Star School

It's a well-worn plot. The leading lady, suddenly unable to perform, yields the spotlight. An understudy gets her chance to show what she can do. The curtain goes up, and something clicks. A star is born.

For Juju Chang this was no Hollywood fantasy, and her stage wasn't on Broadway. It was in the Bronx in 1992, when Chang was assisting ABC correspondent Karen Burnes on a story about a local school. "It was just a nice, little, tiny piece for the morning news," she says. "At the last minute Karen was called off to follow Ross Perot. There were no other correspondents available. I called in and said, 'I've got the piece in the can. The story writes itself. Let me do it.' " She was given a green light.

 As it happens, the ABC corporate bigshots who are making things happen for Chang don't even recall her big break. So, technically, it wasn't her big break at all. But it was her first taste of network air, and she wanted more.

Her official big break has just begun, and to observe it is to get a feel for network-news star-making, circa 1995. After seven years at ABC, Chang, now twenty-nine, has been placed in a special "correspondent development" program with the intention that she become "a full-fledged network correspondent in the shortest amount of time possible," as Amy Entelis, ABC vice-president of talent, recruitment, and development, puts it. The official mission of the year-and-a-half-old program, Entelis says, is "to broaden the pool of people from which we can pick correspondents." The program is "minority-oriented," she adds, but, although Chang is a Korean-American and the other two current participants in the program are black women, it is not limited to minority group members. Entelis sees it as a "bridge" for people from various backgrounds with qualities useful to the network. For example, she says, if ABC wanted to make a medical correspondent out of a doctor, the network would put him or her through the program.

"You have to sound like a network correspondent. You have to look like a network correspondent," says Entelis. "You have to pull it off."

Such a program, with its hint of Hollywood style star-making, is relatively new. Neither NBC nor CNN has a program quite like ABC's, with a stated mission to produce on-air reporters, but CBS recently launched a minority reporter training program of its own. NBC last year began a ten-month "Assistant Producers Associates" program to train a multicultural group of recent college graduates in TV journalism. CNN's "Video Journalists" program, which has existed since the network's inception in 1980, is more an entry-level apprenticeship than a star machine. Network insiders do brag, however, about CNN's track record in recruiting correspondents of diverse backgrounds -- and from inside the company. The award-winning international correspondent Christiane Amanpour is a case in point.

The first reporter admitted to the ABC program, in the summer of 1993, was Michele Norris, a former Washington Post reporter who recently moved from covering the White House on weekends for the network to a regular beat covering Washington's regulatory agencies. The second, Karla Davis, who was admitted six months after Norris, was a reporter at a local TV station in Jacksonville, Florida, before ABC snatched her up and sent her to its San Francisco affiliate, KGO.

Chang, though, is something of a pet in the program, perhaps because of her long stint at the network. People keep telling her she's got it -- that nebulous combination of skill, good looks, and charm that all network news stars have. "It's one thing to say she's going to be a correspondent," says Holly Peterson, a producer at ABC News and a friend of Chang's. "It's another to say she's going to be the next Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer. People have told her that."

She has another essential quality -- ambition. Chang is a consummate professional who always dresses for success. "If I'm having a bad day, I might just walk into the office without my contact lenses, with my cowboy boots on and my hair in a ponytail," says Peterson. "Juju would never do that."

 Chang joined ABC in 1987, days after graduating from Stanford with a political science degree, and moved quickly from desk assistant to researcher. As a researcher, she was sent to Seoul, South Korea, for the 1988 Olympics, where her ability to speak Korean served her well. In 1990, she moved up to reportorial producer, a job that took her to Saudi Arabia during the gulf war. In 1992, just after the presidential elections, she was made a producer and spent three months in Little Rock putting together stories about President Clinton's transition to power.

 For a time in 1990, Chang spent her days off from ABC working as a reporter for News 12, a cable station on Long Island. She showed those tapes to Entelis and to others at the network, seeking feedback on how to become a better reporter. "She took the initiative," says Entelis. "If a person isn't driven, it doesn't happen."

About a year after Chang's Bronx tale, Entelis arranged for her to do six stories as a correspondent for ABC over eight months, including a news piece for Good Morning America on Woodstock '94. Entelis gives those stories mixed reviews, but she gives Chang high marks in some areas. "She has tremendous poise on the air. She has presence. She's a decent little writer, but she'll have to work on that."

Last November Chang joined Davis, her colleague in the correspondent development program, at KGO in the San Francisco area, where she had grown up. She'll probably stay there about a year covering "anything and everything" as a general-assignment reporter, according to KGO news director Milt Weiss, who spent a number of years in New York as a senior producer at World News Tonight before moving to California in 1990.

"I know how the network operates," says Weiss. "I know what it looks for in a correspondent." Weiss insists, however, that he won't single Chang out in any way or give her special attention he wouldn't give any new reporters. "But we'll certainly talk about what she does," he says.

Chang's progress will be monitored by Lennart Bourin, her coach back in New York. Bourin, who began working with her before she moved west, is the journalistic Henry Higgins of the correspondent development program. "When they decide on the fifth floor what they want to do and who they want to do it with, they call me," says Bourin. He critiques tapes, goes out on stories, and reviews the mechanics of being on the air with his students.

 "We had a session where I sat down in a room and went through a series of stand-ups," says Chang. "He coached me on ways to maintain a professional tone -- how to sound more authoritative, how to phrase things the right way." The network also provided Chang with voice lessons. "They teach you things like they teach singers," she says. The "la-la-la thing," she adds, was a bit disconcerting.

Bourin and others back in New York will critique Chang's San Francisco stories each week, says Entelis. "And three times a year he'll fly out there to coach her."

Bourin says that as far as he's concerned, the poise and presentation part of the program is far from the most important aspect of the training. "We're going to look at the writing," Bourin says. "We're going to look at the presentation. We're going to look at her journalism. I'm not a fashion consultant, and I'm not a voice coach. We're not in the business of making Kewpie dolls."

Kewpie dolls or no, it can't be denied that Chang has at least two extra qualities -- factors that have nothing to do with journalistic prowess or ability -- working for her: she looks ethnic, and she's beautiful.

It's never too hard to find healthy skepticism when one speaks of "stars" in TV news. Especially now, with a proliferation of newsmagazine shows expanding the need for on-air personalities, and with a line between news and entertainment that's blurrier than ever. (A major player in this TV-magazine world is NBC's thrice-weekly Dateline, whose executive producer, Neal Shapiro, is engaged to marry Chang.)

 A former top-level insider at ABC News who spoke off the record has skepticism to spare. She calls the network's star system "twisted." "There is a mentality there that 'we will make you a star.' You've got to have the look. It's important to have a look that's uniquely yours. Some of the people chosen to be star correspondents are just big, dumb empty suits."

"The people who are stars are picked because they're either good-looking or they have some quirky charisma," says Marlene Sanders, former correspondent at ABC and CBS News, and now an administrator at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. "Sam Donaldson is not really the movie-star type, but he's got pizzazz. If you're just a good reporter, forget about it."

Jon Katz, the media critic for New York magazine and a former producer at CBS News, says "warmth" and good looks are essential in the makeup of a network news star, particularly the anchor. "You can't be a network news anchor and be stupid; it's not the airhead versus the intellectual. But the person's journalistic ability does not come first," he says. "Before anything else, you have to be attractive and charismatic."

And conventional wisdom at the networks, says Katz, is that "men can get older and still be attractive. Women tend not to last as long." Men also have a greater license to be quirky, he adds.

The reasons for this are clear to Sanders, who co-wrote with Marcia Rock the book Waiting for Prime Time, which bemoaned sexism and ageism in network news. "Who creates a star? The people who run the news divisions. Who runs news divisions? Men," she says. "They go by their gonads."

And in 1995, it also helps to look ethnic, says Katz. "Asian-American personalities are very popular in television news."

The youth and beauty aspects of news stardom have been publicly scrutinized for years. A former local anchor, Christine Craft, brought the issue to the fore with her 1983 lawsuit against a Kansas City TV station alleging she was demoted to a reporter because she was "too old, too ugly, and not deferential enough to men." She lost the suit in 1986 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

"The networks basically use the Hollywood studio system in manufacturing stars," Katz says. "The way you make a news star is the same way you make a movie star: control their publicity, how they dress, where they go . . . the roles they're in."

At NBC, for example, the machinery seems to be at full throttle for Brian Williams, the handsome thirty-five-year-old who recently replaced network veteran Andrea Mitchell as chief White House correspondent. (She became the network's chief foreign-affairs correspondent.) "The White House is a key superstar beat, a high-profile beat," says Verne Gay, who reports on TV for New York Newsday. "They're putting him on a fast track to stardom." NBC honchos have said publicly that Williams is in line to succeed Tom Brokaw as anchor. Brokaw -- and CBS anchor Dan Rather -- covered the White House before claiming their anchor desks.

That kind of image building isn't foolproof; NBC's star machine has backfired a few times in recent years, most notably with the Today show. Deborah Norville was certainly groomed for stardom, but she was seen by the public as an evil home-wrecker when she replaced Jane Pauley as co-anchor in 1990.

But ABC is widely considered to have the most invested in big names. "They spend a lot of money," Katz says. "They find the right vehicles. [ABC News president] Roone Arledge is by far the greatest genius in star building." Arledge, a man with no background in journalism, ascended to the news presidency from the sports division after he successfully injected an element of showbiz razzle-dazzle into the network's sports coverage. He is credited with (or blamed for) buying a number of superstars for ABC News and for paying superstar salaries to such journalists as Walters, Sawyer, Ted Koppel, and anchor Peter Jennings.

For his part, Jennings denies there is a Hollywood influence in his shop. "The term 'image-building' makes me grate my teeth. I'm not interested in any reporter's persona, per se," he says. "We are, after all, talking about journalism."

 Jennings knows better than most how far good looks and charm alone will take you. In 1965, as a twenty-six-year-old with the looks of a model -- and just about as much experience reporting -- he was made ABC's anchor. It was a disaster. He was called a "glamorcaster" by the critics and scoffed at by his colleagues.

"It was a dreadful mistake, a foolish experiment," says Jennings, who returned to the field as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before resuming his position as anchor. "I'm the classic example of how not to do it. I'm glad it didn't hurt me more than it did.

"People think this is silly," he adds, "but the most important thing anybody can bring to this business is their mind."

Network news divisions have been in the star-making business since the dawn of television, says Barbara Matusow, author of The Evening Stars, a 1983 book that details the rise of dozens of news stars. Matusow, a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine who wrote an article about Brian Williams for the magazine's December issue, says the phenomenon has received more attention since the advent of powerful agents and multimillion-dollar salaries -- more spillovers from Hollywood. But developmental programs like ABC's are new, she says, and they're a good idea. If you're going to turn people into stars, at least make sure they know what they're doing. "They've seen someone they like; they think she has some good broadcasting capabilities," Matusow says of ABC and Chang. "They're trying to make sure she has the training."

For her part, Chang is well aware of what the cynics say about the nature of stardom in today's network news. She even agrees with them, to a degree.

"I would like to be able to say honestly that [appearance] has no impact, but, if we can generalize, it does," says Chang, who has been asked for her autograph by fans convinced she was Connie Chung. "The ideal would be to tell a good story and let that be the face that represents you."

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