Broadcast News: Where We Are Now

In the 21st century, the landscape of broadcast journalism includes not only local and network news, but also cable channels and related Web sites. The reach expands even as the ownership of outlets contracts. The 24-hour cycle of today’s news drives the new engines: time and space must be filled. Viewers can watch the video clips online—the same clips endlessly, if they desire. Entertainment news and hard news blur. Speechwriters craft messages mindful of the potential for soundbites to resonate indefinitely.

According to a June 2005 Pew Research Center Survey report, most Americans say that they like mainstream news outlets. By wide margins, more Americans give favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper (80%–20%), local TV news (79%–21%), and cable TV news networks (79%–21%), among those able to rate these organizations. The margin is only slightly smaller for network TV news (75%–25%).

In fact, the favorable ratings for most categories of news organizations surpass positive ratings for President Bush and major political institutions such as the Supreme Court, Congress and the two major political parties.

Milton graduates are among those who capture and broadcast the nation’s news. They believe strongly in the power and importance of their work to help Americans acquire the information they need to lead productive lives.

Name: Felicia Taylor ’82
Station: Co-anchor, NBC 4,
New York

“If my stories can inform, shape your day or somehow help people, I’m satisfied. If watching a story [about a financial issue or product] gives you a leg up and makes an opportunity available to you, then I’ve done my job.

“At the end of the day, I love what I do,” Felicia says, “There’s no such thing as a typical day.”

Felicia looks at delivering news as a way to serve the community; capturing those stories often requires assertiveness.

“If you’re talking to the media, make sure you know what you want to say,” she says, “then say only what you intend.”

Felicia doesn’t make apologies for going after her story. To her, it’s a job and a profession in which luck and perseverance helped her succeed: to capture the story and, now, to share it from the anchor’s desk.

“Yesterday [July 27], I watched the shuttle launch and it brought back to me the day when I was at WLS in Chicago [as an intern], the day of the shuttle Challenger disaster. I remember sitting in the newsroom, watching this thing go up and just thinking that something didn’t look right,” she says. “It was my first taste of breaking news. I remember feeling fear, uncertainty and adrenalin. I remember thinking, ‘What is the story? What do we need to tell people?’ And that was before the Internet; we didn’t have the same resources.”

In Felicia’s early news experience, she witnessed disaster—she later reported on 9/11 and the first Gulf War, too—but business and financial news reporting have shaped much of her career. Felicia started at the Financial News Network (FNN), a cable station, in New York before cable was relevant and before business news had emerged as “the next big thing.”

Felicia had always thought of herself as a producer. Her first airtime came when the anchor seat of “This Morning’s Business” became vacant, and the program’s managing editor suggested that Felicia might sit in. The show’s general manager thought his girlfriend might do as well in the seat—but an independent analyst of the audition tapes chose Felicia. There, in the basement of New York’s old Exxon building, the producer became an anchor.

The first person she interviewed was Larry Kudlow, a business legend. “I hadn’t studied business and barely knew the difference between a stock and a bond,” Felicia says. “Larry gave me my reading list, which included the Wall Street Journal and Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”— a tome that introduced Felicia to the concept of bubbles, among other financial phenomena (the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1600s—when tulips traded at a higher price than gold—was one of the 1841 book’s case studies).

Felicia hit her first bump when CNBC bought FNN and the supply-demand balance left Felicia without a job. She moved to London, signed on for a few classes at Sotheby’s and made a list of just about every producer in London. Before she’d exhausted her list, a friend’s husband mentioned that the Financial Times planned a new business show, and Felicia got her break in London. She joined CNBC in 1992 as London correspondent from the Financial Times, where she anchored three business shows seen on Sky Television and Superchannel.

Since 2003, Felicia has been co-anchor of NewsChannel 4. Prior to that, she was the co-anchor for NewsChannel 4’s “Weekend Today in New York,” the station’s top-rated weekend morning news programs. She joined News Channel 4 in October 1998 from CNBC, where she was co-anchor of “Today’s Business” and “Market Watch.” While at CNBC, Felicia also served as a contributor to the weekday editions of “Today” in New York, providing daily business and stock market updates. She also has contributed reports to NBC “News at Sunrise.”

One of Felicia's most important tenets in preparing and delivering the news is this: “If I give my word to somebody, I stand by it,” she says. “ [But] the news is never about me. The news is the news: a bombing in Egypt, an explosion in an apartment building in Queens. I like to tell stories that affect a great number of people; I like to tell them as much as I can.”

Over a year ago, Felicia broke a story about ”naked shorts”—a stock is sold short without any ability or intention to ever cover the sale, a crime according to the SEC regulations, but a crime that has not regularly been punished. That story has since held server space on financial Internet sites and blogs, and in publications such as the Wall Street Journal.

Felicia claims that her only formal training for becoming a broadcast journalist came from Dale Deletis, former Milton Speech Team coach. “The gift of being able to write well has also been very important.

A news story should be simple to digest,” she says.

Felicia applied to Milton late and enjoyed the unusual experience of living as a member of the Pieh household with former Headmaster Jerry Pieh and his family. “I spent two great years there with them and their slobbering dog,” she laughs.

Felicia has been nominated for an Emmy five times.

Name: Ned Roberts ’93
Station: Reporter, WTSP-TV News, Tampa, Florida

Ned believes that the best television news pieces let the characters tell the story. “The power is hearing directly from the source. In a well-done piece, you use everything you have. TV is a visual medium, so it pays to maximize what you get on tape.”

Ned has been telling the stories well, as evidenced by an Emmy—one of two—he won in 2004 for writing “Homecoming” about a soldier’s return from Afghanistan. “In local news, I think that writing is an important piece that often gets overlooked,” he says.

Finding a compelling story is another must-have, like Ned’s story about Amos King, an inmate of the Florida prison system who was scheduled to be put to death until Governor Jeb Bush granted a temporary stay after Ned contacted the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that handles cases where postconviction DNA testing of evidence can yield conclusive proof of innocence. “I asked if they were looking at the case,” Ned recalls. He explained the lack of conclusive physical evidence against King in stories that traced King’s plight. In the end, most physical evidence had been lost or destroyed, and Ned witnessed King’s execution on February 27, 2003, but Ned maintains that it was right to pursue the story and bring the issue of DNA evidence in old criminal trials to people’s consciousness. “The real power of local news is to spur government and community action,” Ned says.

Ned’s continuing coverage of Death Row inmate King earned him an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2003. Also that year, he won an Emmy Award for his live report from a hurricane simulator. In 2002, his report on the U.S. Coast Guard tall ship Eagle earned him an Emmy Award nomination. When Ned pursues an assignment or an idea, he’s “thinking about what story I can tell and whether it’s something that I might want to know about.

“I don’t go through a lot of mental preparation [even for difficult stories]. On some level, a lot of people want to talk to us. It’s a catharsis [if they’re in a crisis]. There are ways to be kind and understanding when you approach someone with hard questions. The bottom line is that if people want to tell their stories, I can help them.”

Ned realized the power of storytelling at an early age: “When I was a kid, I watched a lot of local news. I did speech team and knew that I wanted to apply those skills directly—that I wanted to follow this path.

“I think that [TV news] often gets a bad rap for not being serious enough. A ton of really conscientious people are in this business for the right reasons.
“People in the audience really develop a connection with the people who bring news into their homes. In the end, what wins out is good storytelling. What I love about my job is that I learn something new every day and can share it with the community.

“I become a mini-expert.”

Ned Roberts joined Tampa Bay’s 10 News as a general assignment reporter in May 2000. Before moving to the Bay Area, he worked as a reporter in Jacksonville, Florida, at WJXX-TV.

Prior to his time in Florida, Ned reported for the CBS affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky, during a fellowship. His work there earned him national recognition for excellence in broadcast journalism. He won a first-place award for Spot News from the Society of Professional Journalists, as well as a first-place award from the Hearst Foundation.

Ned graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in June 1998.

Name: Caroline Cornish Kmack ’94
Station: Reporter, WSCH,
Portland, Maine

A Milton assignment brought Caroline to the decision to become a journalist.

“In Mr. Fricke’s non-fiction English class, we had to write an article about anything we wanted. I loved the Red Sox and watching the news, so my father suggested I write my article about television sports reporters. I called channels 4, 5 and 7.

Bob Lobel invited me to the station for an interview. I talked to him for 20 minutes, and then he let me watch the 6 o’clock news from the studio. Afterward, he told me I asked some very good questions and he gave me his scripts.

“At the time, it didn’t occur to me that anchors toss their scripts out after every broadcast, so I thought he was the greatest guy I had ever met. I still have the scripts. I think I got a B on the paper, but I realized then that not only was I capable of becoming a reporter, I was going to become one.” As her advisor and speech coach, Dale Deletis helped her gain confidence to speak in front of crowds and in almost any other situation, she adds.

“Milton gave me the tools to think critically about the world and encouraged me to think about issues that may not affect me directly,” Caroline says.

Now Caroline helps other think: “In the broadest sense, my job is to keep people informed about what’s going on in the world. But my goal also is to get people to care about what’s going on in their communities.

“My first priority is to get the facts right. Your writing or your pictures don’t matter if the story is wrong. You have to do everything you can to represent the truth. To that end, I feel my job is always to be fair. Sometimes you interview people you don’t like, but that can’t affect your reporting. My job is to present all sides fairly.

“My best moments come when I try to do a little extra to help the story. A couple times, my photographer and I have gone out of our way to get one more picture or one more interview that ends up leading us to a treasure that makes the story 100 times better,” she says. “For instance, one day we heard that police were going to search the home of the estranged husband of a murder victim, Chellie Calloway. We had no idea where the house was in the town. But as we searched, we ended up finding the victim’s brother, who gave us insight into who Chellie was. That interview allowed our viewers to see her as a person, not a statistic.”

Caroline loves her work, but the public’s perception that TV news reporters care more about the story than about people is frustrating, she says. “I think the most difficult part of my job is going out to a story that’s sad or upsetting, like a murder or a drowning, and having people act as though I am purposefully antagonizing them. I ask questions because those people can help you understand the victim, and sometimes people want to talk. It’s my job to let people know what’s going on, whether it’s good news or bad.”
As a reporter for five years, Caroline says she is witnessing a shift in the way news is collected and broadcast. “I hear people talk about how the 24-hour news cycle puts more pressure on journalists to get their work done quickly, and that pressure can lead to mistakes. That’s true, but the biggest challenge reporters face is separating facts from rumors. Many blogs out there give information that may or may not be accurate. No one wants to be behind the pack, but now we need to be more careful than ever that our information is correct before we go with it.”

Caroline Cornish Kmack (who does not use “Kmack” professionally) joined the News Center team in January 2004. She began her reporting career at WNNE in White River Junction, Vermont, and then moved to WPTZ in Plattsburgh, New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communication studies and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.

Heather Sullivan

 

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