• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 17, 2025

To all of my acquaintances in Southern California, a message of appreciation at this time: 

A journalist on the same beat for a long time gets to know a great many people in the industry he covers.

So many of them, particularly those far away -- which in this case, means southern California -- are familiar to me mostly through email exchanges and, in the now-distant past, telephone calls.

In my long career, I have crossed paths with many executives, show-runners, actors, actresses, talk-show hosts, game-show hosts, comedians and others.

I wish them, their families and their properties all well at this terrible time. But I never would have gotten to any of them if not for the TV industry’s vast publicity apparatus, both in-house and out of it.

How many publicity professionals have I known and worked with over the years? It is impossible to know, but it must be thousands. I have been doing this a very long time.

You publicists are the ones who help me every day. You answer questions, send me photos and provide timely access to the new-show screeners that are the lifeblood of the work I do.

We do not have personal relationships. We have long-distance, professional ones, for which I am very grateful. Without you, this job would not be possible to perform.

And so, a very belated thank you to all of you. Although I know none of the locations where you live and more to the point, what you and your communities may be going through now, I am thinking of all of you.

And for those who might be reading this who are not in the path of the fires in Southern California and are in a giving mood, a list of charitable organizations is shown in the photo above, courtesy of NBC News.