Not So Fast On Sidelining The News Anchor

Kirk Varner

As someone who has dedicated their career to working in and leading local television newsrooms of various sizes and markets across this country, I’ve been reading with some interest Sean McLaughlin’s new series of columns here in TVNewsCheck titled “Reinventing the News.” Our industry faces some fundamental challenges to its very survival, so this topic isn’t one that anyone who cares about working in local television should take lightly. And I say that as someone who has done a fair amount of building and rebuilding of some great local television newsrooms.

But I think it may be helpful to conduct a bit of a reality check on the paths for reinvention that have been suggested, along with a look back at how we arrived at this point in the first place.

The news operations of most local TV stations came into their own in the 1970s, when many owners discovered that aside from being a long-standing FCC requirement to keep the license, successful news operations could be very significant contributors to a station’s bottom line. The cottage industry of news consulting and research quickly emerged, ready to assist in emulating whatever might have worked in any other television markets across the nation. On-air “talent” became very essential to a station’s news success, and the marketplace for talent quickly became as competitive as the free agency marketplace in any professional sports league.

There were other factors in the rise of the most successful stations. Things like technology, marketing and sometimes even the actual quality of the journalism produced could move ratings and revenue. And like any success story, the more dollars that came in, the more hours of news programming would be added to the programming schedule.

That was until the competitive media landscape began to shift with the force of the tectonic plates under the San Andreas fault. That brought swift calls for the budgets of the local news operations to be “rightsized” in short order, leading to embracing the simple mantra of “doing more with less.” Most newsrooms keep figuring out how to do just that. Some do so with more continued success than others.

Which brings us to today and the need for, as some might put it, a “reinvention” of local television news. Why not? The mantra of business is that if you aren’t as successful as you used to be, you look to reinvent, or some cases even revolutionize your business to survive and maybe even thrive.

And that’s where we turn to hear from those who might be the pioneers in such revolution, those who have been willing to make the critical changes that might show the rest of us the way forward. They tell us to embrace the brave new world of digital platforms and social media. Rethink the newsroom structure. Cover less crime and spot news. Generate more local and hyper-local content. Have the anchors report more stories or perhaps consider doing away with anchors altogether. The list goes on, all in an effort to avoid the proverbial iceberg that lies looming ahead.

Except for one thing. Those strategies often fail to recognize what made local television news successful to begin with. For that answer, one should remember the oft-spoken mantra of the late Al Primo, the man who is credited with sparking much of the growth and success of the local TV news genre with his creation of the Eyewitness News format in the late 1960s. What he often said was this: “News is all about people.”

That included the people who would be covered each day as they made the news, from the famous to the everyday people who could be interesting no matter what they were doing. At least that would be true if their stories were told by journalists who would remember what Primo would preach — that “people can tell their stories better than we can.” The characters in those stories would be paired with the personalities who delivered the news, often being characters themselves.

As an industry, we’ve moved away from those characters. Perhaps because it was easier and no doubt more economical to embrace the idea that anyone could be on television. That may be particularly true these days, given that anyone can be seen on video around the globe with nothing more than the smartphone in their pocket.

But the reality is — and always has been — that news anchors still actually matter. We want someone to bring us the news. The audience — through whichever screen they are watching — wants to connect and relate to people. The anchors are the very face of a station in the eyes of their community. If those anchors can build trust with the viewers, they are often the most important reason those viewers make the decision to watch one local newscast over another.

Maybe someone can point out where “sidelining the anchor” has worked in terms of growing or maintaining an audience. To my knowledge, it hasn’t proven to be a move that has avoided any icebergs that may be in our industry’s future course. Active and engaged news anchors still matter. We ignore or discard their role at our own peril.

How I know that’s true is spending time in public standing next to all the people who appear as the faces of our station. I take note of the countless viewers who line up at a public appearance just to say hello and snap a selfie with them. I’m not ready to sideline them. I’m looking for them to shine in our next newscast.

Kirk Varner is news director of Hubbard Broadcasting’s ABC affiliate KSTP Minneapolis-St. Paul.