Looking For A Job? Indianapolis Needs 3 NDs

What’s up with Indianapolis?

In the last four months, three of the city’s four news-producing stations — all but the Fox affiliate — have lost their news directors. None has announced a replacement.

The exodus started in August, when CBS affiliate WISH fired Patty McGettigan, who spent 17 years with LIN, the station’s owner. Kevin Finch, a 22-year market veteran, was next to get the boot; WRTV, Scripps’ ABC affiliate, let him go in November.

Just a week or so later, Keith Connors, citing personal reasons, announced that he will leave WTHR, Dispatch’s NBC affiliate, when his contract is up at the end of this month.

Lee Rosenthal, at Tribune’s Fox affilliate WXIN, is the only news director Indianapolis has left.

Industry watchers, including those with particular interest in the country’s 26^th largest market, say they don’t believe there is any mystery behind the rash of departures, chalking it up mostly to coincidence.

“I don’t think the GMs called each other up first,” says Finch, who joined WRTV in April 2011, when the station was still owned by McGraw-Hill. Finch also has done a stint at WISH, where he worked his way to up to news director, and WTHR. “It’s just an intensely competitive market. There are high expectations and there is a lot at stake.”

Jacques Natz, a SmithGeiger consultant and former WTHR news director, says factors as mundane as yearly business cycles could be at fault. It is fairly common for stations and staff to part ways toward the end of the year when November sweeps are fresh and contracts expire.

“It gives people on both ends of the equation … time to evaluate whether they are doing what they want to do,” he says.

“So guess what? There are going to be three lucky people who get those jobs,” he adds.

News directors typically don’t stick long at their jobs, although Hofstra University professor Bob Papper, who closely tracks the TV news business through annual surveys, says they are less nomadic today. The average tenure of a news director is now pushing six years, he says.

Insiders in Indianapolis say the churn is indicative of the city’s transformation from a relatively staid TV market to a highly competitive one where all the stations believe they have a shot at No. 1.

It is one of the country’s most vibrant markets when it comes to investigative reporting. WTHR is well known for its investigative journalism, and is a regular national award winner.

In 2007, both WTHR and WISH won Peabody Awards, making Indianapolis at the time the smallest market in the country to have two competing stations win awards in the same year, Finch says.

In the November sweeps, WTHR was dominant in household ratings in all key news dayparts, according to ratings provided by the station.

WISH and WXIN are in a battle for the No. 2 position in the morning. WISH ranks No. 2 in the early evening, followed by WRTV and WXIN in that order. In late news, WISH ranks No. 2, with WXIN and WRTV competing to be No. 3, according to WTHR.

The three general managers are keeping mum on the specifics behind their news directors’ departures. “Everybody’s circumstances are different from each other,” says WISH GM Jeff White.

In the case of WISH and WRTV, the firings appear to be part of a larger effort to unseat WTHR. Since being bought by Scripps, WRTV has added staff and rebuilt its newsroom, says GM Larry Blackerby.

Meanwhile, WISH also has updated its look, with refurbished sets, changes in its lighting grid and new graphics “so our station looks fresher and more up to date,” says White.

But change for the sake of change may be counterproductive, says McGettigan, who moved to WISH in 2009 from WOOD, LIN’s NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, Mich. The locals “like things to be done the way they always have been done.”

And for many years, there wasn’t much change.

Legendary leaders headed Indianapolis’ newsrooms.  Bob Gamble ran WRTV’s newsroom for 27 years before retiring in 1986, earning the station national recognition. Lee Giles cultivated talent like Jane Pauley during his 35-year tenure as WISH news director that ended in 2003.

During the 1980s and 1990s, WRTV and WISH jockeyed for the No. 1 ranking,  while WTHR never really contended. WXIN joined the mix when it launched news in 1991.

“In a sense, everyone knew their place,” says Finch. Just 20 years ago, the stations still operated as if “in the era of a gentlemen’s agreement,” he said 

But the status quo got rocked in 1994, when a new generation of leaders at family-owned WTHR brought in News Director John Butte and changed the way the station covered news.

Having spent time in Los Angles, Butte brought with him a more aggressive, big-city style of journalism. The station was the first in the market to experiment with live, continuous coverage of big events. That started with a hostage crisis that occurred when two gunmen burst into an Indianapolis Denny’s.

“When I got to Indianapolis, there were these extraordinary events that just started happening, and we happen to provide news coverage that was new” to the city, says Butte, now a professor at Kent State University.

“People have a love affair with their community; they are proud of their city and they are proud of their state,” Butte says. “As a consequence, they place a lot of value on how their TV stations are telling the story of their community.”

By the early 2000s, WTHR had established itself as the top purveyor of news.

WTHR GM John Cardenas says he doesn’t expect Connors’ departure to affect that status. “We have the luxury of being consistently dominant for several years now and nothing is going to change dramatically by having a new news director,” he says. “Nothing is broken.”

“It’s flattering when people say WTHR has caused the turbulence in the market being as dominant as we are,” Cardenas says. “But the reality is we don’t know all the reasons for all the changes. We are just happy to be us and not them.”

Read other Air Check columns here. You can send suggestions for future Air Checks to Diana Marszalek at [email protected].