Category: Blog Post

This morning’s rumor has Jeff Kiernan leaving his job as news director at WCCO-TV for an upgrade in Boston.

As the hacks says … “Developing”.

(Update) It is now confirmed. Kiernan, news director for ‘CCO since 2003, will exit here on the 19th and begin work on the 24th in Boston for the two CBS owned-and-operated stations, WBZ and Channel 38. Former WCCO (and KSTP) GM, Ed Piette is currently the resident boss for those two operations. Boston is the country’s seventh-largest media market, the Twin Cities are 14th.

I spoke with Kiernan a few moments ago. Having covered some colossal clunker news directors over the years I have no problem at all in saying that Kiernan, who did 20 years in Milwaukee before coming here, is one of the brighter and more thoughtful newsroom managers to work these towns in the last 20 years. He is a careful, fellow, however.

At a moment when new media and internet-TV convergence imperils local TV news at least as much as newspapers, Kiernan has demonstrated politically dexterity in maintaining ‘CCO’s reputation as the first-stop for breaking news amid serious financial pressures from parent company Viacom, Inc.

I asked Kiernan if he could be objective now about the qualitative differences between the cities’ four TV news shops. In my opinion very little separates the news-gathering/story-telling abilities of KARE, WCCO and KSTP, with KMSP, depending on the reporter, just slightly back. Yet audience habits are deeply ingrained. When the bridge collapsed WCCO drew the bulk of the audience share during prime time, but KARE claimed the 10 pm news while KSTP did a terrific job staying on it round the clock — an advantage to not having distant corporate masters to answer to.

Kiernan took the, “there is tremendous quality in the Minneapolis St. Paul [TV news] market” angle, which was a little disappointing, but entirely arguable if you’ve ever watched the follies that play night after night in markets as huge as Los Angeles, for example. “I have a great deal of respect for KARE, KSTP and KMSP,” he said. “They each, I think, offer very distinct choices, and each produces quality.”

Ok, so he’s not going to call anyone a demented rat bastard.

How about how many reporters and photographers he’d add to WCCO to bring it up to his ideal staff level?

“Well, you know, even if I had 10 more reporters and 10 more photographers there would still be times when I’d say I didn’t have enough. But as the business continues to evolve, you simply have to be realistic. This is a business. And in some places we’re seeing audience declines and advertising revenue declines. There is a tremendous amount of change out there. I choose to be realistic and acknowledge that.”

I told him that from my perspective very few news directors stay in their jobs, much less get promoted up, by constantly complaining about a lack of resources.

“You have to be realistic,” he repeated.

And give me an idea, I asked, how much change you see coming in the look and tone of local TV newscasts over the next, say, seven years.

“Seven years! I’d shorten that up to a year from now, or even six months. Issues of convergence, new media and things we know nothing about today will have a significant impact on this business.”

My point was the static formatics of local TV news, the mom and dad anchor “teams”, the strict allotment of time to weather and sports, the whole “Leave it to Beaver” atmosphere that so often reminds you of something dug out of a time capsule. You’d think by it is a shtick long overdue for serious re-invention.

I didn’t really expect Kiernan, a realistic TV news businessman, to agree with me and say, “You know, you’re absolutely right. This stuff is so hopelessly cornball it couldn’t open for Mr. Ed. Just the other day I was thinking of dumping Shelby and Amelia for these two Goth mimes I saw at the Fringe Festival, but then I got this Boston gig.”

Bottom line is that Kiernan avoided making news himself, which I get. TV news, local-style, is a business, and right now it is a precarious business. What has worked is still working well-enough, revenue-wise, and in reasonably large part, journalism-wise, that no corporate board is going to blow it up for the hottest trend of the hour.

But another couple years of 15% annual audience declines and rapid expansion of video news prowess from the Web 2.0 crowd and precarious will get pushed closer to, “Evolve or Die.”

I told Kiernan I’d keep up with him.

As for Kiernan’s replacement, WCCO’s press release talks about the usual extensive, exhaustive nation-wide search, yadda yadda. But two names that may be of immediate and logical interest would be former KSTP news director, Scott Libin, now down at the Poynter Institute, and Libin’s second-in-command at KSTP, Mark Ginther, now with WFAA in Dallas. Either would offer a fairly seamless transition from Kiernan and both are thoroughly familiar with this market.

For a couple weeks I’d been hearing rumors of a directive … or something … to the Star Tribune editorial page from Chris Harte, the ex-Knight Ridder executive, (way back in the early ’90s), and as far as anyone knows the only Avista member with any actual newspaper experience. At first hearing the information was ninth-hand, at best. But the story had Harte telling (those who remain) on the paper’s edit page staff to go easy on calling for gas tax increases in the aftermath of the I-35W bridge collapse.

Really? Why would Chris Harte care enough to stick his nose into something like that? Isn’t Par Ridder the publisher? (He is isn’t he?) If anyone, wouldn’t Ridder be the one to open the door to the dimly-lit offices of the Strib’s Bartleby-like Op-Ed wretches and admonish them with something like, “Now, now you crazy Commie, hippie kids. Let’s not get carried away with silly notions of throwing money at problems. We all know how ineffective and wasteful government is. I mean it’s not like a big public company that’s been laying off people left and right forking over $600,000 to an ace executive like me in return for my promise to stay in a job I left anyway barely six months later.”

Eventually, with the departure of Steve Berg from the Strib just before Labor Day, I found someone with a first-hand connection to the story. And what do you know, the rumors appear to have been pretty much true.

According to Berg, Harte did NOT order the editorial staff to reverse its long-standing support of a gas tax increase, (there hasn’t been one in 19 years). “It wasn’t like that,” says Berg. “Rather it was suggested heavily that we be careful to include other options in what we wrote.”

Uh, huh. So Harte strolls in one day not long after the bridge goes down and says …

“This was all by long-distance phone.”

What? He wasn’t even in town?

“If he was I didn’t see him. But we got this by phone. I think he called from Maine or Texas.”

I told Berg the first question(s) that crossed my mind when I heard the story was, “Who got to Harte that fast, and why did he listen?” I mean, as everyone knows all too well, Avista Capital Partners has demonstrated almost zero interest in ingratiating itself as a member of the Twin Cities community. It isn’t known if Harte keeps even an apartment here. But the rest of the visible members of the “partnership” are East Coasters. Why would they give two cents … or 10 cents … if the Minnesota State Legislature hiked the gas tax?

“He never spelled out why,” says Berg, who incidentally has agreed to write for Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com. “A cynical speculation could be as simple as he was concerned about the cost of running the [delivery] trucks.” The delivery trucks. The cost could add up, never mind that gas prices are spiking up and down 30-40 cents a gallon depending how close we are to a holiday weekend. Eventually though, with an extra dime or quarter here and there you’d be talking real money. Maybe even enough to imperil Avista’s end-of-the-year bonuses.

Berg, who handled transportation issues for the Strib’s edit page, doubts Harte or anyone else at Avista, “has actually sat down and studied the state budget.” He suspects rather, “They’re really interested in tone, in us being less like a knee-jerk liberal editorial page,” never mind all those pesky years Berg and his pals had spent actually reading the state budget and following the local politicking — in person, not by long-distance phone conversation.

In fairness to Avista, Bergs adds, McClatchy was just as concerned with not “antagonizing local readers” with pro-tax editorials. “They were also urging us to be more nuanced in what we wrote.”

“Nuanced” could be construed as corporate code for “mushier”, or in the context of adequate infra-structure funding, less informed in terms of how far the state has fallen behind, and more, shall we say, pandering, to the usual noisy critics whose cynical small government crusade is doing to public schools, police and fire funding, what has already been done to highways and bridges.

But back to the, “Who?”

I remain intensely skeptical that Chris Harte, vacationing in Maine or managing his portfolio in Texas suddenly got a bee up his silk boxers and speed dialed the edit board to urge nuance on their tax editorials. And yes, I love a good conspiracy. You know where powerful, well-connected people talk to each other privately, like peers. So I’m thinking somebody — someone here — contacted Harte first, urging him to urge his paper to dial back on … yadda yadda. But who? Who would have the most to gain from the Star Tribune “nuancing” down from gas tax, to “a range of other options”?

And I’m sorry. I don’t even have ninth-hand as to who that might be.