The Times-Tribune from Scranton, Pennsylvania • 11

in vm "wwwhwiihh Tnninmnrnjm i Yt trj, A JW THE SCRANTON TIMES, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1978. -IV Anchors Aweigh In the Local Battle for TV News Ratings, the Gloves Are Off market as it is in those major markets, a number one rating does provide the tation with the golden opportunity to iharge more for commercial time. Jeff Greenfield tells of the importance of a winning news team format id "Television: The First Fifty years. "By the mid-1970s, local news was an enormously profitable venture, accounting for a third to a half of a local stations profits. To local news directors, under intense pressure to produce the highest ratings for the highest dollar, it was crucial to develop winning news personalities and formats.

Many local stations begain to hire reporters without journalistic experience, looking only for the charismatic face and voice that would pull the audience to their stations at six and eleven commercials, however, portray reporters relating how much they love being at WCAU and how well they all work together. The spot concludes with the reporters cheering, Yeaahh Team! "The whole phenomenon is somewhat disquieting, as far as Im concerned," Powell explains to FOCUS. We like to think the medium is 95 percent entertainment and we like to think weve been able to erect barricades to prevent the entertainment forces from overlaping the informational side the news programs. "Unfortunately, I think some of this promotional stuff tends to reinforce or create public notion that this is a theatrical business, that the people on the air are not professional journalists, and that they are actors hired to present the news in theatrical fashion. about it.

We do not market the news, Essex continues. "Marketing the news in my estimation is a thorough analysis of viewing audience and a station's talent. You evaluate you're weaknesses and determine what you have to do to sell your product to the people. You may not have a product, but you force something on the people you want to attract as viewers. That is what I object to in terms of marketing.

JCssex contends Hale has done a marvelous job in restructuring WNEP to the point where it has left WBRE and WDAU choking in the ratings' dust. And the most recent Nielsen Statisti-cal Index (that for November 1977) tends to support the claim. Thirty-five per cent of the people in the metropolitan of Lackawanna, Luzerne and Mon It was inevitable. Television has personalized people doing the hews. Across the country, news teams ate as big, if not bigger, than the personalities they cover.

The yeast in this growing process has been promotion, marketing, hucksterism. The words are virtually synonymous. Locally, the evolution of the news anchorman and his news team was much slower than the national pace. In the late 1960s and early '70s, when local stations throughout the country were ballyhooing the personal attributes of reporters, and creating on camera "happy talk" between team members, Northeastern Pennsylvania was still getting its news straight from the shoulder. No frills, no gimmicks, just a monologue being read from teleprompters.

The news was boring. About 3 ft years ago, things started to change. The local ABC affiliate, WNEP-TV, hired itself a 29-year-old news director, Elden Hale, who had been the senior news producer at WCKT, Miami. Almost immediately, things began happening. Began Inching Up WNEP, which for years was the poor sister of WBRE (NBC), He claims to have been pigeonholed In New York, the nations number one TV market.

So, for one year, he "looked for a place to expand." His name: Gary Essex. He was perfect for WNEP and WNEP was perfect for Essex. It was a marriage blessed by Nielsen of the Nielsen Ratings family. Tremendous Progress In the year and one-half that Elden Hale had been in charge of the news department at WNEP, the station made tremendous progress in the ratings battle. It would fluctuate between the one and two position.

But there was no stability. What it needed was an anchorman to create television presence to lock the station in on the number one spot. Essex was hired. A promotional campaign was started to herald Essexs arrival. It was featured during the 1976 Olympics and it seemed nearly everytime the World Games broke for a commercial, viewers would hear, Gary Essex is coming, Gary Essex is coming.

Hale calls the pre-Essex publicity The most successful promotion campaign ever conducted in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The statement probably is accurate. But in retrospect, both Hale and Essex rl return to the. area, the newsman was filmed walking along Scranton streets and talking to Scranton personalities. The intent was clear: Lets try to capture a portion of the Scranton audience by letting people know we have one of their native sons anchoring our news team.

Did it have an impact on the ratings? "That's something that cant be changed overnight, contends Baltimore. "Let's say there have been minor improvements in the right direction. Besides trying to draw some television audience away from the Scranton-based WDAU, there was another purpose behind the Keith Martin package. "What we wanted to achieve was to have people recognize the fact that after a long period of time, here comes a newsman, a local personality, who left the area, went on to bigger and better things in other markets, and then came back. We wanted to inform people that WBRE was different than the competition, who pretty much went out of the area and brought back complete strangers to do the news, says Baltimore.

The stations vice president admits that promotion is invaluable in trying to inform the viewers that ones news team is better than the oppositions. But he draws the line at the use of gimmickry. "Gimmickry is being used locally, but not at WBRE, insists Baltimore. "One other station, in particular, goes in for a lot more theatrics and gimmicks. I am talking about radar, people outside doing the weather and the thrill of broadcasting a weather show from the Market Street Bridge.

Baltimores comments were in reference to devices regularly used by WNEP during its news show. "Does being outside really add to tomorrows weather forecast? Baltimore continues. "People really dont turn in a weather forecast to find out whats going on now. They want to know if they should take an umbrella, a raincoat or boots to the office tomorrow, or if they should put chains on the car. As for radar, he goes on, "It is great in a flat area.

It is a great promotional gimmick to say, 'We have radar, but they omit telling the viewers that most of what they see on the screen is the tops of mountains. Radar really doesnt add anything substantial to the program. Keith Martin worked at WDAU before moving on to Jacksonville, five years ago. From Jacksonville, he went to Rochester, N.Y., where he stayed for 1 Vt years. He says he came back to the ScrantonWiikes-Barre area because it offers a bigger television market than either (Rochester (64th) or Jacksonville (70th).

"As far as promoting news teams is concerned, Id say Jacksonville and Wilkes-Barre are in the same class and that Rochester is at the bottom of the heap, the 31-year-old Martin states. The difference between Jacksonville and Wilkes-Barre, in the way they approach promotion, is that the management in Jacksonville relied on billboards a great deal. It is an outdoor area, very spread out. Billboards in key locations can attract a lot of people. This area just doesnt lend itself to billboards.

In talking to the WBRE duo, one senses a determined effort is being mounted by the station to try and narrow the ratings gap between it and WNEP. The feeling found some basis when Baltimore was asked if his station is suffering from an inferiority complex when compared to WNEP. After all didn't NEP present a new news format first, and didnt BRE follow suit. And, didnt NEP go out a hire Gary Essex, a likeable enough person brimming with warmth and a good post-Watergate quality credibility, only to have BRE bring back the blond, personable Martin. "Until three years ago, we were first in the ratings, WDAU was second, and WNEP was third, says Baltimore.

News at WNEP was only an afterthought. But then it recognized the fact that news presentation was very important and that a newscast was the most important local program. They made changes and we sensed the competition starting to heat up. We wanted to make sure we wouldn't get caught staying stable so we went out and improved ourselves. We didnt want to get blown out of the water.

Thats what happened to WDAU. It stayed unchanged too long. The gun has not yet sounded for the real ratings race. It probably wont go off until WDAU begins promoting its news team in the fashion WNEP and WBRE have been doing for months. When the time comes for the real battle, all three local stations will be on par, at least superficially.

All will have new sets, new anchor people, if not teams, and promotional campaigns trying to catch the viewers attention. Then, and only then, will Northeastern Pennsylvania find out if the local stations will stoop to the absurd and foster images of themselves out of likenesses of San Francisco cowboy-journalists or Atlanta In the battle for ratings supremacy, everything seems to be done by the numbers, as tfie comments of these three personalities indicate. In the background is a fabrication of one of the many surveys taken to document claims. and WDAU (CBS), Scranton, began in-' ching up in the ratings the barometer of television success Critics snickered, figuring 'NEPs success would be shortlived. Nevertheless, Operation Aboutface was being carried out at the Avoca-based station.

New faces were hired to report the news. A new set, contemporary in design, was fashioned. More film footage was aired. In time, more and more people started tuning WNEP news in and turning WBRE and WDAU news off. WNEP was pumping iron and beginning to flex its muscles.

The formula for success that Hale brought with him from Miami was camouflaged by news personnel who were made the focus of the presentation. Instead of cutting from a news report to a commercial and then to a sportscaster, the anchorman exchanged cross talk with the weatherman. (It rained yesterday, Joe, hope you can do better today!) or sports reporter (Hey, Steve, any fights among the Yankees today?) Looking for Action These newscasts were structured around the premise that the television audience, whether for news or entertainment, was 'looking for action, pace, involvement, people to believe and care about. The cross-talk helped' to convey that image. The trend began in the late 1960s in a news show on KQED a northern California public television station.

Attempting to break from the rigid formula of local news, the station introduced a one-hour local show in which reporters sat around a table and talked about the stories they were covering. As the reporters combined their factual presentations with more conversational approach to news, other reporters would bring up and clarify points that might be confusing to the viewer as well. The Ratings Formula The appearance of this process materialized on local newscasts across the country. It was triggered principally at the end of the '60s by the Eyewitness News format of the ABC-owned and operated stations. WABC in New York developed the cross-talk, happy-talk format to its fullest.

Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel were the co-stars or co-captains. The supporting cast included Geraldo Rivera, Jim Bouton, a former major league baseball player, and Tex Antoine, a double-talking weatherman on the 6 oclock news. The combination of per-sonalities produced high ratings. People tuned in to be entertained as well as informed. The man who did the 11 oclock weather on WABC was not content telling viewers about approaching highs and lows or storm fronts coming out of Canada.

He wanted to do more news, but he was stereotyped. agree the publicity almost had a nega- tive effect. People expected too much. Essex could have been Walter Cron-kite that first night on the air and still the viewers would have been disappointed. But any initial letdown was weathered by the new anchorman and WNEP.

Soon the station had the most watched news program in the region. And it has stayed that way during the year. FOCUS is seated with Hale and Essex in the news directors office at WNEP8 modern offices near the Wil-kes-Barre-Scranton International Airport. Essex is 44 and much thinner than he appears on television. A slight bulge shows up around his waist as he sits cross-legged listening to Hale talk.

We werent necessarily after an anchorman who was good looking, but somebody who comes across well on TV. A lot of anchormen are not good looking, he explained. "Walter Cron-kite certainly is not good looking. But by God if Walter says it, you believe it. Thats the most important thing.

The anchorman has to be someone people trust, someone who comes across knowing what he's talking about, someone who comes across as being a first rate journalist, stable, secure, the kind of person youd like to invite into your living room. The Central Figure "Gary is the central figure on the show, but Gary is not the show, Hale continues. "I am not the show, Liz PurseU is not the show. Nobody in this news department is the show. "If anyone of us left, the show could continue.

It hurts, like cutting off your hand. But the hand will grow back. The show is Gary, Liz, J. Kristopher, Dan Patrick; it is everyone together. I compare it to a snowball.

We had the snowball and is was rolling. Gary came along and it got bigger. Dan Patrick followed and it got even bigger. The show is a snowball and everybody on the news team is an important part of it. Over the past couple months, WNEP has promoted each member of its news team in 30 second spots.

Essex and Pursell, the anchors, hard at work; Kristopher, the weatherman, and Patrick, the sports commentator, on the job telling it like it is. The news team is being sold like any other product in need of advertising. The theory behind the spots is not so much marketing as it is promotion, according to Essex, who shudders to think he could be marketed like a cluster of ripe bananas. To me, marketing suggests that you try to foist something on people," he says. "I look at the term, marketing, in a negative sense because Ive been in the big markets, where they try to foist something on people.

The approach in this market is simply: Hey people, we have something we're proud of and we're letting you know Day-Part Audience oclock. This trend led CBSs Charles' Kuralt to observe that his overriding impression of local newscasts was one of hair. (One local station in Boston put a young newscaster through five different changes of hairstyle in a single year.) Tom Powell, the news director at WDAU, is aware of the value a highly rated news program has for a television station. He is also aware that his station is lagging far behind in the regional ratings race. But in Lackawanna County, he notes, were still number one.

A Ripple Effect There are some who contend Powell is talking through his teleprompter, that ratings cannot be broken down into counties. They Insist that WDAU is on the bottom of the heap in the county, in the metropolitan area, in the region its signal reaches. There is a growing recognition of the value of a well-rated news program," Powell says. News has a ripple effect throughout the daily television schedule. A highly rated 'news show helps the ratings overall.

Given this impact that news has, weve seen efforts to promote news teams. The effort has taken on strange forms in many markets. A San Francisco station dressed up its news team in cowboy outfits and had them ride into town on horses like outlaws wanting to take over the territory. "The distressing fact of the matter is they did, says Powell. "That station is the highest rated station in San Francisco.

In Atlanta, anchor-people are dressing up as roosters, bloodhounds and other animals as part of the effort to hype their local news show. Closer to home, WPVI-TV Philadelphia, faced with the problem thatfew viewers recognize its new anchorman, Jim Gardner, put him in a commercial that shows him being accosted by excited viewers (actors from New York City) as he enters a movie house. While the spot is being filmed, bystanders gather around the camera and, pointing at Gardner, ask, "Whos the guy with the mustache? Another Philadelphia station, WCAU-TV, is so plagued by morale problems that it has formed a morale committee. The station's newsteam Summary Powell, who inhales cigarettes at the rate of three packs a day, says he hasnt seen anything done locally as outlandish" as the San Francisco outlaw commercial. But he adds: Empty of Substance I have seen actors used to promote various news personalities (WNEP commercials for Patrick and Kristopher), at feast I think theyre actors since I dont recognize them as staff members of any TV station.

But I dont want to be in the position of throwing snowballs at the competition. My only complaint about promotion of news locally is that it is empty of substance. They use a greatbig promotional campaign to say, 'Were the best, without anything backing it up. First of all, I think the best commercial of all is the product. If you have a good news program, it promotes itself.

At least I would like to think that is true. Im not certain thats the case any longer. "Secondly, if you are promoting and you want to promote a program on its merits, there is nothing wrong with that. Promote an individual on the basis of his credentials not simply his name or because the guy has a nice haircut. If what Powell says about good taste promotion is true that it can help a station along in the ratings sweep-stakes then why hasnt WDAU taken to the airwaves telling people about what a great newsteam it thinks it has.

WNEP and WBRE have and, by all counts, are running first and second respectively. "Weve just put a new news format on the air, new anchor people, new faces, states Powell. Admittedly, weve been light on the promotion until this point. But that doesnt mean to say we are not going to do it it has become a necessity competitively. Lets say were right on the threshold of doing something.

In the Scranton area, WBRE-TV has always carried the stigma of being the Wilkes-Barre station. The lable has always rankled Terry Baltimore, vice president there, so the station did something very subtle when it went out and hired Scrantonian Keith Martin as a co-anchorman five months ago. In the package publicing Martins roe Counties tend to watch the 6 oclock news on WNEP. WBRE has 27 per cent of the audience and WDAU 23 per cent The remaining 15 per cent get their news from a variety of cable television outlets. Ratings for the 11 p.m.

news is basically the same. Translated into home viewing, the figures become 82.000 for WNEP, 64,000 for WBRE and 45.000 for WDAU. Elden built this winning news organization. He didnt foist anything on anybody. As soon as you foist something on someone and you dont live up to it, people are going to turn you right off.

It simply is not going to work. You cant invent phoney slogans, Essex contends before an addendum. The biggest thing we said about ourselves is that we're everywhere. And we have tried to be honestly. Its not an empty slogan.

A Good News Team We have not said, Were bigger and better, We are not saying 'We do it better than anyone else 1 What we are saying is that we have a good news team here at WNEP and wed like you to watch." It has become increasingly important for the stations to have highly rated local news shows. First of all, there is the prestige of having a number one news team in the 42nd-largest market out of over 210 in the country. Secondly, and perhaps most important, selling commercials on the number one-rated news show means big money for the station. One major market station estimates that an increase of one percentage point in its newscast's share of viewers will generate increased advertising revenues of $300,000 annually. Another pegs the figure at $500,000 to $600,000.

While the money isnt as big in this By FRANCIS T. DeANDREA Times FOCUS Writer ill This is the last of three parts dealing with the presentation and philosophy of television news in Northeastern a---.