise on a daily basis and eat a healthy lifestyle – especially Maggie Rulli! Every day she brings in a new concoction of healthy homemade snacks. Being a vegetarian myself, it was nice to see the healthy-food cognizant staff. 

Another thing that I really like about the newsroom was the atmosphere. There is a fresh vibe that you can feel working in the newsroom, a collective group of people doing what they love. As an intern, one of the challenging things is that I can’t go on any of the interesting and exciting trips with the rest of the staff. Since I’ve been here in August the reporters have gone to Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Mexico and just this weekend, Myanmar. Plus Jessica and one of the producers were in Israel over the summer for a series that’s going to start next week. 

They’re constantly searching for new story ideas and teens that are influencing the world. I admit I’m a bit jealous that I don’t get to go on these exhibitions but my dream would be the ability to travel the world and report on stories at the same time. 

Some food for thought: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” 

 

 

Tags: , ,