The Thursday night newscast on WCAU in Philadelphia began normally enough: a murder, the sports, the weather. Then, toward the end of the broadcast, anchor Renee Chenault turned to the cameras and launched into a four-minute report about . . . herself. "I’m having a baby!" Chenault exulted, and proceeded to fill in all the blanks. She was forty. She was alone. And she’d become pregnant through artificial insemination.

Chenault and her co-anchor, Larry Mendte, celebrate her good news.

related site: WCAU's Renee Chenault

Cut to a shot of the clinic, where the deed was done. Cut to a doctor, draped in surgical scrubs. Piano and flute plays dreamily in the background. Cut to Chenault, talking it over with her parents.

In those four minutes Chenault turned herself into the talk-radio topic du jour, the subject of public debates on the morality of starting a family without marriage or a man.

Among journalists, Chenault sparked a different debate, one that was also about boundaries and propriety: When do up-close-and-personal stories cross the line from well-intended and informative to cynical circulation or ratings boosters?

Personal reportage, of course, is nothing new. In the last year alone, TV and print reporters covered their own breast cancers (USA Today’s Cathy Hainer and the New York Daily News’s Jami Bernard), skin cancer (Miami TV reporter Ike Seamans), heart attack (the unfortunate Seamans again), bone cancer (Norfolk TV anchor Terry Zahn), addiction (Chicago TV correspondent Robin Robinson on her brother’s life and death as a heroin addict), and marriage (The Arizona Republic’s David Leibowitz proposed in a June column).

Many of these "this is my life, film at 11" stories are effective. Few people can structure a narrative and yank on heartstrings like folks who tell stories for a living. Most reporters who draw from their own lives say they’re doing it as a service. Norfolk’s Terry Zahn says he’d long been associated with the American Cancer Society, as a fundraiser and guest speaker, and "it would seem hypocritical to say, ‘Now I’ve got it, but I don’t want to talk about it.’ But the more important reason was my reporter’s instinct. I could give perspective. I could tell my story for all of the other people going through this."

Cathy Hainer, who wrote about her breast cancer for USA Today, had similar motives. "I think some people might have felt that what I did was a little tasteless, or lacking in discretion, or thought, ‘My God! This woman’s bald on the front page!’ But breast cancer is an epidemic that will affect a million of my readers."

While it might have been meant to educate, the Chenault piece came with certain complications and contradictions. They were set in the context of an NBC affiliate that has been unashamed of employing a bit of show biz in its drive to challenge WPVI, the more traditional ABC affiliate.

After a WCAU staffer told Daily News gossip columnist Stu Bykofsky that Chenault had been artificially inseminated, he ran an April 28 item headlined, pregnant? chenault won’t say. Chenault was not happy about the report, and was quoted in the piece telling Bykofsky, "I wouldn’t discuss the time of day with you, let alone any aspect of my personal life, and I find you very offensive for even making this call.’’

But as soon as that story ran, the station began figuring out how to make Chenault’s personal life public — and fast. WCAU began promoting the story eight days after the Bykofsky piece — even before Chenault had the results of her amniocentesis. The piece ran the next evening, on a Thursday, which happens to be WCAU’s biggest broadcast night. It was also the beginning of the May sweeps.

Critics raised their collective eyebrows. "It was no accident that it ran on Thursday night." says Philadelphia Inquirer television columnist Gail Shister. "It was a sweeps stunt." Frank N. Magid, c.e.o. of Frank Magid Associates, the big-time TV news consultants, says the pregnancy-as-news was a ratings ploy, pure and simple. "Television news is a competitive enterprise," he explains.

The reaction seems to have brought about some change. When Chenault did two short follow-up pieces on her pregnancy in September, they aired without fanfare, without promotions, and without music, and while they featured more footage of Chenault with her parents, they focused more on the broader issue of artificial insemination as a choice for single women.

Chenault herself is still refusing to talk to the press about her increasingly apparent condition. Her baby girl (the gender has been announced on the air) is due in November — just in time for sweeps.

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