Coming across Carol Marin at 7:15 in the morning, as she grabs a cup of coffee at a Michigan Avenue Starbuck’s, you would have no idea this is one of the riskiest days of her broadcast career.
Even in running gear, even knowing the day’s business won’t be done for another 16 hours, she looks put together in that way TV news people do, as if a live interview could be necessary at any moment.
You would have no idea unless, that is, you listened to the radio or read the papers.
It is a Monday in early February, the day her television station, WBBM-Ch. 2, will debut what it has billed as a more thoughtful 10 p.m. newscast, one with the potential to change the way America’s most trusted news medium — and its most hidebound — does business.
Marin, as the public face of a broadcast that will ask Chicagoans to rethink their concept of what a television newscast can be, crosses Michigan Avenue and heads into the Tribune Tower studios of WGN-AM 720 to promote the new show one more time, on Chicago’s most popular radio program.
Arriving in his studio 10 minutes ahead of her scheduled 7:35 interview, she greets host Bob Collins, an old friend. During his commercial breaks, they talk about a letter Collins had read on the air, written by the neighbor of the Naperville woman, Marilyn Lemak, who police say killed her three children. She listens as he talks about unloading an Arizona vacation home that, he says, feels like an albatross. And she brings up a WGN promotional spot that features Collins interviewing Marin and Marin citing one of her favorite quotes about her impending return to the anchor chair.
“Old chicks rule” is the quote, and Marin first heard it in a conversation at the December news conference announcing her new duties as solo anchor of the CBS-owned station’s flagship newscast.
Marin, an energetic 51-year-old in a business that likes its women closer to 30, has adopted “Old chicks rule” like a mantra. It even became the tag line for a WBBM promotional spot that, to her slight chagrin, would never air.
Another mantra, one she will repeat in her interview with Collins, is that the goal of the new newscast is to give viewers stories they wouldn’t know how to ask for in a survey — that, although people know good stories when they hear them, they are often about topics they previously had no idea interested them. It is the belief of Marin and her co-workers that local news, in the format that is used by virtually every station in the country, is too reliant on viewer surveys and consultant recommendations. That’s why, for instance, you always see health and crime stories, always see a male-female anchor pair, always see the weather and sports and cheery closing item at the same times each night. One of WBBM’s goals is to upend all that, to can the canned newscast.
“I really hope we don’t do any more empty, burning warehouses,” she tells Collins.
Collins, for his part, poses hard questions in his deceptively laconic way. He asks her what happened to her stated intention to not anchor again when she left WMAQ-Ch. 5 more than two years earlier, days ahead of the debut of Jerry Springer as a news commentator. (Her response: Coming back under these circumstances is “the opposite side of quitting.”) He asks her about unconfirmed reports that Joel Cheatwood, the then-WMAQ executive who was one of the engineers of the Springer maneuver and has most recently been running CBS’ Philadelphia station, may move into a role overseeing news at some of the local stations CBS owns. (Marin: Not in Chicago, she has been assured.)
Marin, it is clear, understands the challenge her station is taking on. Not just the wildly raised expectations that greet the possibility of change in TV news. Not just the implicit disrespect for her competitors in saying she’s got a better way of doing things, however adamant she is in telling Collins that she does respect their work. But also the risk to her market value and, more important, to television news should it fail, a distinct possibility given the thin resources WBBM has to achieve this resource-gobbling task.
“It’s a small shop,” she tells Collins. “I get it. There are limited resources. I know it.” Compared with its competitors, she would later elaborate, WBBM simply has fewer photographers, reporters and producers to gather information. That’s largely a result of the station’s woeful competitive performance during what have been parsimonious times in the business. The past decade has seen local news operations nationwide — and indeed, journalism outfits generally — trying to get by with smaller staffs.
But, she says, as her 20 minutes on air wind down, “It’s worth a whirl, don’t you think?”
It is a peculiar set of circumstances that allowed, at this late moment in local-news history, a big station to rethink the wheel.
WBBM was desperate enough to risk radical change, having suffered through years of third-place finishes with its primary economic engine, the 10 p.m. newscast. The trail of ratings tears predated even the station’s brief, failed experiment with a tabloid, blood-and-guts format in the early 1990s, but things had gotten worse since. Even three years of mounting an entirely respectable newscast led by a competent, stable anchor team, and with the same general manager in place, had failed to turn the station’s fortunes. By February 2000, the 10 p.m. news was losing not just to longtime market leader WLS-Ch. 7 and WMAQ, but to reruns of “Friends” and “The Simpsons” as well.
By landing Marin when she left WMAQ, the NBC-owned station, WBBM got someone with the clout and integrity to insist on this kind of newscast. Since joining WBBM in the summer of 1997, she had been contributing long reports to the newscast and to CBS newsmagazines — and only on rare occasions filling in as a news anchor.
Marin was willing to be talked into returning to the anchor chair, a process that lasted some six months between last May and October. She won’t specify, but one can assume she got specific language in her new, three-year contract that prohibits the kinds of things that led to her leaving WMAQ, where she had worked since 1978. It wasn’t only the Springer ratings gambit that drove her out, but years of battling with management over creeping commercialism infecting the newscast. She had been suspended, for instance, in late 1995 for refusing to read news copy that she saw as a sop to advertisers.
Perhaps most important, this was happening in Chicago, a city with a national reputation as a hard-news town. Yes, Chicago was where the “happy talk” local-news format was invented, at WLS under Fahey Flynn in the late 1960s. But it is also the place where the stations all maintain active investigative units and where the happiest-talking station in town, the current WLS, is also the one with the largest news staff. Chicago’s legacy, and WBBM’s in particular, dating back to the highly respected newscasts led by Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson in the late 1970s and early 1980s, meant General Manager Hank Price could sell his boss, CBS Stations Group President John Severino, on the idea that news could look a little different here.
Lastly, things had been coming to a head in local news nationwide. Enough people were fed up with the rigid format, the monotonous sameness of news, to want to try something like this. Enough viewers were turning away to suggest change was necessary, whatever Americans keep telling pollsters about their trust in television news: Between 1994 and 1999, the Chicago audience for the news at 10 dropped from 70 percent of those watching TV at that hour to 49 percent, a loss of about 450,000 households. And enough critics, both inside the news business and out, were arguing that a reinvention was sound not only as journalism but also as marketing: If you want to attract people to your product, make it different from the other products on the shelf.
“People have changed anchor teams and news directors,” says Tim Weigel, WBBM’s lead sportscaster. “They’ve changed sets. But nobody in decades has changed the basic way you approach the 10 o’clock news.”
For WBBM to succeed, it not only must stretch a small staff to its utmost, but also must woo back a perhaps unwooable audience, the people who have turned away from late local news. These are the very people whose understanding of news is sophisticated enough to recognize what is different about a newscast that does not take time to tell you to lift with your legs when shoveling snow. But given the copycat nature of television and Marin’s national stature in the business, if it is successful, stations across the country will rush to imitate it in one form or another.
Imagine it: everywhere you turn, solo female anchors of a certain age, a ban on “news stories” tying in to that evening’s network entertainment fare, weather and sports having to earn their time based on news value, and a concentration on longer looks at meatier issues, ideas taking a seat at the news desk alongside pictures.
Then imagine the alternative: If this fails under the vaunted Carol Marin, at the CBS station in the nation’s third-largest city, then station managers everywhere will likely close the book on “quality” as a potential strategy for a ratings-challenged newscast. Cue the footage of the empty-warehouse fire.
At 10 a.m. on Feb. 7, exactly half a day before WBBM’s first Marin-led newscast, key staff members get together to start deciding which stories, and in what form, will make the debut. A piece on friends of former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds seeking his early release from prison looks strong. Former city Treasurer Miriam Santos is holding her first news conference after the overturning of her fraud and attempted-extortion conviction. Political reporter Mike Flannery will cover it, but will Santos come onto the set for a live Q&A? And a water main broke in the Loop — shades of the 1992 flood — and Sammy Sosa is claiming he was misquoted about expecting his next contract with the Cubs to be worth $160 million.
They debate whether former WTTW-Ch. 11 host John Callaway, signed on as a regular contributor, will come on the set to talk about what WBBM is trying to achieve. The early inclination is to let the newscast be the explanation.
“Let’s just do the news,” says Pat Costello, a native Chicagoan hired as news director last April after a successful stint running the news operation at the Salt Lake City CBS station.
Along with Marin, Costello’s primary partner in shaping the new news is a fellow 46-year-old, assistant news director Danice Kern, who is, like Marin, a WMAQ refugee. She quit that station several months ahead of Marin, for some of the same reasons, and had been teaching and writing until WBBM lured her back to the game last June. Kern more or less runs the meeting, offering ideas and calling colleagues “kid,” as if in homage to the “Front Page” era of journalism.
“There is a sinkhole in the middle of the street,” says Kern, speaking of the flood story. “We don’t know what it means.” People suggest ways to make that story richer than just a tale of commuter inconvenience, to try to discover if, for instance, it indicates a systemwide problem with Chicago’s water supply.
Marin homes in on the political stories and the thread she sees connecting them. “The parallels between Reynolds and Santos, in terms of minority prosecution” — some in the community contend that the two received harsher treatment because of their ethnicity — “that’s a really smart combination I don’t think anybody else has done,” she says.
After two months of planning, this meeting in a small conference room off the main newsroom is a relief. Staff members are finally getting down to the specific business of what Chicagoans will see if they tune in to Channel 2. It is as if an engine under construction for months has finally been switched on.
The engine was built with care but also haste. Marin’s new job was announced only in early December. A couple of times, the whole newsroom got together — camera operators, makeup artists and reporters — on daylong “retreats” to talk about how people would like things to be. For those meetings, a news consultant got the only work he is likely to out of the new 10 o’clock operation, coming in to moderate.
More frequently, the brain trust would huddle to discuss which reporters were strong enough to be featured on the broadcast, which stories might be good for the first week, which cliches needed to get the frigid shoulder.
For all the advance thinking and talking, though, the week before the debut was feverish. Like most newsrooms, WBBM’s, after all, is a place that believes deadlines exist so that you will have no choice but to get something done. “By God,” Kern said at one point, “let’s have another meeting.”
A new, stripped-down set was readied just in time, the emphasis not on high tech or high style but on simple functionality, the theory being that viewers should think about the news, not the mahogany. It is shoehorned into a small segment of the studio, most of which is still dominated by the traditionally massive desk that will continue to be used for the morning and afternoon newscasts.
“Wow,” said Weigel upon seeing the 10 p.m. news warren for the first time. “This is really radical.”
Rehearsals had to take place, involving as many as 22 people at once on the set and in the adjacent control room. The movements of the massive, robotic cameras were choreographed, an especially important task for machines that recognize other cameras in their path but not humans. Then there were the basics of doing a TV show, like Marin and weatherman Steve Baskerville practicing ways to be in the same shot comfortably.
Marin found some of her anchor choreography rusty. “You know,” she said during the rehearsal the Wednesday before debut, “I’ve forgotten how to go through a script.”
Later that practice evening, which relied on a sample WBBM newscast built from the previous month’s stories, a giant graphic went up on screen alongside Marin. The handgun in it was pointing straight at her, sending the staff into hysterics.
“That’s our tease,” said Costello. ” `Watch or we shoot this anchor.’ “
A little after 2 p.m. on debut day, staff members reconvene to start refining their plan. “We are in a position, enviable perhaps, of being very, very heavy going into our first newscast,” announces Kern, “heavy” referring to the amount of material they have to choose from.
“We’ll have to make some tough decisions, unless we hold Letterman,” she adds sardonically. David Letterman’s CBS “Late Show” immediately follows the 10 p.m. news, of course, and except in extreme circumstances, holding it is not an option.
Marin jokingly suggests that she sign off by saying, “Join us on our Web site for the rest of our newscast.”
During the meeting, Flannery calls in a couple of times, first to report back from the Santos news conference — the one where she blamed her conviction, in part, on PMS — and then to let his colleagues know that she is sitting down for one-on-one interviews with just about every news operation in town. The news value of interviewing her live is in question.
Weigel shoots down the Sosa story, attributing the strong reaction to the quote to “decades of paranoia by Cubs fans” who figure the team’s management will find a way to lose him too.
Kern still has questions about the water main break. “Are we talking about Son of Chicago Flood?” she asks. “Or are we making too big a deal of this? We’re running a city, and there are going to be problems.”
Marin, the newscast’s senior editor, seconds Kern’s enthusiasm for getting footage of a performance that night of West African drummers. “We’ll actually have a cultural note,” Marin says. Culture is one of the areas, like education and politics, where traditional newscasts have been weak. Making sure those topics get covered, regardless of whether there is great video to illustrate them, is one of WBBM’s key objectives.
By 2:50 p.m., only senior staff members are left to select the all-important first story. “What do we think is our lead?” Kern asks.
“Miriam Santos,” says Mike McHugh, the show’s executive producer.
“Even if everyone else has her as the lead,” agrees Marin, “she’s the lead.”
As the newscast takes shape, Costello does some rough math and figures there’s only one minute and 10 seconds of breathing room, way too little for a program whose guiding principles include time for the anchor to question reporters.
“That’s time to show myself as a warm and fuzzy human being,” says Marin, who is still in her running gear. (“I think this is the longest time I’ve gone without putting on school clothes,” she will say a little later.)
With planning time finally running out, the reality of what is about to happen is sinking in. Kern tells her colleagues that she had little sleep the night before; in her nightmare the robotic cameras were chasing her. Costello’s nightmare, he says, was more fundamental — they had showed up to work this Monday and forgotten to do the newscast.
A few thoughts from people inside WBBM and out on what the station is trying to accomplish and why:
Danice Kern: “How many times do Chicagoans need to be reminded to wear a hat in winter, to check the antifreeze in their cars? People are so offended by that. It’s brainless.”
Carol Marin: “In a lot of ways TV stations have become sort of ATM machines for the networks just pulling cash out. . . . We’ve lost a lot of our journalistic equity.”
Patricia Dean, a former producer at all three 10 p.m. news stations, now an associate professor in the broadcast program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism: “Chicagoans have rejected tabloid news. It’s a smart, savvy audience. If you deliver on the promise, the viewers are going to find you.”
Tim Weigel: “You just have to realize that something like this (will take time). It’s like the Titanic. You don’t miss the iceberg when you decide to start turning the rudder 100 yards away. . . . It takes a long time to get something this broken fixed.”
Mike Parker, veteran WBBM reporter: “For so long so many of us here have sort of slogged in, and we knew what we had to do that day, so we did it. But there wasn’t a lot of joy in it. Well, we’re getting a lot of the joy back.”
The clock ticks down. By 7 p.m. the show’s producers have plotted out the debut broadcast, story by story, second by second, on a computer program that editorial staff members can access. Click on the specific story and you can call up its script, something Kern and McHugh are now doing, trying to pare down and improve the copy.
Marin’s office is overflowing with flowers from well-wishers. “I’m very sorry,” says Costello, sticking his head in the door at one point. “I came to see the deceased.”
Out in the newsroom, Kern has lit a candle and placed it and a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, atop a pile of papers on McHugh’s desk. It’s not so much a fear of failure as an ironic reference to Marin’s and Kern’s days at WMAQ, where Kern’s desk became a kind of shrine, accumulating a new icon almost every time a big story broke.
The staff has decided that having Santos come on set, live, to take questions is still newsworthy enough to do, and Marin, finally in her “school clothes,” sits at a monitor watching a tape of Santos’ news conference that day.
“She’s angry,” Marin observes. “If we get right down to brass tacks, (she thinks) Daley’s the villain here. She doesn’t want to say that.”
Everybody is anxious about when Flannery, who has followed Santos to an evening appearance, will be able to return to the newsroom. He still has to shape the news piece that will detail her day and set up the interview.
Costello breaks some of the tension with another joke, a reference to a story that made local newscasts nationwide and became emblematic of the kind of thing Channel 2 is trying not to do.
“Carol,” he says, “at the water-main break, there was a water-skiing squirrel.”
Marin, though, says she is surprised at how calm she feels. “In an hour and 45 minutes,” she says, “it’ll be on its way to Mars.”
Before that, it plays in Chicago. The newscast runs without glitches — until, almost at the end, Weigel slips and calls Marin “Linda,” the first name of one of her immediate predecessors, Linda MacLennan. The Santos story leads the newscast. She proves difficult to pin down in her Q&A — even as Marin asks her about blaming Mayor Richard Daley — but it is strangely invigorating just to see a newsmaker on the set. The water problem, after all that discussion, gets 30 seconds midway through, and with no live shot from the scene.
There is a feature from Weigel on an ebullient retiring high school basketball coach, but Weigel’s sportscast gets only about a minute, about 40 percent of the standard time. Ditto for the essentials-only weather report. There are no “teases,” the anchor-read promises of upcoming stories, and, in general, the newscast treats viewers like sentient human beings.
The broadcast will get generally, though not overwhelmingly, positive reviews from this writer, in the Tribune, and TV critic Phil Rosenthal in the Sun-Times. If anything, the critics seemed to want a little more.
Viewers will tune in, guiding WBBM this Monday night to its first second-place finish since November and its best viewership number since the previous February. It wasn’t the kind of huge audience that Marin’s farewell broadcast at WMAQ drew, but it was something solid for a third-place station to build on.
Harder will be Day Two and all the days to follow, an observation Marin offers even before knowing that on Day Two she would have to set aside emotion to report on the death of her friend Bob Collins in a plane crash.
After the inaugural broadcast is all over, after the post-show party treats of Chianti and Italian beef sandwiches in a hallway outside the studio, Flannery is exuberant.
The 20-year WBBM veteran has seen the glories of the Bill and Walter era, when his topic, politics, would provoke minutes-long round-table discussions on the air. And he has seen the tabloid years, when politics was deemed unimportant.
After his part of the newscast was done, Flannery says, he watched the three 10 p.m. competitors side by side. He heard that the other two had led with the flood, and he saw their sports and weather segments start and end almost simultaneously.
The contrast between the stations was “so startling,” he says, his eyes glistening with excitement. “We dropped out of the conga line. We’re doing the merengue.”
