In 1998, Jerry Springer’s confrontational, chair-throwing TV talk show was a sensation. It aired on WAGA at 4pm, opposite Oprah. For a ratings period or two, it actually had a larger Atlanta audience than Oprah. Like it or not, it was an effective lead-in to WAGA’s 5pm news.
But Springer’s show was lowbrow and controversial. It triggered a gazillion phone calls every week, most of them griping about the content. Those at WAGA who had to actually speak to those angry callers couldn’t disagree. Truth was, the Springer show drove WAGA’s managers crazy. They wanted nothing more than to get rid of this embarrassment, but couldn’t. They’d created a monster.
This comes to mind as I stumbled across this piece WAGA produced for its 50th anniversary in 2008. It was based on a story Andi Larner and I produced about WAGA’s 40th anniversary ten years earlier. WAGA took the essence of the 1998 story, added some fireworks to the tail end of it, and reconstituted it as a 50th anniversary piece. They apparently played the piece at the 2008 Emmy Awards. (It’s worth noting that I’d left WAGA twelve months earlier, and am delighted they continued to recycle my work.)
I knew about the station’s uneasy relationship with the Springer show. Despite that knowledge, I opted to include a three-second chair-throwing clip of Springer during the 40th anniversary piece. It was a bit of ill-advised mischief on my part, yes. But I thought it was a fair snapshot of the TV industry’s then-current direction, a sharp contrast from its past. If the TV station runs Springer for sixty minutes every day, who could object to three seconds of it in my story?
(A year earlier, Andi Larner, photog Eddie Cortes and I produced a piece called “Jerry Springer Happy Hour” at a bar on Tybee Island. The bar now known as Benny’s played the Springer show for patrons imbibing in cut-rate drinks. It was quite the interactive experience. The story won an Emmy. I seem to recall my ad-libbed acceptance speech including a line that said “this story had no cultural or literary value whatsoever. So, thanks.”)
As the lovely Ms. Larner was tweaking the 40th anniversary piece in a post room, General Manager Gene McHugh walked past in the hallway.
Understandably interested in the story about his TV station, he asked if he could see the piece. Larner hit “play.” McHugh liked what he saw, up to the end. “Take that out,” he said curtly, referring to the Springer moment. “But it’s just a three-second shot,” I began to object. McHugh, a normally affable and easygoing guy, made it clear the order was non-negotiable.
The Springer moment disappeared from the 1998 version of the piece. Within a year or so, McHugh had jettisoned Springer’s show from the 4pm slot. It’s now on WATL late afternoons, safely tucked away from any newscast.
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In other retro news, check out this Pecanne Log post, where Christa posts four pieces of promo video from Atlanta TV from the mid-70s to mid-80s.
A memorial service for Jim Axel will be held Sunday February 14 at 3pm. The location is Living Grace Lutheran Church, 1812 Cooledge Rd., Tucker 30084.
Axel, who worked at WAGA for 34 years, died in November after a battle with cancer.
WAGA’s obit is here. Axel was known for many things — chiefly, as a newsman with a lot of integrity. He was also known for wearing a red tie on the air nearly every day he worked. Attendees at the memorial are encouraged to dress accordingly, says longtime WAGA production guy Rodney Barber.
Many of us remember when the Fox News Channel launched in the mid 1990s, an upstart cable news competitor to the vaunted CNN.
Turns out, the upstart had deeper news roots than CNN, despite CNN’s fifteen-year head start on cable.
Fox Movietone was a newsreel producer, back when TV didn’t exist but motion picture houses still played a campy, prototypical version of today’s (still campy, I know) TV news.
This dawned on me after reading a blog called Feeding the Beast. It’s the same place where I found that cool photo, the one showing the hat-and-suited Fox News guy hand-cranking a camera on a rickety wooden tripod, perched on the shoals of a river chatting it up with a fisherman,
It’s the same place you’d find behind-the-scenes info on other historical relics. Perhaps you already knew that an Army bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. A newsreel photog, impersonating a doctor, actually made it up to the crash area with a camera. And he shot some still-disturbing film of the aftermath.
The blogger behind it is a still / video enthusiast / history buff named Amanda Emily. Recently, she posted some fascinating 1970s material depicting a lost cause, an ongoing debate positing that film was superior to ENG.
Unlike the photos on this blog, many of Emily’s photos are high resolution and can be viewed in full size. The Fox News photo, for example — you can distinguish the logo easily. Go there and see for yourself. Then click the photo for the larger version.
And who wouldn’t want to view this 1957 News Car in glorious high resolution? Click here, then click the photo.
Notice the newsman’s use of the two-way radio. Old school, right? Maybe not. Especially if your 21st century Atlanta TV station is now forcing photographers to sign contracts accepting liability for accidents in company vehicles when the driver is at fault as a result of talking or texting on a cell phone.
Perhaps it’s time to dig out those mothballed two-way radio devices. Is frequency KFH-743 still available? “Doctor, is that you?”
Feeding the Beast is linked on the blogroll to the right under “media sites.”
The man, the suit, the haircut, the legend: Tom Snyder
Tom Snyder, the news anchor turned host of the long-defunct “Tomorrow” show on NBC, would occasionally get asked about writing. He would famously reply: “I can’t write. But I can write 90 seconds of television.”
Snyder’s answer was a snarky assessment of TV news as much as his own talent. It also overlooked the genuinely thoughtful writers of TV news: Charles Osgood, David Brinkley, Bob Dotson and Tom Petit (who? I loved Petit in the 80s) on a national level; Marc Pickard, Jon Shirek, Jaye Watson, Jerry Carnes, Jeff Dore, Randy Travis and a few others locally.
For the rest of us, see the video above.
When I worked at a TV station that valued every manner of so-called breaking news, and boilerplate surveillance-video “exclusives,” (“take a good look at this man…”) I often leaned on formulaic writing. With every deadline seemingly a few minutes away, and the stories mere variations of the story told the day before, the formula worked. Nobody called me on it, because the stories were clean, understandable and made slot. My formula included the occasional offbeat adjective or adverb, which gave the writing a bit of faux creativity. But I knew it was formulaic.
Writer's bloc: Ross McLaughlin, Marc Pickard, Chris Sweigart, Jennifer "Jaye" Watson, Shawn Hoder, Jon Shirek, Bill Liss, Jerry Carnes (taking a knee) and your blogger - WXIA
My position at WXIA has raised my game somewhat. The stories are more varied. The talent in the newsroom, writing-wise, is the best I’ve ever seen. But this blog also plainly showcases the limitations of my own writing talent, which seems to lean to the straightforward, with a decent grasp of basic high school grammar and spelling but little flourish. Every morning, I wake up irritated that I can’t write with the elegance of Shirek or Pickard, or with the madcap observational ability of this guy.
I’m now struggling a bit, writing-wise, with some specials that will air in February. The subject matter calls for new formulas.
I’ll figure it out. But my inspiration won’t come from Charlie Brooker or Tom Snyder, though both men are obviously inspired in their own way.
Snyder, especially, for the haircut alone.
Two things about this story.
First, it illustrates how tone deaf folks can be. Jeremy Porter seems like a sensible, ambitious guy. His vision is interesting: He wants to build an environmentally-friendly motorsports park in undeveloped Dawson County. He wants customers when it opens this fall.
But he and his PR folks came up with an odd promotion: Free half day passes for violators of Georgia’s new superspeeder law. It was offensive to law-abiding motorists yet Porter had trouble understanding that. By the end of our conversation, I’m still not sure he understood it.
Second: The story construction reflects the fact that this was a deadline-crunching, last-minute production. Photographer Bill Jones and I returned from Dawson County in rush hour. Jones had about twenty-five minutes to edit it. The story consisted of three short voice tracks, a standup and a series of soundbites.
Porter told me that he and his publicist came up with the idea because they were “overdue” to issue a new press release. Sometimes, the best publicity is no publicity.
John Gerard, WXIA
When I started working at WXIA, I learned I’d be working alongside a guy called “Commuter Dude.” That would be his on-air name. He’d cover viewer gripes about roads and such. He’d wear a reflective vest on camera.
“Sounds kitschy,” I thought. As a supervisor told me about the Commuter Dude, I fought mightily to suppress a skeptically raised eyebrow.
Now I’m a fan. When the Commuter Dude’s stuff appears on my TV set, I’ll stop and pay attention.
I’m especially a fan of this as an interesting alternative to the drumbeat of mayhem and breaking “news” that remains the common currency of local TV. Maybe the Commuter Dude isn’t covering an issue in my neighborhood. But whatever its location, I can relate. I can’t relate to garden-variety fires and traffic wrecks because they all sound and look the same.
The Commuter Dude is a guy named John Gerard. Gerard is a low-key, self-effacing guy to whom the word “dude” is a natural description (not in the classic Western sense, but in the “hey dude” 2000s sense). Gerard mostly shoots his own video on an eggplant-cam. He has an abundance of material to cherrypick from his inbox / tip jar.
But his job isn’t easy. Covering hiccups in signage, traffic lights, traffic engineering and asphalt can turn quickly into one-note storytelling. Gerard strives mightily to avoid that, and succeeds more often than not.
Gerard does so by exploiting characters who gripe about “craters,” as he typically calls potholes. This guy was amusing because he referred to watching WXIA during the “dark ages” of weatherman Johnny Beckman. (Many would argue that those free-spending years were actually an age of enlightenment, but I’m not going to quibble…)
This woman was amusing because she kept referring to Gerard as the “computer dude.”
And in this piece, Gerard actually went to court with a motorist who’d been ticketed for disregarding a “no left turn” sign that had disappeared from an intersection. The court threw out the case. Gotta like any TV news goon who actually helps right a wrong. Gerard does this stuff all the time.
Gerard’s involvement in fixing trouble spots results in a lot of first-person reporting and writing. This can be an awkward device. It would be obnoxious in a more ego-driven personality. Gerard isn’t much of a chest-thumper, thankfully.
Which is part of the reason why I’m a fan.
The Daily Show has become a go-to for exposing misleading video in the TV news biz. When Fox News transposed rally footage in Washington, showing a larger crowd than actually attended, the Daily Show nailed them.
Yet the Daily Show does its own sleight-of-hand in editing a comedy bit featuring footage shot by a Weather Channel photog depicting the Atlanta showflake-and-ice event earlier this month.
Jon Stewart shows video recorded in Midtown at the intersection of Monroe and Virginia, and questions why the photog didn’t “throw down some rock salt” instead of doing his job.
Note how Stewart’s video editors deftly relocated the “look out!” warning so that it’s audible just a few milliseconds before the crash. Compare it to the actual Weather Channel video here, where the photog’s utterance is heard a full second earlier.
Stewart calls the warning “lame and quite late.” But the editing makes it seem later than it really is. Not by much. But, still. It’s doctored.
The comedy is solid. I’m still giggling like a schoolgirl at “the blimp’s on fire.”
But the conclusion is flawed. The photog had a natural reaction to what he was seeing, and did a far greater service to the community by documenting the icy roads than he would have done by throwing down rock salt, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in his grab-bag of photog equipment.
As for the sketchy edit:
Nailed ya, Daily Show! Oh, snap! It’s peanut butter jelly time!
(Uh, hello? Sorry, LAF. Comedy Central is an entertainment channel. The Daily Show isn’t a news organization. They doctor stuff all the time. Like the graphic you’ve put in the top of the post.)
Oh. Right. Never mind.
(I realize I’m a little late to the party with this. The Daily Show played this clip weeks ago. The LAF household seems to always have a two-week backlog of Daily Show episodes on the DVR…)
Secret Squirrel
Readers of this site have clamored for the return of “Winne Watch.”
OK, that would be a broad overstatement. The truth is, I miss it. I also suspect Mr. Winne, once again a respected competitor, doesn’t mind the attention. So here goes: The return of Winne Watch.
You’re welcome.
“J.J. was shot in the face at a fish fry on Father’s Day weekend.” – Mark Winne, WSB on December 18.
The story detailed the search for the guy who shot J.J. Drama points: √ (out of five possible.)
John Cater had been a freelance reporter at WXIA, WGCL and WSB. He died Tuesday; an unknown illness hospitalized him at Thanksgiving. An infection developed. He never shook it.
Talk about a life cut short. Cater was 32.
I didn’t know Cater. He made it into this site twice, once during his coverage of a Tea Party event; the other, for his coverage of the Botanical Garden accident. Both references were mostly complimentary.
Amani Channel reports that Cater attended last spring’s NABJ conference in Tampa. “Though I didn’t know him well, I’ll remember his wide smile, his positive outlook, and he was a true broadcast professional,” Channel writes in My Urban Report.
Last year Cater won an Emmy. In a memo to her staff Tuesday, WXIA news director Ellen Crooke wrote: “His joy and enthusiasm that night was wonderful to see. His mother wanted us all to know because she said he loved working in this market and he was very proud of his time at 11Alive.”
It had been two and a half years since I’d covered a killing. In this case, it was a shooting rampage, fatally injuring three people at Kennesaw’s Penske facility. “You’re on victims / family,” read the text message. It was inevitable. I’d worked five months at WXIA and had successfully avoided such stuff until Wednesday.
The desk had found the address of one of the victims who’d been shot dead by the gunman at Penske. We drove up to the house in an unmarked vehicle. A man in his thirties was working on his pickup truck in the driveway, the son of murder victim Van Springer.
Victim: Van Springer
Our car stopped. I walked up and introduced myself. He gave me a hard look. I was matter-of-fact: “Sorry for your loss. You know that this is news and we’re covering it. If you, or somebody in your family would like to talk to me, we can portray Mr. Springer as someone substantial. Right now, he’s a name on a list of victims.” My words sounded hollow to me. I could only imagine how they sounded to him.
He wasn’t buying. Some do, some don’t. Some victim families want to speak publicly about their loved ones, suddenly thrust in the news because they died horribly. Others react with anger, and the presence of the news media gives them an opportunity to lash out. I considered myself fortunate that my unsuccessful conversation with the gentleman was still civil.
“Before I go, may I ask to see a photo of Mr. Springer? It helps to give the victim a human face.” I’ve never mastered the spiel in such circumstances. I figure the less I say, the better.
The man’s gaze softened a bit. “Let me go ask my wife.” He disappeared into the house, then returned and said his wife would find a photo. As I stood on the sidewalk, a crew from WGCL appeared. Harry Samler walked up. I told Harry that the family wasn’t interested in talking to us, but was digging up a photo.
Then the man piped up: “If we talked to you, what would we say?” Samler and I took turns explaining that a few words describing their loved one would help convey the depth of loss sustained. “I realize that goes without saying. But it gives the story context when we know something about the victim and it comes directly from somebody who loved him.” Once again, the words seemed lacking. You’d think that a guy with my experience would have a rock-solid spiel memorized for such circumstances.
The wife emerged with a photo. She and her husband wanted to talk to us, she explained. But they wanted to discuss it first with the widow, who was making funeral arrangements. She suggested we check back a few hours later.
Then the mood shifted.
We returned a few hours later. Nobody was home. We parked a few houses away, waiting for the son and daughter-in-law to return.
A competitor drove up in a garish, brightly marked live truck and spotted our unmarked car. We spoke; the competitor lacked the photo of Mr. Springer. I spilled what I knew: The family was considering talking on TV, and had already provided us with a photo. They would probably return shortly.
(Why give such intel to a competitor? Because they saw us staking out the house, and would figure it out anyway. Plus, WGCL’s crew knew what I knew, so my info wasn’t “exclusive.” I knew and liked the reporter and photog, and I like Karma. Withholding such stuff would have made me secretive and squirrelly, and I’m not a big fan of such behavior when the info isn’t earth-shaking.)
A car drove up to the house. The competitor pulled up to the house, anxious because their deadline was approaching. Our car stayed back.
A man I hadn’t seen before appeared on the lawn with a cane. The reporter emerged from the competitor’s truck. The man began angrily waving his cane. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but the communication was clear: Leave us the hell alone. The son and daughter-in-law, who were so gracious to me, entered the house and said nothing. The competing reporter retreated to her live truck, which drove off. “That was rough,” the photog told me later.
This scenario is typical. Reporters must ask family members if they want to participate in stories about their murdered loved ones. Sometimes they are grateful for the opportunity to speak publicly about their loss. We won’t know until we ask.
Frequently, there is disagreement within the family. Almost always, the most emotional voices prevail. If one family member wants to lash out at the media, the other family members won’t stop them. They already have enough on their plate.
And it almost doesn’t matter how talented or experienced or aggressive or sensitive the reporter is. Because it’s the family’s call.
I finished that day with a dull headache. Comparatively, my pain was minor.
