[5/96]

By Valerie Hyman (valhyman@poynter.org)

What a privilege it is to produce news programs, and what a challenge. To decide what goes in and what stays out, to influence reporters and photojournalists as they work, to determine how to present stories most effectively, to shape the way news programs are promoted.

Lots of details and pressures influence those decisions on a daily basis, but at their foundation must be the principles of journalism and the role of journalists in a free society: to seek truth and report it as fully as possible, to be independent of associations that could compromise editorial integrity, and to minimize the inevitable harm reporting news causes.

It's hard to remain true to those principles in today's competitive environment. You may enter a newsroom that has chosen to do "happy, warm, fuzzy" news, perhaps to the exclusion of important, albeit unpleasant, stories. Or your first job may put you in the swirling middle of a tabloid-style approach, emphasizing high story count, violence, and sex. My advice: stay true to your principles and you'll never go wrong. In fact, you'll gain a reputation as a leader to whom others look for guidance.

Your job as a producer is to reach beyond overnight ratings to long term success, to reach beyond glitz to substance, to reach beyond format to responsiveness—all in the service of journalism that empowers citizens by informing them. To inform audiences, you must first engage them with compelling material, presented in a form that makes sense, in a context that shows you understand not just what happened, but what it means.

Lots of journalists think they have a lock on what their audiences need and want to know, but the most recent and comprehensive research shows they don't. That isn't surprising, considering that journalists as a group are younger, whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the public as a whole.

And to make matters worse, they spend most of their time talking to each other. Keep that in mind when you make decisions about what stories get covered and which don't, where to place stories in newscasts, and how much time to devote to them.

In fact, people across the country, in big cities and small, in North and South, tell researchers pretty much the same thing, and it goes something like this:

"I want to see stories about issues that make a difference in my life, presented in a way I can understand. Don't just show me crime after crime—tell me trends or patterns of crimes in my community so I can get a clearer sense of what the problem is. Don't just show minorities as criminals and victims—incorporate people of color throughout the news, regardless of whether the story involves race. Don't pander to what you think will draw my attention to your news program—sex and violence—show me you care about my community by spending the time and resources to explain even the most complicated issues in a clear and compelling way. And include the good things in our town as well as the bad."

It's good advice. And it's time we journalists started to follow it. Here are some ideas on how to get started:

Write a mission statement for your news program, in keeping with the overall mission for the newsroom and the station. Include such things as your target audience, the program's general pace and style, and mix of local, national, and international news.

Treat reporter/photographer "crews" as teams. Coach them at the front end of their day, by asking what they anticipate to be the focus of their story, and what interviews and visuals they think they'll need to tell it. Encourage them to emphasize interviews with people directly effected by the story, and play down the "talking heads" of experts and government officials.

Encourage reporters and photographers to look for details to help describe what it was like to be in this story, the "telling tidbits" that recapture the experience for viewers.

Be flexible with your format. When a reporter comes up with an enterprise story and it's compelling, let it run long. Break out an important element with an anchor voiceover and a graphic. Tease a sidebar to the lead story for after weather. Be open to 45-second packages from reporters on matters that require no more than that to make their point. Remember: let the content determine the form.

Don't let crime stories slither into your newscast. That's how we've come to have segments full of unrelated crimes, complete with body bags, bloody sidewalks, and blacks and Latinos in handcuffs. Instead, make deliberate decisions about each story, make each meaningful, and put each in context. That could mean grouping certain crimes for a brief overview once a week, or using graphic maps to show where crimes occur over time.

Become familiar with a wide range of computer databases, and do your best to ensure your newsroom uses them. It's especially important to gain access to city and county government, police, and judicial public records. They can enable you to break important stories 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Make sure your Rolodex of news sources includes lots of people of color in a variety of areas: a black pediatrician, an Asian chef, a Latina principal. Go out of your way to offer those sources to reporters at the beginning of their reporting day.

Know what equipment your graphic artist and/or technical director has available, what it can do, and how long it takes to create the most-used graphics. Get specific ideas and photocopies of maps to them as early in the day as possible.

Disclose your process to your audience. If a grieving family has invited you to cover the funeral of a child, tell that to your audience in the lead to the story. Make sure whenever you use pictures and sound of distraught people, that your audience knows you did not exploit them, but rather followed their wishes. And then, of course, make sure you're telling the truth!

Be the best writer you can be. Use the active voice. Be sparing with adjectives. Eliminate cliches. Use short sentences to tell complicated stories. Remember, clarity comes from selection, not compression, so make sure everything you write is central to the focus of the story.

Encourage creativity. Consider a regular feature written by and for teenagers from local high schools, or a photo essay to close a newscast, or a spot for guest commentators from the community, or letters to the newsroom.

When you face a difficult decision, create options beyond, "We either use it or we don't!" For example, if you decide to run some especially sensitive or potentially harmful video, consider calling the people involved, and letting them know about your decision before the story airs. The idea is not to ask their permission, but to be sensitive to their feelings. The editorial decision is yours.

Be generous with praise and stingy with criticism. Consider mistakes—especially your own—as learning opportunities.

Always remember, the journalist's primary responsibility is to the public.

When you become a journalist, you answer a noble call. Nobody else does what journalists do in our society. No other professionals are responsible for revealing information, for holding the powerful accountable, for giving voice to the voiceless. Only journalists carry that burden. With it comes certain obligations and, potentially, the ability to make the world a better place.

Valerie Hyman is Director of the Program for Broadcast Journalists at the Poynter Institute and has written several on-line articles. This article is reprinted with permission from ENG: Television News and the New Technology, 3rd edition.

[12/96]

Commentary by Alice Main (webdesign@mainhat.com)

The story was about homosexuals using a local park for sexual encounters. KENS-TV caught some of those encounters on tape. The story that aired included some graphic video of oral sex between two men. Much of the video had been digitized, but this portion either had not been digitized at all, or the digitization was ineffective. After the piece was over, the anchor apologized to the viewers for what they'd just seen. The station's public response was that no one had screened the piece before it aired, because it didn't get finished until the last second.

[There was] much debate about the role of the producer and management in allowing the story to air. It's all about accountability and responsibility and authority and power. Some have argued that the producer should have killed the story, since it wasn't ready for screening before it airtime. Others say a producer can't and won't do that.

The truth is, it's not too hard to imagine something like this happening in other newsrooms. It's not too hard to imagine being the producer to whom it happened.

You know the scenario: the reporter and photographer and perhaps a manager have been working on the story for a while, and you've had nothing to do with it. You know it's airing Tuesday night, and it's called Perverts in the Park, and that's about it. Naturally, since you weren't in on any of the advance planning, you assume someone else is taking care of the sensitive video issues. And then it happens. Blowjobontheair.

We can all take lessons from this episode.

Number 1: planning for sweeps. Does your newsroom keep stories secret until day-of-air, even from you, the producer? Insist on more knowledge. Ask for a story description, and ask whether there are any special concerns about the story.

Number 2: Are reporters assigned to work with producers on their pieces? If not, this may be something you can change. Ask the news director if you can be assigned to work with a reporter on a sweeps story. The news director will usually be happy to comply, and the reporter will usually welcome the input. If you're the producer on the piece, you'll know the issues. You'll know if there's sensitive video. You'll know if the editing is running late. You will have talked with the editor about digitizing ALL the video. (Producing the story doesn't necessarily mean you have to go out and shoot it with the reporter & photographer. You can talk about the story with the reporter, assist with some research, make some phone calls, work on graphics and pre-production, and suggest copy changes. You've been involved, and you know what the story's about. It's in your newscast. If nothing else, you'll tease it better!)

Number 3: know your power and its limits. Can you really kill a major story because it's late? Will the news director stand behind you if you do? The answer to that can come only from the top of your own organization.

Bottom line: It is your newscast and your responsibility, but you may not have absolute power over what's in it. You need to maximize your power until it matches your level of responsibility. Ask your news director what would happen if a major story aired in your newscast, and it contained serious nudity or cursing. If the first words out of your ND's mouth are, "How could you let something like that happen?" .. then you know you need to be butting in, asking questions, and generally getting in the way when the big stories are being put together. Don't let someone else's mistake flush your career down the toilet.

[9/97]

By Bill Jacobs (bnjacobs@erols.com)

Firm and direct differences of opinion are a part of every newsroom. If you have a talented staff, you have a number of intelligent points of view, and those opinions will vary on a day-to-day basis.

A newsroom is unlike any other business environment. The deadline pressures forces direct statements and blunt answers. There is little time to discuss breaking news situations politely in committee. At times it's going to be both rude and vulgar.

There are a lot of things said "in the heat of the battle" that are not personal, nor are those statements intended to be insulting.

However, many of the people in control of a newsroom tend to believe that noise and vulgarity equate intelligence and strength. They feel if their message isn't being understood, the best way to clarify it is to say it over and over in a screech. If 15 or 20 people do that in a tense situation, it's easy to see that there can be a lot of squawking and little communication.

When I was a young hot-shot producer trying to flex my management muscle, I made the same mistakes. But a terrific news director, who was also a competent educator, took me aside and gave me some useful information.

During tense situations, people's voices should actually get lower. Loud barking from producers are not the sign of people in control of their broadcasts. In fact, it has just the opposite effect. Whether they realize it or not, producers are at the helm of their programs and people look to them for leadership. If anchors, reporters, engineers see a loud, obnoxious, cynic, bouncing off the walls of the news department before a broadcast, it hardly fills them with the feeling of confidence.

This wise manager told me, "You don't get paid to stack and backtime a day-to-day newscast. I can teach college interns to do that." He added, "You are paid to handle your broadcast and the newsroom when the s*** hits the fan. You earn your money by showing calm and direct leadership in tense situations."

The troops need to see a level-headed person in control when there's a hot debate.

Bottom line: Yes, direct, honest, and an open exchange of ideas in a newsroom is very healthy. The staff is eager to accept praise, but they should also be ready to share ideas and the responsibility of helping direct editorial content. Debate is useful and often enlightening.

But too often, it's the meanest and the loudest who get their way—and it has nothing to do with the quality of their skills or the content of their character.

The good news departments know how to turn up the volume without turning up the noise.

[4/96]

By George Gillis (kelly+gillis@edge.net)

Greetings from an ex-producer who has managed to retain a semblance of sanity after many years in the business. As you know, the producer is always on the spot. (S)he is given all the responsibility for a particular show and basically none of the authority to make the changes necessary to make that show the best it could be. One enters the news room at the beginning of one's shift and finds the anxiety level begins at '50' on a scale of 1-100. It goes up from there throughout the day. Breaking news requiring helicopter coverage seems to occur when the only available photographer doesn't 'do' helicopters. The battery packs for cameras are all either discharged or have battery memory of two minutes. The chief photographer is in the bathroom throwing up. The lead tape editor is stoned. The news director came in with a bad back and has had to fire someone to relieve his pain. He spends the day on the phone to cohorts sharing news war stories. The male anchor has spent two hours trying to prove the producer was incorrect in his spelling of the word 'restaurateur'. The executive producer is consummating an illicit affair with a staffer in his downstairs office. The female anchor is stoned. The technical director is stoned. The assignment editor is virtually deaf from the 18 radios he keeps at full blast tracking EMS, police and fire departments of thirty jurisdictions, the competition and his wife's cell-phone. The computer system is down. The script for the show has more blanks in it than copy. The top three stories are being done by reporters stuck in a massive traffic jam and are feeding their scripts by radio. The tape line-up for the show is lost. The male anchor's earphone has fallen out. The traffic department changed all the spots in the show. Top-level executives of a major multi-national corporation which just bought the station are in the control room and you have mistimed the show by thirty seconds. You go to the neighborhood pub for a beer after the show and the male anchor and his entourage sit at one end of the bar while the female anchor and her group (the anchors don't speak to each other off-air—they can't stand each other) sit at the other end. Once again, you are in the middle. I've been out of the business about seven years. My book will be entitled "Only the Call Letters Change'. Do I miss it? Are there any openings in New England?

[2/96]

By Alice Main (AJMain@email.com)

"Many of us don't mind the hours, but do mind being considered an afterthought." Jeff R. Field, Morning Producer KCTV Kansas City

"It's amazing how drunk someone can get and still manage to dial the correct 7 digits to reach a TV station at 3 AM" Ward Koppel, Morning Producer KOVR Sacramento

The early-morning hours present big possibilities for news organizations looking for ways to expand their operations. Three-hour weekday newscasts are becoming more common, and the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers now have to compete with The Saturday Morning Edition.

The only problems with expanding the morning shows is finding the people to make it happen. As discussed in the October issue of The Producer Newsletter (The [Alleged] Producer Shortage), many news directors say they have a difficult time finding the right people to fill their producing jobs. Recruiting morning producers is about five times harder than finding evening-shift producers. Let's face it, it's a killer shift.

THE NATURAL REVULSION TO VAMPIRISM

The news directors are calling. We've heard you're a great producer, they say. There's a great opening for you at our station, they say. It's a bigger market, a wonderful opportunity for you. We need a real dynamo to revamp our morning newscast.

Whoa! Stop right there! Mornings? I'm past that, you say. I'm doing weekends now (or noon, or 10 PM). And it's not my idea of a dreamy lifestyle, you say, sleeping every day away, spending the nights gargoyle-eyed and cranky, churning out stories all by myself in a semi-darkened newsroom with only Sam the custodian and his extremely loud vacuum cleaner to keep me company.

But are you missing something by refusing to consider these opportunities? Perhaps.

"Morning news has been my life for over 15 years," says Ward Koppel. "I'm told I'm one of the first people to produce a local morning newscast in the U.S., and that I have been doing it longer than anyone else."

Koppel started at KCRA in Sacramento in 1980, eventually expanding its half-hour newscast to 90 minutes, and later did the same at KOVR, where he's still working. Koppel says getting the right amount of sleep is crucial to success on the overnight shift.

"The key is to set aside the same hours everyday to sleep. My sleep hours haven't changed to speak of in 15 years: to bed at about 9 AM, up at about 5 PM. I can stay up later, but I have to be in bed from about 1 PM to 4 PM. I guess that is my REM sleep time. I convert to a day person on Saturdays and Sundays, except that on Sunday I take a 3 hour nap from about 3 PM to 6 PM," explains Koppel.

Koppel has even found time to get married and start a family, and his odd schedule actually helps. "It is especially helpful to our personal life to have a parent home 24 hours a day to handle doctors appointments, and other responsibilities children bring," he says.

But the shift is clearly not right for everyone. Gina Diamante is now the executive producer at KADY in Oxnard, California, but recalls her early-morning experience at KFMB in San Diego with something less than fondness:

"I launched the early morning newscast—finally, my own show instead of substituting for someone else. I hated it! The hours killed me. My fiancé hated it, because I was always at work or asleep in the hours he was home.

After six weeks, I decided for my own mental health and t he sake of my impending marriage, I needed to get off the morning shift and back to something more normal," Diamante says.

MAKING IT WORK

Phoenix is a tough market these days, and that's where you'll find Rochelle Brookson toiling away on Good Morning Arizona, a three-hour newscast that competes with four other local morning broadcasts.

"I've worked all shifts in the business and the true overnight producer/writer shift (midnight or so until 9 AM or so) is not only tough on your body; it's tough on your confidence and ability to grow," says Brookson.

Brookson says the Good Morning Arizona team has found the best way to make the shift work is with what she calls the two Fs: Fun and Feedback.

Fun can mean sending a writer out as a field producer on a story, having everyone wear his or her college colors, bringing in free food, or pitching in on a 2 AM Domino's pizza delivery.

Feedback requires a real commitment from everyone. "Good Morning Arizona has five writer s and a news producer who fit that true overnight shift. On a daily basis they get feedback on writing, on content, on covering breaking news from both the GMAZ line producer and the GMAZ executive producer. Even though they don't see other dayside managers or staffers often, they're constantly getting input," says Brookson.

Feedback, or lack of it, was an issue echoed by Ward Koppel in Sacramento.

"(Morning producers need) the ability to understand what your news director's goals are for y our show without daily feedback. You have to be able to read the mind of a person you see only in passing once a month. Hopefully you have a news director you can be honest and direct with. Your one-on-one communications will be few and far between. So each will be vital to your relationship, and the success of your show," he says.

Janice Houston has been producing the 90-minute early morning newscast at WXIA in Atlanta for the past year. She's produced in other time periods in Birmingham, but Atlanta beckoned not only as a larger market, but as an opportunity for her to learn.

"I'm the manager overnight," Houston says. "It's a good chance for me to take on more responsibility, because my ultimate goal is to work in management."

Jennifer Childree and Sarah Dascanio are the producer and associate producer for "31 NewsMorning" at WAAY in Huntsville, Alabama. Childree, Dascanio and an overnight reporter put the 60-minute newscast together. Dascanio has been a full-time employee since October, hired shortly after her arrival as an unpaid intern in September. She says she'll be happy when she's "paid her dues" and can move on to a different shift, but for the time being she enjoys the work and her colleagues.

"We make the most of our shift by working together and adding nice easy morning things like our producer's new puppy (our unofficial mascot, named Doppler Max), holiday decorations, etc.," says Dascanio.

SUPPORT STAFF: FROM SAM
THE CUSTODIAN TO A TEAM OF WRITERS

"A morning news producer is a jack of all trades," says Koppel. "From 11 PM to 7 AM, you're the acting News Director, General Manager, Assignment Editor, Community Affairs Director, and even owner—all while trying to put your show together, listen to the scanners, and deal with viewer phone calls. It's amazing how drunk someone can get and still manage to dial the correct 7 digits to reach a TV station at 3 AM."

Koppel says staff sizes for morning news in Sacramento have shrunk in recent years. He's alone in his newsroom from 11 PM until 3:30 AM, when his writer and videotape editor arrive. At 4:30, he sees the combination photographer/live truck operator, the director, Chyron operator, and stillstore operator.

The anchors and the rest of the technical crew come in at 5 AM, 30 minutes before air. A reporter is brought in only for breaking stories.

At KFOR in Oklahoma City, producer Becky Kellogg has a writer, a photographer, and an editor to help her with the Newschannel's Morning Edition, a 90-minute hard-news oriented broadcast that regularly wins its time period. She brings in a reporter a couple of days a week to handle breaking news.

At Atlanta's WXIA, the morning news is also 90 minutes. Producer Janice Houston has an associate producer for most of the night, and a writer who arrives at 4 AM.

Robin Radin produces the weekend morning news at WLWT in Cincinnati. "I the only person in the newsroom until 4 AM, when the anchors come in. They are assigned stories to write, but the newscast is about 90% producer-written. I am also considered the overnight assignment editor, and I am lucky enough to have on-call photogs all over the tri-state, who willingly go out on over-night stories," says Radin.

Jeff R. Field produces the morning news at KCTV in Kansas City. Besides the short staffing, he says, "an added problem is that once we find someone who's good, they're usually snapped up quickly by the 5, 6 & 10 crews, or hired as a full-time employee by one of our competitors. The morning shows are constantly seen as "training ground", even though they're longer and more complex than the others. If news managers want to keep early morning producers, they should pay them fairly, and give them enough manpower support so they don't get burned out. Many of us don't mind the hours, but do mind being considered an afterthought," says Field.

Koppel says, no matter the staffing level, the morning producer needs the ability to oversee the rest of the crew. "'Oversee' is the key word here. I firmly believe you should not, and can not 'manage' people. You are working WITH the folks who put the show you produce on the air, they are not working FOR you. More than any other shift at a TV station, teamwork is critical to a morning newscast. Lets face it, on every given day, at least one of the people you work with is going to be either half asleep (understandable at 5 AM), or just plain having an off day. If everyone pitches in, everyone benefits from a good clean show, and the one or two days a month that you are half sleep or having an off day, there are people there to bail your tail out," Koppel says.

MORNING NEWS THAT WAKES PEOPLE UP

"Viewers at 5:30 AM are not watching the picture, they are listening, and only looking at the video when they want to check the time on the chyroned clock, when a story interests them or when the anchors call their attention to video about to be shown that is outstanding or interesting," Koppel says.

"A big chunk of your audience is naked and brushing their teeth, and they want anchors they feel comfortable inviting into their home, or more likely, bedroom."

So what's the right format for a morning news program? There is no "right format." Morning producers say their programs win because they're strictly hard news, because they're feature-heavy, because they're easy to watch, because the anchors are charismatic, because their weathercaster is funny, because they have sports every fifteen minutes, because there's no sports.

But some producers did share some interesting ideas.

Koppel brings in a stock broker three days a week. "Something that has just gone through the roof is a stock contest we do. Viewers mail in their stock pick, and our anchors and stock broker each pick a stock. Every Friday for three months we do an on-air update, then we close out the contest and send the winning viewer a small prize."

Field says his program introduced "Consta nt Weather" to his market. "It's a bar at the bottom of the screen that runs the current conditions, and the 1 PM and 4 PM forecasts at all times during the program," he says.

Each day of the week Field gives his viewers something different. Mondays, it's "Bits & Pieces," a collection of short voice-overs from the weekend feature feeds. Tabloid Tuesday brings headlines from the most notorious of the supermarket rags. Wednesday is a local history piece called "Betcha Didn't Know." Thursdays are for the Highlight Zone, a plays-of-the-week feature which Field writes and edits. And on Fridays, he writes and edits a local preview of all the new movies coming to local theaters.

And then there's what Field describes as his hardest-to-describe semi-regular feature. The morning crew has a plastic cow that they take along on vacation. "Cow Patty" has been to Ireland, the Chiefs/Cowboys game on Thanksgiving, and to Las Vegas. "We used a plastic cow because three goldfish we had on the air all died."

From: News Managers Over 35
Re: Our Communication Gap

Thanks so much to those of you who get up in the middle of the night to produce the early morning newscasts. When we were coming up through the ranks, most of us never had the opportunity to oversee an hour, an hour and one-half, or two and one-half hours of news in the morning. In most of our newsrooms, the earliest full newscast started at noon. We hope you feel lucky to have this experience. And by the way, we’re sorry that we rarely see any of your newscast that airs before 6 a.m. It’s just too early for us to get up. However, if you are unable to make it in to the station by midnight to get the show together, we’ll be really angry. Oh, and sorry about the lack of support staff. When we started in the business, we were unpaid interns willing to do anything to get even a part-time job in news. We worked our tails off, unlike those ungrateful paid interns who come in to stations now expecting to be handed their big break. Of course, we can’t get any paid interns for your shift. They don’t want to work the horrible hours.

We also want to apologize if we’ve criticized your inability to correctly time a newscast, and ridiculed your dependence on the newsroom computer system. You see, when we were producers, we had to learn to back time ourselves, in our heads. Then we used back-timing calculators just to check ourselves. We’re very proud of our back timing ability, even though it’s a little embarrassing when you balance your checkbook, pump your gas, or add up a restaurant tip in base 60. Back then, knowing how to back time was as important as knowing how to use a Web browser today. We’re actually very happy that you have a computer system to do the work for you, so you can spend your time researching more information for stories on the Internet. By the way, one of these days, you’ll have to show us how to produce a newscast on our new upgraded computer system, just in case we ever need to help out.

And, last week’s memo criticizing you for taking incorrect information off the wire – let us explain where we’re coming from. When we started in TV news, we had AP and UPI. Their stories printed out on separate machines simultaneously. We compared their copy and gave attribution when they differed. We’d like to get Reuters for you, but it’s just too expensive.

One of our top priorities before the next rating book is to get you all trained on how to cue live shots, move satellite time and use the RTS system in the control room. I know we complain that some of you don’t know how to do all of that correctly. We probably should have thought of that before we just threw you on a newscast.

We’d like to schedule the next producers meeting for next Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. I know that’s not a good time for most of you, but that really works out best for us.

Thanks again for all your hard work!

(As Vice President of Caruso & Company, Nancy Popkin represents news managers, producers and on-air talent. She was the assistant news director at WRAL-TV for 7 years, and is over 35. In her youth, Nancy was a producer at KABC in Los Angeles and many, many other newsrooms. You can contact Nancy at lilykins@prodigy.net or 215-369-2952.)

[7/96]

By Jimmy Valentine (jimmyv@adnc.com)

I view the news on my telly from a fun position. I have spent 30 years in broadcasting—most of it on the TV side. I'm old enough to have transitioned from Bell and Howell 16mm to the multi-chip beta cam, from souping film to ENG and thence to SNG and soon to digital data that will pop out of the cam and into your computer. I have directed, reported, produced, assigned and managed in newsrooms large and small. Like most TV news folks I have been a journeyman journalist. Moving from Tampa to Louisville to Dallas/Fort Worth, etc.

For the past two years I have been producing Talk Radio (oops, there goes half of our audience).

As a TV news dude I was addicted to local news shows. Watching news when you work in the business is actually work Did they have a story we didn't have? Did they do it better? Did they get the great shot? Did the technical work..You know how it goes.

Today as a radio talkshow producer I seldom watch local TV. Yes, I still deal in the marketplace of stories and ideas but I find that local TV has nothing to offer me. I keep trying but the prime time teases turn me off. The lead story detailing the latest drive by shooting, body found or the endless pictures of a great highway accident are of no value to me. It's all file tape!

As one who has been involved in countless special series geared to ratings sweeps I now find myself appalled at the TV and radio ads teasing exclusive coverage of an anchor person's pregnancy and promise to be there at the creation. The franchise items, "cooking with Fran," or "yardwork made easy," waste time that becomes increasingly valuable as one ages. Besides, I can dial up a specialized cable channel and get as much Fran and yard work as I desire.

I also agree, now, that most of the local TV (and a good measure of the network) stuff I see is slanted and biased and quite often very correct. Illegal aliens are "undocumented workers," in TV jargon. Christians involving themselves in their community are members of the "radical right."

Who am I to talk, you say? This guy works in "hate radio." Meanwhile let me refer you to the last major Times Mirror survey circa 1994/95. A well respected survey of the American electorate which reveals that more and more of us are getting information from talkradio (doncha hate that?).

I sincerely believe that, as in my life, TV news is on the brink of becoming irrelevant. There are so many other places to get cutsy, pretty, mayhem and disaster that the only salvation for local news may getting back to basics. City hall coverage, reporting new information (rather than parroting, with pictures, the morning edition of the Yukawhatch Daily Times), less sensationalism and more substance.

Despite the problems local TV news continues to shine when the major story hits. WAGA-TV in Atlanta did remarkable work the day of and the day after the Valu-Jet crash. Full bore coverage with reportage that the networks and newspapers were picking up only days later. I'll bet that is the case in your community too . . . when the big story happens Fran and the yard guy go out the window. News has priority in your newscast. Interesting concept, huh? Maybe we ought to try to convince our news managers (and consultants) that real news happens every day in our towns. And isn't pregnancy and the miracle of birth really a kinda private thing?

Jimmy Valentine is the producer of the The Roger Hedgecock Show (KSDO AM 1130 Newstalk Radio) San Diego, Ca.