DOING LOCAL NEWS

BY NEIL HICKEY

A television news director in Charlotte, North Carolina, peers darkly into a computer screen that is delivering bad tidings about the ratings of his news programs. "That's brutal," he moans. "It's almost like not even being on the air." Later, we observe him agonizing about the effects of ratings pressure on the quality of his newscasts, and about how to buttress the morale of a newsroom that's struggling to do honorable journalism while satisfying the station's new owners' desire for larger audiences.

For nine months during 1999, a New York camera crew took up residence at WCNC-TV in Charlotte and -- like an invisible guest at a tumultuous family dinner -- watched and listened. The crew also trailed WCNC's reporters into Charlotte's streets and official buildings, and to fires and homicide scenes. The result: more than 300 hours of of videotape, distilled into a landmark, five-hour documentary series called Local News to be seen on PBS over five successive Tuesdays starting October 9. Nothing quite like it has been tried before. For the first time, the agony and the ecstasy (more agony, by far, than ecstasy) of covering local news for television is in plain, unmediated view: the two-edged struggle to climb out of the ratings cellar while holding fast to decent journalism standards; the collective mood swings of a news staff as it adjusts to new leadership. More engrossing than the 1987 film Broadcast News, the series is hard fact, not fiction -- real people painfully wrestling with how to cover the news honorably, right before your eyes.

In March 1998, a newly hired news director, thirty-eight-year-old Keith Connors -- soft-spoken, professorial, a hardened television news professional -- arrived at WCNC, where the newscasts were barely showing a pulse in the ratings. The Belo company of Dallas had recently bought the station and was determined that its newscast be number one instead of a distant third. Then in April 1999, documentarians from Lumiere Productions in New York came with Belo's permission to videotape virtually anything they wanted. Calvin Skaggs, a Lumiere executive, told cjr they chose WCNC because Connors was "really trying to do capital-J journalism" and because Charlotte, the second-fastest-growing city in the U.S., was off the beaten track; and because a pending desegregation trial involving the busing of 70,000 children to achieve racial balance in public schools was about to galvanize the community.

The newsroom staff feared for their jobs as the new owner took the reins. "They thought that some of us who were already there might not deliver excellence," recalls Sterlin Benson Webber, the station's education reporter. "That was an assumption that cost us some very good people. Around the time the documentary was being made, I felt I was on a very slippery slope and that my future was in peril" -- not because her work wasn't up to par but because she was part of the old regime. "I was just kind of sitting there holding onto my desk. I loved what I did and hoped I wouldn't be a casualty of change. It was one of the most difficult years of my life. I used to go home and talk to my husband about it, and cried occasionally."

Producer Wanda Johnson Stokes is heard in the series wondering about the new owner's intentions: "I believe this station will be a major contender," she says. "What scares me is the way they're going to get there."

We observe close up, in cinéma vérité format, how the management team attempts to "get there" as Connors and his staff deal with a rich supply of dramatic news stories during the nine months of Lumiere's filming:
Days after the Columbine massacre, in which twelve Colorado high school children died, a bomb threat panics Charlotte schools. WCNC's news staff is seen struggling to report all the verifiable facts without causing a stampede of parents to round up their children.

The murder of an eight-year-old child triggers a newsroom crisis as the staff competes to be on the air first with the most information, but agonizes about reporting everything it has learned from private sources lest that information compromise the police investigation. And they're troubled about the rectitude of interviewing kids who were friends of the victim. A WCNC cameraman confides: "To go and stick a camera in their face . . . I think it's tacky. I do it because it's my job." He's a man genuinely unhappy over what his station sometimes does to compete and win ratings points.

An angry delegation of African-Americans confronts Connors and the station's general manager when Beatrice Thompson, a veteran of twenty-two years in the city, is eased out of her reporting job in favor of younger, less knowledgeable hires. (Headline in The Charlotte Observer: tv reporter claims wcnc guilty of age, race and sex bias. Pickets brandish signs outside the station: "We Support Beatrice Thompson," "Racism!," "Don't Watch WCNC.") "I don't know that I fit in with what consultants are telling them the public wants," Thompson tells the camera. "I'm in the way. They're not sure what to do with me. This town is not just a stop on the résumé. This is my home." She's deeply concerned that television news managers who did not live through civil rights struggles can't fully understand issues of race. TV news is a business, she acknowledges. "But it's not a license to make money. The public has a stake in this." She did not get her job back.

Racial passions rise to the surface as white parents force a retrial of Charlotte's famous 1971 busing decision. Reporter Webber, who is African-American, strives daily to tell the story without being inflammatory, and without appearing to support the black parents. Interviewed by cjr in July, she recalled how emotions flared between blacks and whites during that period, and how she struggled to choose her words judiciously in reporting the developing story, lest she be responsible for opening old wounds.

Morale issues pervade Local News. Wanda Stokes, a six-year veteran producer at the station, resigns after being passed over for a higher job. "I've tried to move up in management twice, and have failed," she says. "I really wanted to ask why, but I didn't." She's not interested in a network job, preferring to remain in the Carolinas where "the people know that I am genuine."

Reporter Mike Redding spends nine days on the North Carolina coast covering a violent hurricane and the resulting floods. When he returns exhausted, mentally and physically, to the Charlotte studios he is quickly assigned a trivial local story he has no interest in. "There's nothing worse than doing a story you don't even think should be done," he complains to the camera.

Redding is fearlessly candid to the documentary makers about his assessment of television news. "News is always a frustrating mix between what we would like to cover and what we think would draw numbers," he says. "You can effectively judge a sitcom by ratings. But when you judge news, are you judging it by entertainment values? Do people watch the news because they like the personalities and being entertained by the eye candy?" Stations should scrap ratings for news, he thinks, and let reporters tell the stories they believe are important. "There's always that tension. You feel it in our newsroom. All day long in every decision that's made, there's a push and pull between wanting to do a high-quality job and needing to absolutely cover the stuff that people will watch."

Keith Connors in a morose moment decides that if television news is only about ratings, then the profession is a "shallow, vacant, meaningless pursuit." There are days, he says, "when you just want to bang your head against the wall." But then an effort like the station's hurricane coverage suddenly makes him proud. "Every day is a war," he says. "Every story matters, every minute matters, every newscast matters."

One particular newscast matters enormously, but brings Connors to his lowest ebb. He's decided to reformat the 5 and 5:30 p.m. news broadcasts into a single, fluid hour, allowing longer, more in-depth stories. On the debut evening, everything goes wrong. A new computer system fails. Tapes jam. Reports from the field never make it to air. General meltdown. "It was an abomination," Connors tells his top aides angrily in a closed meeting. "The worst telecast we've had," one of his colleagues agrees.

Then, he goes before the entire staff in the newsroom and, in an effort to salvage whatever scraps of their morale he can, takes the full blame for the disaster on himself. "It's entirely my fault," he tells them. He'd overreached, attempting too much too soon, placing too great a burden on the team's resources. Asked about that moment by cjr, Connors says: "Sometimes the group needs a carrot and sometimes they need a stick. That was an instance where they certainly didn't need a stick. They were beating themselves up so badly as it was. I wanted them to know they hadn't let me down."

The WCNC news team has recovered from that misadventure.

They're still in third place (as of mid-August), but closing in on second, and have won important awards for excellence from the Radio-Television News Directors Association and other trade groups. But morale needs constant monitoring, Connors says in retrospect. There's no way to keep everybody happy. Be fair and honest with the staff; set a course, explain it, tell why decisions are made. Give people the opportunity and the resources to do good work.

Does Connors regret agreeing to cooperate with the public-TV documentarians, especially since they captured him in moments of vulnerability and desperation? It will have been worth it, he says, if the series starts people talking about the serious problems afflicting local TV news; and if it helps bring back some of the millions of viewers nationwide who have abandoned local news because those programs don't speak to them, or address their interests, or treat the issues that they think are important.

Reminded that Lumiere's cameras captured 300 hours of himself and his co-workers in action -- much of it intimate, painful, revealing -- he wonders what the producers plan to do with those 295 hours of outtakes.

"I hope they'll burn them," he jokes.
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Neil Hickey is CJR's editor at large.