THE DESK
The newsletter about TV news gathering...
And the people who do it
Volume 1, Number 4
June 24, 1997
Paul Skolnick
Managing Editor
BREAKING NEWS
THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO FIX
IT IN POST... REALLY!
We learned a lesson with The Desk #3, which is the last one sent to you.
The lesson was that putting this newsletter together is something best
done a little earlier in the evening than we tried to do it.
There were several serious grammatical errors in that edition that went
beyond mere typos - things like sentences that lacked subjects and verbs
and parts of speech just dangling there between various punctuation marks.
We really did do well in junior high school English. It seems to
us there are two ways to do it: either we can start diagramming sentences,
or we can clean up the syntax.
We're resolving to fix the problem. If we should slip again, please
don't hesitate to let us know: skolnick@newstrench.com.
---
IRE SNAFU:
SHOEHORNED INTO A SHOEBOX
Investigative Reporters & Editors (http://www.ire.org/)
did it again this year in Phoenix. The always popular TV "show and
tell" - where broadcasters sign up for 15 minutes apiece to show
their peers some of their best stuff and talk about how they did it - was
shoehorned into a viewing area with 30 or so seats at the sumptuous and
sprawling Arizona Biltmore. That was enough room to hold only a tiny
fraction of the people who come to look, learn, and discuss.
It was either an example of extremely poor conference planning on IRE's
part, or an example of the low esteem in which some people feel the organization
holds broadcasters. (Having been a member of IRE for almost two decades,
I'd like to think it was just a loose end that will get rectified before
next year's conference in New Orleans. You can email Brant Houston,
IRE's executive director, at brant@ire.org,
just to make sure you'll have a seat in '98.)
Even with the seat shortage, random peeks into the darkened room showed
some inventive approaches to old stories, and increasingly sophisticated
production methods. It seems that our ability as an industry to tell
good stories has risen to the level of the technology available to us.
Sometimes, though, we just aren't pushing hard enough to find the new story,
to really get the goods on the folks doing bad, to expose the graft and
corruption at any point beyond the most obvious one.
Maybe next year....
---
AIRWAR:
ARE THEY PICKING A FIGHT
WITH THE WRONG GUY?
The Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com)
ran a front-page feature on Wednesday, June 4, about the intense competition
among news helicopters in southern California. The piece questions
whether news helicopters provide for viewers any news worth knowing.
Singled out in the article - for a WSJ sketch as well as for some extremely
strong words of condemnation - was KNBC pilot-reporter Bob Pettee.
The article includes this especially choice passage about news pilots in
general, and Pettee in particular:
"They are not reporters," says Sherrie Mazingo, chairwoman of the
University of Southern California's School of Broadcasting.
"Reporters are not named Captain Bob. This is not the Howdy Doody
show."
The words sting - and not only because I have known Bob Pettee for more
than a decade, and had for many years a daily opportunity to see his exemplary
work first-hand.
Mazingo's is a cheap shot. Reporters are named whatever they want
to call themselves - which, throughout the history of TV, is not always
what their birth certificates say their names are. Even Murrow was
known by a different name than he was born with (yep - he was originally
EGBERT Roscoe Murrow). And if coworkers want to bestow a nickname
- which is where the "Captain Bob" comes from -- for lighter moments, like
weather shots - it's just that much easier for the audience to identify
with.
Names, however, aren't the issue here. The issue is Bob Pettee's
work - which has frequently brought southern California TV viewers instantaneous
facts and pictures of such presumably trivial events as earthquakes, floods,
wildfires. Are those the things that weren't worth interrupting "the
news" for?
Bob is a measured reporter, concerned about getting the facts right and
telling the truth (which I've always been under the impression is what
journalism is supposed to be about). He is a fierce competitor (something
else I always thought journalism was about). But perhaps above all
else, he is a careful pilot. He helped to organize -- and headed
for a time -- an association of southern California helicopter pilots whose
aim was safer operation for all in the skies over L. A.
The Wall Street Journal neglects to mention that the Los Angeles DMA is
one of the largest in the country in terms of square miles, that its legendary
traffic jams often preclude ground crews getting from one point to another
while the news is on the air, and that its topography and geology lends
themselves to the kinds of cataclysmic stories we've all seen come out
of there in the last few years.
---
WONDER HOW YOU STACK UP:
CHECK THE SALARY SURVEY
While it's nowhere near as exciting as reading in the newspaper what you're
making - something that has happened in both San Francisco and Los Angeles
lately - you can still gauge your wage. RTNDA has posted the results
of its annual salary survey (http://www.rtnda.org/rtnda/steady.html),
which was conducted in the 4th quarter of last year.
Perhaps most interesting is that TV news wage increases beat the rate of
inflation (for the first time in recent memory). That's the good
news. The not-so-good news is that they didn't beat inflation by
much.
The range is still incredible - TV news reporters go from a low salary
of $10,000 a year to a high of $87,000, news directors from $20,000 to
$200,000 a year.
That has always been indicative of the vastly different cash flow from
small markets to large ones, and it probably always will be.
Don't see the same numbers in the survey as you see on your own paycheck?
That's probably what statisticians call "sampling error." Only slightly
more than half (55%) of the TV stations in the country returned their questionnaires.
---
WHO OR WHOM?
HELP IS NOW DIGITAL
Got a vexing grammatical question when the copy is supposed to be flying.
There may be some high-tech help a little more accurate than what they
throw into your word-processor.
The Grammar Lady - a column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - is now available
on line (http://www.grammarlady.com/index.html).
The columnist is actually a "grammar lady," Mary Bruder, PhD, whose online
resume lists her jobs as a teacher of English and English as a second language.
The site includes much helpful information, as well as a message area (http://www.InsideTheWeb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/mb2581)
where you can post a grammatical question... or answer one.
---
GO TO THE SOURCE:
PRIMARY PUBLIC MATERIALS ON THE WEB
You no longer have to maintain a nationwide network of like-minded enthusiasts
and a bulk-volume fax machine to see the public documents behind many prominent
stories. Check out "The Smoking Gun" (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/),
where FOIA-found documents are popping up with regularity.
There doesn't seem to be a consistent thread connecting the materials that
are popping up - everything from the lawsuit an admitted prostitute filed
against Jack Nicholson for allegedly not paying her to pieces of an FBI
file on Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson.
The nice thing is that you're seeing the documents themselves - or as close
to the documents as you can come on the WWW. The originals, or at
least the paper obtained under FOIA, which is invariably a photocopy, is
scanned and then posted in its entirety.
No breaking news in here... at least not yet. But the site does help
in an amusing way to refocus attention on the "paper trail."
---
DESKNOTES
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE:
"WHO'S CALLING... PLEASE?"
by Alisha Ryu
aryu@users.AfricaOnline.Co.Ke
The next time you pick up a phone to call someone, you should know
just how lucky you are.
Most people in the States take the phone thoroughly for granted. I mean,
when's the last time you thought to yourself, "Gee, I'm so privileged to
live in a country where I can make a local call and get connected to the
person I had intended to call within 6 seconds, each time I pick up the
phone"?
If you live in Kenya (or most anywhere else in Africa, for that matter),
the telephone represents evil, the act of dialing becoming a life and death
struggle between sanity and insanity on a daily basis. Okay, maybe that's
an exaggeration, but it's not that far from the truth. Let me give you
an example.
On a good day in Nairobi, it takes on average FIFTEEN minutes to connect
from your house to, let's say, your neighbor's house three blocks away,
IF you can get connected at all. It goes something like this: you
pick up the phone and you hear a long whiny beep. That means you
have a dial tone for the moment. Seizing the chance to dial, you
start pushing the number buttons on your phone, but there's a catch.
You see, Kenya hasn't discovered the beauty of a tone-based phone system
yet. So as you listen to the endless pulse-dialing of every number,
you realize that your fingers have moved too quickly and it's overloading
the system and soon, an irritatingly loud busy signal will fill your eardrum.
Hang up and try again. You dial more SLOWLY, but this time, you've
dialed TOO slowly and the system decides you're not making a call.
It hangs up on you automatically. Try again. Crackle, hiss,
pop... BEEEEEP.
Ah, this time you're connected but TO THE WRONG NUMBER even though you've
dialed the RIGHT number. This is such a common occurrence in Kenya,
no one gets upset that you've dragged him/her out of bed to answer the
phone. Apologize, hang up and try again except this time, you can't.
There's no dial tone.
So, you put the phone down for at least five minutes for the system to
get back on line. Try again. Damn, dialed too fast again!
Try again. At last, there's ringing on the other end and when you
FINALLY hear the voice of the person you're calling, he/she says, "Hello?
What?? I can't hear you! The line is bad. Please call back!"
Click.
Well, you get the picture.
In case you were wondering, there is no 9-1-1 service in Kenya.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Alisha Ryu is a producer
for a German television network, based in
Kenya. She has produced for CNBC and CNN
in the U. S., as well as CNBC/Asia in Hong
Kong.]
---
TROGTALK:
CAN IT STILL BE SALVAGED?
by Dave Linder
dlinder@vegas.infi.net
In the early days of the genesis of TheDesk (now that it is a hoary
4 cyberissues old), your site guru contacted your humble servant scribe
to convince him to write a few lines about the craft of teevee news, based
on a checkered career spanning exactly 30 years over 6 West Coast markets.
Recollections of a dinosaur, I thought. TrogTalk, he thought.
Great name, I thought. But, in reality, it might be too limiting,
I added, thoughtfully.
Maybe it's because I am saddled with this heavy responsibility of providing
thought-provoking (and Paul hopes humorous) recollections about the aforementioned
three decades of decadence that I find myself noticing more indications
in the media that I am not the only one who looks upon our Calling as falling
down a bit from our expectations.
Example: got to June 3 edition of "Newsweek", page 32 "In The Time
of the Tabs". Jonathan Alter writes; "When news oozes 24 hours a day it's
not really news anymore. The TV becomes ambient noise. The
newspaper becomes wallpaper. Finding the importance of patterns becomes
hard. It's easier -- and more profitable -- just to make the consumer
gape."
His next line hit this old dinosaur hard -- because his metaphors might
miss the mark for the kids that are coming out of college or have just
put their fifth year of local teevee nooze behind them as they head off
to the Big Time of the Top Ten -- "...Young men and women who went into
journalism hoping to be Woodward and Bernstein find themselves ersatz Walter
Winchells writing for an audience of ersatz rat packers." The thought hits
me that hell, most of our "journalists" now don't even know who or what
the "rat packers" were, nor have any idea what the hell "ersatz" means,
and for sure never heard of Walter Winchell. Hell, I bet most have
never seen a live Walter CRONKITE newscast, let alone know who Winchell
was. Hint: he did gossipy, celebrity-studded radio news in
the Jurassic era. So did Mike Wallace. Even The God, Edward
R. Murrow.
A couple weeks ago, I read a syndicated article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal
(and I am embarrassed to admit I didn't clip the article or jot down the
name of the author or even the syndicator, but at any rate) the point was
that television news is having a difficult time being taken seriously because
the medium is delivering very little serious news. The author suggested
(tongue in cheek, I assume) that perhaps the disillusioned journalists
could form SNN (Serious News Network) to provide insight into so-called
Serious News -- things You Need To Know. Except SNN would be known
around as SIN TV.. and where is the Seriousness in that?
Don Fitzpatrick's "Shoptalk" lately has been running a series of letters
from disappointed college professors and disillusioned news managers
decrying the declining state of the art.
Maybe it's all going to come out ok. Maybe there will be a time when
the public says "enough" or the networks split tabloid, gossipy coverage
into an Entertainment Information Division separate from "real" News divisions.
It'll never happen.
As Alter writes in Newsweek: "...the country had a choice: chatter about
what Marv Albert and some woman might have done to each other in a Virginia
hotel room -- or about what President Clinton and Trent Lott did do to
millions of uninsured American children across the river in Washington,
D.C. It was no contest. For now, anyway, Americans are fat,
sassy and always hungry for more cheese."
Damn, I wish I could write like that.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Dave Linder "hung it up" a few
months back. After three decades in television
news, he took a job coordinating video production
for a metropolitan county government in the Western
U. S.]
---
WHO'S WHERE
NANCY BAUER, from Assistant News Director, KNBC-TV Los Angeles, to News
Director.
BILL EVANS is the new news director at WPSD in Paducah, KY.
ADAM BRADSHAW has been named manager of news operations at KCOP-TV Los
Angeles. He is promoted from the position of assignment manager,
which he held for two years.
ERIK LEVINE to Charlotte County Reporter, WBBH-TV from Writer, WSVN
Miami.
---
TO BE ASSIGNED
(JOBS)
GENERAL ASSIGNMENT REPORTER (KRCG)
Mid-Missouri's top rated news station is expanding! We're looking for a
reporter who wants to make a difference. We need someone who can come to
work every day with ideas and not rely on the desk, can turn a story on
a dime, lives to go live, and understands the production techniques that
make for compelling television. Your tape must demonstrate your ability
to shoot and edit. 1 year experience preferred, but we will consider beginners.
Rush tape, resume and cover letter to: Al Zobel, News Director, KRCG-TV,
P.O. Box 659, Jefferson City, MO 65109. Your phone calls are welcome!
NEWS DIRECTOR
The NBC affiliate in Green Bay, Wisconsin is currently searching for a
News Director. Terrific family environment, and terrific working environment.
Station possesses the best in technical support, and is striving to become
the significant news force in the market. We need a nuts and bolts
person, as well as one who can think outside the box and be different.
Send resume and current sample news tape to: ND Search, WGBA-TV,
1391 North Road, Green Bay, WI 54313. An Equal Opportunity
Employer
NEWS/PUBLIC AFFAIRS DIRECTOR (KULR)
KULR 8 Television, the NBC affiliate in Billings, MT is seeking a News/Public
Affairs Director. The candidate ideally will have a degree in Journalism
from an accredited institute of higher learning, at least five years of
work experience in the field, possess good written and verbal skills, have
an affinity for people and the ability to work with others, have the will
to win, administrative experience as a News Director/Assistant News Director/
Assignment Manager or Executive Producer, and have a sincere desire to
live and work in a great, small market television station. KULR 8
observes EEO and all related programs. Send correspondence only to:
General Manager, KULR 8 Television, P.O. Box 80810, Billings, MT 59108.
NEWS DIRECTOR
WOLO-TV, the ABC affiliate in Columbia S.C. (#89), is looking for a leader
to run its news department. We need a competitive, energetic person
who can motivate and provide leadership to achieve goals. Successful candidate
will have 2+ years as an Executive Producer or experience as an Asst. News
Director of News Director. If you have a strong work ethic, love
competition, can provide hands-on leadership, and are able to budget and
control costs, we want you on our team. Please send cover letter and resume
with your news philosophy to: Russ Hamilton, General Manager - WOLO-TV
- P.O. Box 4217 - Columbia,SC 29240. WOLO is an equal opportunity
employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.
REPORTERS (WTVT)
Tampa's FOX O&O is looking for 2 reporters who live, eat, breathe news
and know how to tell stories that keep viewers glued to the tube.
You must have original, compelling, and doable story ideas on a daily basis.
You must be smart enough to figure out what the focus is, and, imaginative
enough to put the facts, pictures and sound together in a captivating package.
Your storytelling and presentation abilities should be evident on your
resume tape. A load of experience is not required, but beginners
should seek smaller markets. Mic sticks need not apply. Non-returnable
VHS tape, resume, references to: Sue Kawalerski, A.N.D, WTVT-FOX 13, 3213
West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, Florida, 33609. No phone calls!
INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT
AMERICAN JOURNAL is seeking an experienced investigative correspondent
for its award winning I-Team. Candidates should have proven track
record of on-camera reporting and producing of investigative segments.
No beginners please. Please rush tapes and resumes to: Bob
Read, Sr. Producer, 402 East 76th Street, New York, NY 10021
Fax # 212 737-4983
---
WHO'S WHERE and TO BE ASSIGNED [JOBS]
Reprinted from
SHOPTALK (http://www.tvspy.com)
with permission of Don Fitzpatrick Associates.
---
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