January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

Chicago Experiment -- Why it Failed

BY NEIL HICKEY

With fanfare and the thunder of timpani, a new kind of local newscast appeared on Chicago television screens last February 7. The debut drew national attention.

* Could a struggling, embattled TV station whose ten o'clock news program attracted minuscule audiences reverse its fortunes by an audacious tactic: switching to basic, no-frills, stripped-down, old-fashioned journalism?

* Could the newscast say so long to the familiar crime-and-mayhem, disaster, and celebrity stories, along with the life-style features and scary health reports that fill virtually every local newscast in the country?

* Could a 51-year-old woman be the solo anchor for such a program, rather than the usual male-female -- one white, one black/Hispanic -- anchor team with its cheery, often banal banter among the onscreen participants?

The answer to all of the above? Unfortunately, no. After only nine months, the bold effort that had been hailed by TV critics and the public as a noble experiment was ripped untimely from the WBBM schedule and replaced on October 31 with a newscast that looks like most others on the country's commercial television stations.

The WBBM story is a cautionary tale that's the talk of the industry. Its drastic format shift was part admirable endeavor in the cause of better television journalism -- and part desperation. The station, owned by CBS, had long suffered the ignominy of its late news losing not only to ABC's dominant WLS and NBC's WMAQ, but to reruns of Friends and The Simpsons. The drama that unfolded starting early last year dramatized many arguments that have raged around local television news for decades.

The chronic ratings morbidity of WBBM's late news program persuaded Hank Price, the station's former general manager who masterminded the shift, that an alternative to conventional television newscasts was the road to robust health. "Our thought was: let's just baseline this whole idea of TV news. Let's get a group of good journalists together, put them in a room, and have them argue about what's a great story for that day."

Reviews of the debut newscast rang with high praise. "A significant experiment . . . whose success or failure could reverberate nationally," wrote the Chicago Tribune's television critic, Steve Johnson. The Sun-Times's critic, Phil Rosenthal, wondered if the doughty venture might bring back "the frustrated discerning people who gave up on local TV news altogether . . . . If it fails, our last, best hope for a return to real news will have been squandered, maybe forever . . . . The whole world will be watching . . . to see if anybody in Chicago is."

Special praise was heaped on Carol Marin, the program's lone anchor, whom Ken Bode, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, called "a journalist whose integrity and credentials are sterling." Three years earlier, Marin had been the focus of a controversy that made her an instant heroine, nationwide, to proponents of quality TV news. She'd been serving as co-anchor at WMAQ when station brass -- general manager Lyle Banks and news executive Joel Cheatwood -- informed her they were hiring the tabloid talk-show host Jerry Springer as an on-air commentator. ("The poster child for the worst TV has to offer," Marin said at the time.) In protest, she (along with co-anchor Ron Magers) resigned after nearly twenty years at the station. (In 1995, the two-time Peabody Award-winning Marin was suspended by WMAQ for three days for refusing to read copy she deemed unnewsworthy.)

She migrated to WBBM. Eventually, after months of intense discussion with Price and news director Pat Costello, the design for a no-nonsense news program -- aimed at bringing devout news fans flocking to the station -- evolved. Marin won assurances that she could shape the newscast as she saw fit, and that CBS would give it at least a year to grow and find its audience. She had the help of veteran on-camera WBBM journalists such as Mike Flannery, Mike Parker, and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Pam Zekman.

On Monday night, February 7, 2000, The 10 O'Clock News: Reported by Carol Marin hit Chicago's airwaves. That night, the other stations in town led with a water main break in the downtown Loop; WBBM gave that story a 30-second voice-over seventeen minutes into the newscast. Pam Zekman contributed an investigation into alleged racial profiling in a suburban police department, and Mike Parker did a report on a former congressman's efforts to have his prison sentence commuted. In a later program, WBBM opened with a piece on the Environmental Protection Agency's accord with a chemical manufacturer limiting use of a dangerous insecticide, while the competition was doing live reports on a brief neighborhood power failure. Marin once brought on former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres for a live interview. She spun a routine baby abduction into a larger context by reporting that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had recorded 105 babies kidnapped from U.S. hospitals in the previous sixteen years. The program hired two fine essayists for reflections on the city's cultural and political life: John Callaway, the dean of Chicago's broadcast journalists, and Laura Washington, editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter. Sports and weather got short shrift when there was little to report, more if there was real news value.

The new program's first month was a sweeps period, when local audiences are measured by Nielsen to set advertising rates. Encouragingly, WBBM gained a ratings point -- a tantalizing hint that viewers were sampling the program and might be ready for a new kind of broadcast rather than the tried-and-true, formulaic, cookie-cutter news shows on the competing stations. That shining moment was brief.

The May sweeps brought depressing tidings. The newly minted program's rating had sunk to a level that, alarmingly, was much lower than that of the old format it had replaced: a 4 rating and an 8 percent share of the tuned-in audience, while WLS won a 14 rating and a 23 share; WMAQ's rating was 11 and its audience share 18 percent.

The Chicago Tribune media reporter Tim Jones told cjr: "WBBM thought it had nowhere to go but up. They were wrong." The audience erosion continued through the summer. The July sweeps figure was down 26 percent from May, and showed a significant loss of 25-54 year-olds, a favorite target of advertisers. CNN's ace foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour said she'd been "sleeping" with a newspaper clipping under her pillow that reported: "WBBM-TV in Chicago is going back to basic journalism!" She added: "I don't dare ask how this radical experiment is doing in the ratings. All my fingers and toes are tightly crossed."

Word of viewer defection at one of its most important stations sent shudders through the corridors of power at CBS, reaching all the way to the New York office of Mel Karmazin, the president at Viacom, which owns the broadcast company. Karmazin is famously impatient with units of Viacom that fail to meet profit expectations, and clearly WBBM was a weak timber -- weaker than ever -- in the bridge to higher shareholder value for the parent firm. That conviction was conveyed unambiguously to the station's management team from CBS's corporate chieftains. "The station was a very tough place to work because of the extraordinary pressure to perform," recalls Danice Kern, then the assistant news director.

Abruptly, station manager Price and news director Costello -- the two offscreen architects of the reconstructed newscast -- departed the station, purportedly for better opportunities elsewhere: Price to WXII in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as president and general manager; Costello to become news director at two Seattle stations. Price says that neither of them was forced out.

Moving quickly, CBS installed Walter F. DeHaven, Jr. from Viacom's Paramount Television division as the new boss of WBBM, an appointment that some at the station found ominous since Paramount stations, as members of the puny UPN network, customarily have no news departments, and DeHaven thus has little experience with TV news. Then the second shoe dropped. In mid-September, CBS reached all the way to Orlando and a cable operation called Central Florida News 13 for WBBM's new news director, Craig Hume, once the news chief at Los Angeles's KTLA, and, earlier, a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution.

The handwriting on the wall could hardly have been clearer. The "noble experiment" was in serious jeopardy. Station executives drew the wagons in a circle and would say only that they were "in discussions" about the newscast's future. In October, Danice Kern, who'd been a close, long-time colleague of Marin, resigned. "With profound regret," she wrote, in a note to her co-workers, "but after long reflection, I must tell you it is time for me to move on," even though she had "come to love the rich legacy of this television station and the proud tradition of this news department."

Next out the door was essayist John Callaway, who declared in departing: "It's clear to me that they're going in a different direction. I want them to have the freedom to do what they want to do, and I don't want to do it."

Then the million-dollar question, for which nobody yet had the final answer: Would Carol Marin try to pump water from her newscast's flooded bilges in the effort to save it? Or would she too abandon ship, persuaded that her bosses planned to retrofit the vessel in ways she could not accept?

Actually, this plot had already thickened seven months earlier (during the Hank Price regime) with regard to Marin's and WBBM's fate. In a stroke of Dostoyevskian irony that had TV folk everywhere shaking their heads, CBS hired Joel Cheatwood as overseer of news for all thirty-five of its owned stations, including WBBM. If Marin felt haunted and pursued by Cheatwood, she could be forgiven. The man whose news philosophy had driven her out of WMAQ was once again one of her supervisors, up the hierarchical line. ("Carol Marin's worst nightmare," the Sun-Times media reporter Robert Feder had called the appointment.) Cheatwood was famous in the industry for flashy stunting to boost news ratings, and the Jerry Springer caper had been seen as one more example of his style. Perhaps wisely, Cheatwood steered clear of Marin, never showing his face in the WBBM newsroom, but inevitably staffers wondered if he were the wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers that helped decide WBBM's fortunes.

And then on October 30 -- three days before the start of the November sweeps and two days after Marin won an Emmy for excellence as an anchor -- the guillotine blade fell. The nine-month-old program would be junked, WBBM announced, in favor of something more conventional and, it hoped, more appetizing to viewers.

Marin resigned. chicago news experiment is calling it quits, headlined The New York Times, speculating that the newscast's failure "could be taken as reaffirmation that a serious format cannot succeed -- that people need to be drawn in through celebrity gossip and miracle diets introduced by bubbly anchormen and anchorwomen."

A male/female team -- David Kerley and Tracy Townsend -- replaced Marin at the anchor desk. Talks with Marin had broken down, said general manager DeHaven, because she wanted to do things her way "and we finally got to the point that we agreed to disagree and go our separate ways." (Joel Cheatwood was "in no way, shape, or form," involved in that process, insists Dana McClintock, a CBS p.r. vice president in New York.)

Eulogies for the deceased program were emotional. In New York, Walter Cronkite shot off a letter to the Times saying that the newscast's demise was "disheartening to those many of us in television journalism who had hoped that WBBM-TV's format would be successful and lead the way to a wide adoption of more serious and informative news broadcasts." Chicago Sun-Times readers weighed in: ". . . a serious newscast will never be attempted again on Chicago commercial television." ". . . a broadcast that respected people's intelligence and had no teasers or promos for weight-loss pills or the best razor to shave one's legs." "Now that Marin is gone and WBBM has apparently finished dabbling in news integrity, I have no more reason to watch that station." "Carol Marin was the only reason to turn on the evening news." "Today for the first time in more than twenty years, Chicago is without Carol Marin . . . and whether you liked her or not, whether you watched her or not, you are the poorer for it."

A few expert observers in Chicago conveyed their sentiments to cjr. "I can't explain why, given a chance, they didn't support this newscast more," said Medill's Ken Bode. "It had good people with good credentials in the city of Chicago, and, for the most part, was well formatted. It took years for 60 Minutes to succeed." Sun-Times TV critic Rosenthal thinks the program's death "will be held up anytime a journalist wants to do something against what the sales department says. More than the failure of one broadcast to win an audience, that's the lasting impact, the thing that most hurts about this."

Robert Feder, a Sun-Times media columnist, recalled that one reader called the program an attempt at broadcast utopia -- unrealistic and idealistic at the same time. "As if we needed another example to prove that you can't trust television executives," Feder says. "There was an absolute commitment from them to nurture this format, and a promise, not only to Carol Marin but to the viewers of this community, to stay the course for at least a year. But it didn't last nine months. That is the real shame. So you come away even more cynical, if that's possible, than before."

Av Westin, author of the recently published (by The Freedom Forum's Free Press/Fair Press Project) Best Practices for Television Journalists, says: "We have essentially trained the viewer to expect that news programs will be more entertaining and titillating and sensational than substantive. Viewers won't stay tuned to something that doesn't match that expectation. The industry has hoisted itself on its own petard."

Cronkite elaborated on his feelings for cjr. "I'm damned sorry it didn't work," he said. TV news consultants who customarily prescribe glitzy, show-bizzy techniques "can look at the failure of this program and say, 'See, we were right all along.' But I'm not sure that nine months was a fair test." It was a "valiant effort," Cronkite says, even though the newscast's stories were often "a bit too long," and its texture could have been more brisk and zesty.

But others were far more critical of the newscast than Cronkite. A few Sun-Times readers expressed themselves: "To suddenly cram large hunks of solid news down the viewing public's throat without making the pieces palatable will only cause mass viewer gagging, which is exactly what happened. The concept was impressively noble. The execution was inadequate." "The problem with Marin's broadcast [was] that it [was] structured . . . to constantly showcase the anchor . . . . The program itself, and, by default, the news, became almost secondary."

A Tribune columnist, David Greising, decided there was good news for viewers in the bad news for Marin. "We can stop feeling guilty that we're not watching Carol's news," he wrote. The newscast "was packaged as if it were our civic duty to watch....If we weren't watching, it seemed, we were uncivilized cretins."

But the most venomous post-mortem was a November 1 editorial in the Tribune titled cod liver oil at 10 o'clock. While agreeing that Marin is an "exceptionally talented journalist in a business peopled by too many actors and actresses," the editorial called her newscast "a bore. Marin was somber to a fault . . . and for everyone involved, the overweening determination to be different at times led to bizarre news judgments. The duller the program got, the more you were supposed to love it. Whether you like warmth or great scoops from your 10 o'clock news, this one didn't have it."

An earlier qualitative judgment came from the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual survey [cjr, November/December] which awarded WBBM a respectable "B" grade rather than an "A" on the ground, among others, that -- while it aired more stories each night than most newscasts -- it wasn't providing a lot of news in depth.

Through the November sweeps period, WBBM tweaked the style and tone of its newscast to attract a broader and more desirable audience. Preliminary viewership data looked promising: the program was up 12.8 percent in November over its May 2000 figure, WBBM reports, and for the first time since November 1998, the station beat entertainment shows on WGN in that time slot.

WBBM's historic ratings misfortunes exist in a larger context (see sidebar, page 16). Fans of local TV news in Chicago and around the nation have been drifting away in astonishing numbers. In the period 1994-1999, the Chicago 10 p.m. news programs collectively dropped from 70 percent of the tuned-in audience to 32 percent.

The lessons of WBBM's "noble experiment," ambiguous though they may be, will be massaged and analyzed for years to come. Will it truly discourage other stations from any similar enterprise? Or will it challenge them to build on WBBM's experience and provide news programs both substantive and appealing? The Sun-Times's Feder sees a silver lining:

"If there's one good thing that emerged from this whole crazy episode it's that it engaged the public in a dialogue. For the first time in my memory, viewers were actually talking about what local TV news should deliver, rather than just accepting what's been shoved at us all these years. That's the enduring thing. When is the last time a man on the street wrote a letter to the editor about story selection on a local newscast?"

The answer? Not nearly often enough.

Neil Hickey is CJR's editor at large.

Read a Q & A with Carol Marin.