By Cassidy Lee · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2011) · Wayback archive →
In early October 2011, longtime Bay Area TV reporter Rollin Post died at 81 of Alzheimer’s. Post had spent most of his career as KRON-TV Channel 4’s political editor in San Francisco, but had started in Los Angeles — as a CBS Radio copy boy in 1954.
Then
Post’s career had spanned the entire post-1950s development of West Coast political television. He had covered every California governor from Pat Brown through Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now
The political-TV-reporter category Rollin Post represented has substantially contracted across U.S. local broadcast markets. The structural reduction in local-news budgets at network affiliates, combined with the broader migration of political-coverage attention to cable and digital, has meant that dedicated political-editor positions at local TV stations are now substantially rarer. KRON-TV itself went through major ownership changes across the 2010s. The broader generational story — broadcast journalists who started in 1950s radio and worked through the entire television era — is mostly complete now.
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