Bad news for the blow-drier business: There are some observers of television who say that, at a time of tremendous news-anchor flux in Chicago, anchors don’t matter so much anymore.
The evidence is more suggestive than conclusive. Some top veterans have been let go in (other) big cities. Anchor salaries, while rising, aren’t keeping pace with pay raises in other TV-news disciplines. And the splintering of the TV audience and general decline in news viewership and advertising suggests, logically, that no one person is as valuable as he or she used to be, especially at a time when stations have less money to throw around.
This dethroning seems to be strongest in smaller markets, like Springfield-Champaign-Decatur, where relatively well-paid veterans at a couple of stations have recently been pushed aside, and at stations that aren’t market leaders and try to get by with budget anchors.
But is it really a trend? Can we expect to see news anchors shopping for ties from the clearance racks at Marshall’s instead of the Armani boutique at Marshall Field’s?
Don Hickman wonders. He took early retirement from Springfield’s WICS early in 2001, despite being a community “icon,” in his word. He says he chose not to fight a management that “pretty much wanted me out because of my age [63 then], and they wanted to unload the high-salary people.”
Dwindling, he says, is “the day of the million-dollar anchors.”
But “I would not feel real badly about news anchors and whether or not they’re going to be able to put clothes on their backs and feed their kids,” says Bob Papper, a Ball State University telecommunications professor who conducts an annual salary survey for the Radio and Television News Directors Association. “There isn’t widespread trouble. But some of them may have to give up those country-club membership dues.”
Relevance of Big Three
Certainly, this is a tough story to sell about national TV, where the Big Three network anchors proved precisely how relevant they are in the post-Sept. 11 coverage and where CNN is trying to rebuild its ratings by hiring stars such as Connie Chung after years of pretending anchors were interchangeable.
“CNN was born out of the proposition that it had nothing or little to do with the people, and everything to do with the content,” says former WMAQ-Ch. 5 and WBBM-Ch. 2 anchor Carol Marin, “and CNN is now searching the four corners for the best-known faces.”
It’s only a marginally easier story pitch in Chicago, which continues to have not only million-dollar anchors but a weatherman (Tom Skilling on WGN-Ch. 9) and a sports guy (Mark Giangreco on WLS-Ch. 7) who are widely believed to make that much annually. Behind such salaries, generally, are reams of research showing that these people are audience “drivers,” personalities who bring viewers to a station, says the agent and talk-show host Joel Weisman, who represents Giangreco and Skilling.
On the verge of change
Moreover, the city is on the verge of significant change at its three biggest network stations that seems to suggest the news anchor still matters very much. It’s a turnover that may provide Chicago’s biggest test of the notion since the Jerry Springer debacle at WMAQ led to longtime anchors Marin and Ron Magers fleeing that station along with tens of thousands of viewers.
Of the three, the potentially seismic change is at the longtime market leader, WLS-Ch. 7, where lead male anchor John Drury — most definitely a “driver” — is retiring from the role in early March, to be replaced by Magers.
Magers is not humorless on the air, but he is not jocular and grandfatherly like Drury, either, and the question is whether Drury devotees will warm up to Magers’ more urbane persona and justify the ABC-owned station’s more-than-four-year investment in keeping Magers around as a second-teamer.
At distant third place WBBM-Ch. 2, Antonio Mora, hired from ABC’s “Good Morning America,” will likely assume his lead male duties before mid-March, sources said, perhaps even before his partner-to-be, Tracy Townsend, returns from maternity leave.
Mora represents the CBS-owned station’s biggest investment in an anchor since 2000’s underfunded Carol Marin experiment failed to boost ratings. Yet no one — except perhaps the notoriously itchy WBBM management, which is also building a fancy new studio — is expecting Mora to have much immediate impact on ratings.
And at WMAQ these days, while veteran Warner Saunders is recovering from cancer surgery with no return date set, his apparent heir Mark Suppelsa is filling the role. Saunders, along with partner Allison Rosati and an admirably patient management team, performed the unenviable task of rebuilding the station’s ratings after the Springer implosion.
“Making an anchor change is always risky,” says Chris Tuohy, a broadcast journalism professor at Syracuse University and former Cleveland TV news executive. “You can do all the focus groups in the world, but you never really know how it’s going to pan out until a couple of months down the road.”
Magers, 57, is generally regarded as one of the best local anchors in the country, smooth under pressure, respectful of the news he delivers and likable without seeming needy. But Chicago broadcast experts wonder whether the appeal to yuppies he demonstrated during close to two decades at WMAQ will translate to the broader WLS audience.
“When you replace a lion like John Drury you cannot make any mistakes,” says Jennifer Schulze, the former news director at WGN-Ch. 9. “You can offend an audience and it will go away and not come back.”
Even Magers, who vows to “not change anything,” acknowledges he doesn’t know what makes anchor and audience click. “A lot of people I didn’t think were particularly good went on to have great success,” and vice versa, he says.
“I’ve been anchoring news in television since 1966, and we’ve been trying to figure this out since the first day: Do anchors matter? It’s the question that was forever asked.
“One version I’ve come to accept is that having a good anchor doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win or do the best news, but rarely will you win or do the best news without a good anchor.”
Beware the transitions
And rarely does the audience accept a bad transition. The definition of that — and a case study in the importance of anchors both as personalities and symbols of a news operation’s values — was seen when Magers and Marin left WMAQ in 1997.
Public outrage was palpable over then-management trying to saddle the duo with tabloid host Springer as a May-sweeps-stunt commentator. Ratings dropped throughout that tumultuous May, then again for the November sweeps (six months after Marin-Magers were gone), then again in February, to the point where they were more than 25 percent below the previous February.
To his credit, Larry Wert, the general manager brought in from Chicago radio to clean up the mess, showed exceptional patience after his predecessors, he says, “miscalculated the value of the anchors as the most significant part of the image of this news organization.”
Comfort and familiarity
Proving the theory that an audience’s comfort and familiarity can count for as much as great talent, Wert stuck by Saunders and Rosati, who had been installed in a hurry by the Springer regime so that the angered audience would at least have recognizable faces to look at.
He has been rewarded with a slow buildup and, last November, with a near-tie with WLS during the sweeps period.
And no doubt pleasing his corporate owners, he did this with anchors who, observers agree, are not in the city’s top salary tier — although the time is likely coming where he’ll have to pay up as Wert touts the station’s strong demographic ratings.
Paying anchors less money at No. 2 stations, or for clear secondary roles, is one trend that a number of observers think will continue.
“Salaries of long-term and very successful anchors are going to keep going up,” says Ball State’s Papper. “But just being long-term probably isn’t going to be enough. And if you’re at the No. 2 or 3 station, I suspect it’s going to be tougher. There are certain cases around the country where anchors have been told that if they wanted to maintain employment, they had to take a cut in pay.”
A generational turnover
The Drury baton-passing typifies, in one way, a national trend that may be causing a temporary jolt to the status of anchors, says CBS “Evening News” executive producer Jim Murphy.
“There’s a generational turnover going on in news,” says Murphy, who worked in local news in New York and also spent four years in Chicago beginning in 1988 as supervising producer of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s movie-review show. “That generation who became big stars in the 1970s is either retiring or being fired in the last five years and the coming five to 10.”
So, generally, new and cheaper talent comes in, he says, but “if somebody takes over the market the way Drury and the team at WLS did, the money’s going to have to go there.”
The Magers situation is, of course, different, because he was established in the market, hired both as a potential Drury heir and as insurance against someone else in town grabbing him.
Trying to come out even
But now he finds himself in the unusual situation of being, not a turnaround artist, as in previous new jobs, but a hold-on artist: “What a wonderful story it would be for me to come out even at the end of the day after succeeding John Drury,” Magers says.
Marin, now a little removed from the fray, says she is, “strangely,” rooting for any and all new anchors: “Ron and I are longtime partners. I’m rooting for that. I still have deep friendships over at 5. And at Channel 2, I loved being here.
“I want them all selfishly to succeed because I want local news to succeed. I don’t want them all to be some dinosaur wiping tar off their paws.”
