Longtime WXXI News Director Randy Gorbman, whose resonant voice has been a mainstay on Rochester airwaves for the better part of three decades, is retiring.
Gorbman is one of the longest-serving news directors in the state, according to the New York State Broadcasters Association.
At WXXI, he handles the daily news operations on the radio and online — while also filing his own local reports on business, crime, politics and other happenings.
“Randy set the gold standard for news directors,” said David Donovan, president of the state broadcasters association. “There are only a few — very few — that can compare with his service record.”
Gorbman’s 47-year career includes stints at radio stations from the Adirondacks to the Catskill mountains, from Utica to Stamford, Connecticut, and from Manhattan to Albany.
WHAM-AM brought Gorbman to Rochester in 1994. He made the move to WXXI in 2013.
A 1977 graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, his career spans eight presidents, seven governors and the release of all six “Star Trek” movies (he’s a fan). He has covered Y2K, 9/11, the decline of Kodak, Xerox, Bausch+Lomb, and helped guide the WXXI newsroom — and the community — through a pandemic.
“We don’t take these stories lightly,” Gorbman said. “But you try not to take yourself too seriously.”
The 69-year-old Queens native and lifelong newsman will mark his last official day on the job on March 28th.
‘A touchstone’
“When you want a voice to cut through and to stand out and to believe in, he’s got it,” said Chet Walker, a former WHAM morning host who worked with Gorbman for more than 15 years.
Gone is Gorbman’s New York City accent. He had to work at that. And what colleagues describe as his near-perfect enunciation.
“He is sort of part of the soundtrack of people’s lives,” said WXXI Morning Edition host Beth Adams. “Whether they’re listening in the kitchen, getting ready for work, or coming home … I think it can be comforting for people to have known a voice that long, a trusted voice that they can rely on.
“It’s kind of a touchstone.”
But what Gorbman really wanted to be, at least starting out, was an electrical engineer.
“I figured out quickly I had no aptitude for math,” he said of his path not taken. “It’s hard to be an engineer without that.”
As it happened, though, he figured that out while attending Brooklyn Technical High School, which was home to the New York City educational station WNYE. This was the time of Watergate, he said. And he had become a regular listener of all-news stations like WCBS and WINS — a habit he got from his mother, who tuned into the radio news each morning.
“I started getting really interested in journalism,” Gorbman recalled, “… and the rest is — I guess you could say — history.”
Cows, trains and automobiles
In the early days, as a college intern, Gorbman hitchhiked to his morning shift at WCNY.
He landed his first professional radio job in the hamlet of Ticonderoga, where he battled mooing cows in a nearby pasture, and the whistle of passing trains to broadcast the noon news from a ramshackle studio of the now-defunct WIPS.
“You know, you deal with it,” Gorbman said. “That’s why I still love live broadcasting, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you roll with it, you know, make fun of it, if you have to.”
It was a daytime station, he said: “You had to turn it on in the morning.” And when his Dodge Demon got stuck in a snowdrift one day on the drive in, he said he got on the CB radio, “because I knew the town highway guys,” and convinced them to tow him out.
His anecdotes are entertaining but also defining of a humble, unflappable and affable man.
“The guy is a mensch,” Walker continued. “He’s hard-working. He’s intelligent. He’s got integrity. And people just like him. You know, he’s a very likable guy. And if you say I said this, I’ll deny it.”
Many of Walker’s memories are of Gorbman “grabbing a recorder and a microphone and running out of the building, sometimes with, you know, big, unlaced boots and a big furry hat and big overcoat and charging out to cover a fire, or a weather story or whatever needed to be covered.”
Because every story matters.
‘Not replaceable’
“From the beginning, you could tell the guy was a professional,” Walker said. “I mean, I could see by the techniques he used, the way he interviewed, the way he handled people before, during and after an interview, that he knew his stuff.”
The accolades are many — mixed with a recognition that, in an ever-changing media landscape, Gorbman’s depth of skill and experience is unlikely to be replicated.
“People like Randy, they’re not replaceable,” said Tom Proietti, former radio, TV and newspaper journalist and resident media scholar at St. John Fisher College.
“He is the old-fashioned, dig-up-the-news kind of guy,” said Jeff Howlett, WHAM’s former station manager and program director.
“Hardest working person ever, and no doubt one of the best bosses I’ve had — and I’ve had quite a few,” said WXXI All Things Considered host Alex Crichton, whose career in radio spans a close second to Gorbman’s at 44 years. “If anybody deserved a retirement, it’s Randy. And here it is, and I hope it’s the best.”
“If you are a journalist, and you have him in your life, you’re better for it,” said Elissa Orlando, WXXI’s former vice president for television and news. She hired Gorbman, calling him “an authoritative and independent voice for news.”
And seemingly timeless.
Adams said she recently listened to a tape of Gorbman from 1994, when he started at WHAM.
“And I’m not noticing much difference,” said Adams, who has worked with Gorbman at both WHAM and WXXI. “Most of us, I mean, I’ll speak for myself, my voice has changed in the last 30 years. I hear it. It’s thinner. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about it. But Randy, he could have recorded that a week ago.”
‘It’s going to take a village’
He works early mornings, nights and weekends, and freely admits: “I don’t have a great work-life balance.” So retirement will be an adjustment, though he expects he “still will not be able to stop looking at my phone” for news updates.
“I have been in this business since 1992,” said WXXI Executive Editor Denise Young, “and honestly, I’ve worked with a ton of amazing people. I can’t think of anybody who has a better work ethic than Randy Gorbman. It’s astounding.
“It’s going to take a village of people to fill in what he does on his own,” she said — also referring to the workplace where Gorbman’s compassion, humor, calm and his genuine respect and support that colleagues say buoy them in an often stressful job.
Gorbman already is talking about the potential for him to have some post-retirement work duties with WXXI, Young said. So maybe that voice won’t be gone from the airwaves for long.
Noelle E.C. Evans
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WXXI News
“You know how something becomes part of your DNA?” he asked. “I’m so invested in this business, I would feel like I was missing out on something if I wasn’t involved, in some way. Like I’m not somehow part of the process, you know?”
Not that he doesn’t have other interests.
He’s a fan of NASCAR, admittedly uncommon in public media circles. And of jazz, likely more so. He has seen the likes of McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk play live, and was there when Dizzy Gillespie played Central Park.
And then there is his collection of antique radios.
“It’s embarrassing,” he said. “Aside from some of the antique radios, I have, like, a bunch of different transistor, shortwave radios at home. I don’t listen as much as I used to. But yeah, I mean, we used to try to pick up stations at night from across the country, if you’re lucky, maybe even halfway across the world.”
It’s not uncommon, he said, to get an email from someone as far away as Scandinavia, who picked up the radio signal and sent along an MP3 of what they heard, asking for confirmation. And Gorbman will listen, and respond.
Because journalism is both a solitary, yet very public, act. In radio news, you stand alone in a recording booth and speak the words into a microphone with nobody listening — hoping that sometime later, somewhere, they will.
Gorbman joked: “I’m hoping one of my 1977 newscasts is being heard in a galaxy far, far away.”
Includes reporting by WXXI’s Beth Adams and Veronica Volk.