When I left NBC in early 2009 the most important thing to me after 22 years as a journalist was to keep my voice alive. That’s how Get Real started.

Journalism had been, was and still is in the throes of a radical makeover and to this day I don’t think anyone really knows what the thing is going to look like whenever this transitional era is over (if it ever ends…but that’s another story). What was clear at that time was the big traditional news organizations were losing their audience, clout and in the desperate search for a way forward, often their purpose. The local television station where I had worked first lost many of its viewers even while doing consistently excellent journalism. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” — it just “was.” People, especially the slightly wealthier, slightly more sophisticated viewers that NBC attracted were the first to take advantage of the opportunities technology offered for accessing information any time, anywhere. Broadcast television is a crappy medium for trying to do that.

And so I set out to find a new platform. Blogging seemed like a good way to stay in the game since there was virtually no barrier to entry and I’d already developed a brand and idea from an earlier effort to pitch a cable news show (also another story). Get Real was my attempt to cut through two trends in journalism that both drove me crazy and I believed were partially responsible for the craft’s decline. Bland “objectivity” and pure bald-faced propaganda.

The blandness is practiced every day in newsrooms across the country — every network newscast, every local television newscast, most newspapers do it. Steering away from drawing any conclusions whatsoever from the evidence presented in a story. If some official says up is down, the story will inevitably say, “Commissioner Simpson says up is down. Critics disagree arguing that up is up because that’s the definition of up.” What happened to “Commissioner Simpson says up is down but he is wrong”? As Keith Olbermann has argued repeatedly, just because there are two sides to a story, it doesn’t mean both of them should be given equal weight if one is factually in coherent. Try telling that to the Nightly News.

The reaction to this has been the increasing popularity of one-sided “news” that is, in reality, nothing more than lightly disguised propaganda. Fox News is the master purveyor of this but MSNBC decided, with the success of Olbermann, to dive right in when it became clear there was money to be made in peddling bias. Equating Fox and MSNBC never pleased some of my readers who thought I was equating the degree of their hosts’ bias. But as I wrote repeatedly, just because someone like Sean Hannity makes factual errors nightly and Rachel Maddow does not (the proof here is the Maddow-bashing blogs go on and on about how snarky she is while the Hannity-bashers cite the specific factual errors made and back it up with evidence), doesn’t mean they are trafficking in the same drug: news as a pre-determined narrative.

I thought, and continue to think that coupling the performance aspects of prime-time cable (faux outrage, personality, humor) with hard line on facts is something people would like and use. And so….

In April a group of like-minded journos joined forces to create Buzz60. It’s a web channel of on-demand video clips, available any time, anywhere that are short (60 seconds) and sharp, entertaining and informative. My signature role is something we call Cable Kooks which, based on what I’ve written here over the last two years, is probably self-explanatory.

So Get Real isn’t over, it’s just moved. Come visit at buzz60.com, check out a couple of videos, share the ones you like with friends and then bookmark it. We’re putting up 10 new videos a day. Always something fresh for your eyes, ears and brain.

And again thanks for checking in, commenting and encouraging me to keep reporting, analyzing and speaking my mind.