You don’t see it in the nightly broadcasts, but these are critical times for “The 10 O’Clock News” at WBBM-Ch. 2.
The station’s Carol Marin-led experiment in a smarter, classier nighttime newscast has the corporate gun to its head.
Nobody in authority will say it so bluntly, but if the severely ratings-challenged 7-month-old “10 O’Clock News” doesn’t draw more viewers, and soon, it will have a hard time reaching its first birthday in February, or even the end of this calendar year.
That would be a crushing blow to hopes for local-TV-news re-form nationwide and to Chicago viewers in particular. Even if WBBM’s newscast isn’t always the city’s best on a given night (and it often is), it is always the most interesting, the one that looks and thinks and acts a little differently, daring to ignore the crime-health-weather-and-sports playbook.
Pulling the plug in the near future, something that the station’s owners at CBS have the power to do, would not prove anything about local news except that, once again, the people in charge of it have the patience of houseflies. Building ratings momentum in TV news is like heating up the ocean, and it is unrealistic to expect the new broadcast to overcome in eight months the news viewer alienation plan that Channel 2 spent the 1990s acting out.
“I don’t have any white flags in my office,” Marin says. “Very few things in television, especially news, are runaway blockbusters. They take time to build, and part of that is building trust with your viewers, that you mean what you say and are doing what you said you’d do.”
Asked how much patience she thinks CBS management will have with a newscast that is not producing ratings, Marin says, “I can’t forecast that. All I know is that we operate in the same manner. . . . Our meetings at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. still deal with, `What is the news?'”
And the operating theory, she says, is not to soften up or to start chasing ratings, but to “let the news dictate what the newscast is going to be.”
For the most part, the on-air product suggests there is more truth than spin in that assertion. There are more “teases,” brief previews of upcoming stories, now than in the early days, but they are neither relentless nor shameless, as in the station’s old tabloid days.
More important, a close viewing of last week’s newscasts showed no backsliding to the kind of format formula you see in virtually every other local newscast in America. Health news was not automatically accorded a place in the newscast. Weather, in the absence of anything unusual in the air, was still getting 90 seconds or less. There was almost no crime news and the lead story one night was about the judge in the Wen Ho Lee case upbraiding U.S. prosecutors, hardly the kind of thing a news consultant would tell you to start with if chasing ratings were the goal.
And there was the kind of tight, intelligent writing you rarely find elsewhere. Take this opening from last Thursday, the night of the fire in Commonwealth Edison transformers and more developments in the gas-company mercury scandal: “Tonight, for consumers, what seems like public utility hell. Com Ed, Nicor, Peoples Gas — all of them in the news, two of them under fire, one of them on fire today.”
There is meat in those words, cleverness used to convey the real sense of exasperation people are feeling. A tough-minded first sentence means nothing, of course, without backup, and Channel 2 provided it, first with two solid reports on the mercury-gas meter problems, then two more on the downtown fire that first explained it, then cast it against the backdrop of Com Ed’s woes from last summer.
Rivals have derided the Marin broadcast as “PBS on CBS,” and, like its solo anchor, it is certainly not loose-limbed, even a little stodgy. But if invoking PBS means there is an aura of respect for the viewer’s brainpower, and a willingness to do things like interview Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan live about the mercury issue, then it’s a fair comment.
Still, even as quality remains high, the survival omens are not good. The station’s two top news managers left over the summer in the wake of May sweeps ratings down 13 percent from already low numbers the previous May.
Both said their departures — the general manager to teach and run a station in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the news director to direct news at two Seattle stations — were for personal reasons, but you surely don’t leave a TV station in the nation’s third-largest market for smaller cities if you feel you have the full confidence of your bosses.
In the aftermath of the changes, votes of confidence have not been forthcoming from CBS headquarters, where Marin’s old nemesis, Joel Cheatwood, is now a power.
“I want to keep the newscast intact for as long as the new general manager wants to keep it intact,” the ultimate boss, CBS-TV stations President John Severino, told the Tribune in July. (He is out of the country now and could not be reached for this article.)
The new general manager at WBBM, Walt DeHaven, is a man with scant news or Chicago experience. And his few public remarks have been more like cattle prods than back pats.
DeHaven calls it a “very noble venture,” but also says, “We need to talk about internally what if any changes we need to make.”
And ratings, he says, “most certainly have to improve. Everybody involved in the product knows that the report card and final mandate is the support of the viewers.
“We need to fill the news director’s post and then really at that point sit down and set a course.”
After Pat Costello’s departure as news director in August, the obvious step affirming the direction of the newscast would have been to promote assistant news director Danice Kern, a respected Chicago news veteran and Marin’s longtime friend and philosophical soul mate.
Marin treads carefully in talking about the situation, but she does say, “The newsroom, if it was going to take a vote, would vote for Danice in a second. She holds it together intellectually, spiritually.”
That the Kern appointment hasn’t happened yet makes it seem unlikely. Perhaps more ominous is the news that Cheatwood is involved, at least to the degree of being invited to submit names of candidates for the open position.
Cheatwood is the one-time boy wonder of tabloid television news who has revived his career after the ratings, public-relations and financial debacle he helped engineer at WMAQ-Ch. 5 in Chicago.
He and then-General Manager Lyle Banks, you’ll recall, put their heads together and brought in Jerry Springer to be a WMAQ news commentator in May 1997. Marin and co-anchor Ron Magers fled the station, and ratings plummeted at second-place Channel 5, though not below the perennially third-place Channel 2.
Cheatwood eventually left town, resurfacing first in Philadelphia and now as the news head at WCBS-TV in New York and the top news executive for CBS-owned stations, a kind of “consultant” to their operations.
Marin had assurances from departed GM Hank Price that Cheatwood would not be consulted in Chicago. With Price gone, DeHaven says Cheatwood can submit news director names, but Cheatwood will not conduct interviews and the final decision will be DeHaven’s.
“Chicago has a legacy,” DeHaven says. “Joel is a curious part of that. We need to make our own way.
“Is he going to have a specific say or a definitive corporate say? No, not at all.”
Clearly, the ratings are not pleasing to anybody except competitors. After an initial burst and steady stream of local and national publicity unseen in local news since the Springer debacle, better things were expected.
The numbers were up for February sweeps, but fell again in May, when the newscast again found itself trailing not only WLS and WMAQ, but “Friends” and “Simpsons” reruns on WGN-Ch. 9 and WFLD-Ch. 32.
In August, when the “Survivor” finale on CBS set a new record for summertime viewing, Channel 2’s news did not even win that night; viewers, as they have habitually done for more than a decade, tuned over to ratings leader WLS.
Marin says she figures the station has now lost those viewers who were fans of former anchors Lester Holt and Linda MacLennan and their more traditional broadcast, and now is essentially building back up from scratch.
Chicago broadcast veterans point to the patience it took for the city’s last two major efforts that emphasized quality, rather than personality, to succeed. The Bill Kurtis-Walter Jacobson pairing at WBBM in the 1970s and 1980s nearly had its plug pulled before it started drawing big numbers. And the Marin-Magers pairing built its solid second-place audience very gradually, over some eight years.
Then there is the question of whether the audience for a newscast emphasizing a calmer, somewhat higher tone can be attracted any longer to TV news.The 10 p.m. viewership numbers went down across the board throughout the last decade, and general managers cheer now when they manage not to lose viewers.
The numbers they look at most closely are those during the “sweeps” ratings periods, when local numbers are parsed more closely by Nielsen Media Research for the purpose of setting advertising rates.
The next major sweep is in November, and the best bet seems to be that this November will be do or die for Marin and Co.
She made it clear in February that she has language in her contract protecting her from having to front a newscast that does not meet her idea of good journalism.
So even if corporate CBS and/or DeHaven wanted to change horses or formats right away, even if Cheatwood is itching to take revenge on Marin for her primary role in the affaire Springer, they surely would not risk another public-relations blowup.
On the other hand, if ratings again do not improve in November, management would have a somewhat graceful exit strategy, and another chapter in the depressing recent history of local television news could be written.
The problem there, however, is that WBBM would again be asking viewers to adjust to something new, and its helter-skelter news strategy through the 1990s is a big reason the station’s rating hole got deep enough for it to even take a chance on the Marin format.
The station had better have a better idea in place, something that does not seem to be in ready supply in television news these days.
Indeed, if you are the manager who sandbags the Marin experiment, launched to great fanfare and national support, you are left, like the couple at the end of “The Graduate,” asking yourself, Now what?
