WNBC/4: Chuck Scarborough Stays
Had a pleasant chat last with Chuck Scarborough - the dean of New York anchors and a master in the art of survival, TV-style - and he told me the following: He's staying.
Let me rephrase that: He's not going. Let me be even more clear: Chuck. Stays. At. Ch.4.
As you know, the NBC-owned station system has been in an uproar this week, even more so than usual. LA KNBC vet, Paul Moyer, was shown the door yesterday, while Len Berman - an institution in this town going back a quarter century - opted to leave within a couple months. According to the reports filed by our own Neil Best, the parting is amicable. Moyer, too, insisted to the LA Times that he was "retiring" which is a word that certainly implies he's going of his own volition.
But here's the simple fact: NBC is in a state of great anxiety - panic seems too strong a word, but maybe it isn't. They're now throwing the furniture out the window over at the Plaza and if a body happens to be sitting in that over-stuffed comfy chair, he or she goes too. In mid-winter, at least fifty people - many of their first-raters, including top newsroom editors like Peter Facini (long ago the station's Long Island producer) and Phil O'Brien - were fired or found the door on their own. Any one deemed "expensive" is thus deemed "expendable."
Thus the fear. A report in Gawker earlier this week had both Chuck and Moyer out the door, per "rumors," because they're exclusive members of the $3 Million club. So far, half right.
Here's what Chuck told me:
"No, I think I got lumped in with others somehow, but there's nothing to that. Nary a word has been said and quite the opposite - they've [management] assured me there is not a discussion going on. I've got three years and change as of July left on my contract, and so far as I know, I'll be working [to the end of it] if not beyond. There's nothing in the wind that I'm aware of."
"Do I feel confident? I'd tell you I'd feel a hundred percent confident [but] because the business changes all the time, this is a snapshot of this day. Those reports are completely erroneous and I've been assured by management that they are. They have shed some high-priced talent around the system, and whether they've finished doing that, I don't know. We've cut an awful lot here [as] the business model keeps changing. We're all caught up in this sort of perfect storm of ...a collapsing economy that [affects] your newspaper and my television station."
Yeah, we talked about Sue too.
"I hear nothing about Sue either," and he said they're gonna continue to be a team. "I think it'd be very difficult for them" to drop both.
Then, he got wistful: "If it ended tomorrow, I would be blessed to have been here that long [35 years!] and I have zero regrets, and I certainly wouldn't walk out of here angry. But I have hopes that I'll be at the helm here through the end of my contract."
Do I believe Chuck? Sure. Of course. The real question is this: Should he believe management?
Notwithstanding the obvious reason why he shouldn't - if they could hire a Latvian monk with purple hair and a Cyclops eye to anchor and who would cost nothing but still draw viewers, then...so long, Chuck! But I doubt if they can.
Three reasons why Chuck/Sue stay, and I could be wrong...I can be that way sometimes:
1.) It'd cost 'em around $10 million to cut bait. That's a golden exit ramp, and maybe a prohibitively expensive one.
2.) There really isn't anyone to replace this team; they ARE Ch. 4, and lose them and you become a bowl of oatmeal, indistinguishable from the other bowls of oatmeal out there. Also, Scarborough's a very good anchor - not some blow-dried twinkie - with a vast store of institutional knowledge and "marketplace equity."
3.) Chuck's also anchoring the new 7 p.m. telecast on the digital channel; this is a critical venture and so far, the 7 p.m. hour is pretty much the only reason to tune in; more on this in Monday's Newsday.
Again, I could be very wrong. The ineradicable truth: If Ch. 4 can find a cheaper way to do this, Chuck'll be spending a lot more time out in the Hamptons this summer. A source tells me, "this has gotta be his last contract. And then what..."
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Comments (13)
You are a huge jerk for being so nasty to this station in a time of economic distress. Shame on you!! A lot of us viewers find your nasty columns like this to be just pure venim--I will NEVER buy Newsday again!!
You know what we all think--you should be fired for a smarter journalist who has better things to write about then slamming continuously companies who are trying to do something different.
Lynn
Don't speak for me lady. I think you missed your meds this morning. Sounds like somebody's got some anger issues. All he was doing was letting us know that Chuck will stay at WNBC. Simple as that. NBC has been printing their own money for years. Why should we care about them?
Chuck and Sue are the top team among the English-language TV stations here. But in more than 30 years in TV, I have learned an indispensible rule about TV news: A great anchor cannot save a bad newscast, but a bad newscast can do terrible damage to the public perception of a great anchor. Cuts are inevitable in the current advertising climate. One must take care when cutting not to drive viewers away. Our product is not what we put on TV. It's the eyeballs in front of the TV. NBC has totally mis-handled its cuts and has driven viewers away, creating for itself a viscious cycle of declining viewership leading to declining revenues leading to still more cuts which drive away even more viewers.
It does sound alot as though the re-invention of NBC is really just a euphemisn for layoffs. Maybe the 20-30-somethings have finally broken through and somehow think that content center is going to work in place of newsroom. Hello? Content is not news. Mostly, it's junk, like the crap on CNN, which is probably most responsible for creating tv news content. The news business is a bunch of garbage these days anyway -- between infor-tainment, the blow-dry talking heads, twinkie brained casters -- Don't get me started!!!
I thought something changed at WNBC last summer. Must have been when Facini left. That newscast made me feel like if I wasn't watching ch. 4, I was missing the news. Now...not so much anymore. Cablevision should hire Facini...pay him whatever he wants, get some hi-def cameras, and it would kick major butt because it would be produced by a serious NY producer. C'mon Dolan...get going already with this!
Yes!!!! HI DEF Cameras FOR NEWS12!!!! You are CABLEVISION...have some SELF RESPECT!
WNBC's mistakes have been both on-camera and behind-the-scenes. They did get rid of a lot of key managers and producers. Petey Facini and Phil O'Brien were just two of them, older white guys who were squeezed out. On the technical side, they lost people to retirement/buyout/better jobs, but didn't replace them.
If local news is looked at by the quality of stories the organization puts out, and the geographic distrubution of those stories in a three-state market, WNBC just doesn't have the boots on the streets any more. And it shows. Pathetically.
As noted on an industry message board, WNBC has lost 60 - yes - 60 percent of its total viewers since 1990.
And if they're doing things for their website, it sure doesn't show. For a media website, it has about the least and hardest-to-access video anywhere.
I can't believe what passes for news these days. The WB or CW or PIX or whatever it's called these days; playing music behind the tight shirt wearing news/weather/traffic bimbettes. Even the one male on the show gets his tips frosted. They give a new meaning to the phrase: "Hard News".
I get excited like Pavlov's dogs whenever they do the traffic!
Can we please have some real news in New York? Please? Just rehire the old producers and scrap the stupid website/content center. What a joke.
My error - numbers above should say WNBC has lost 60 percent of its total viewers since 2000.
And looking at other stuff ... yes on the notion that Peter Facini should be hired by Patrick Dolan. But only to take his place as the head of all News 12 operations.
It doesn't matter if Chuck stays or goes. He's the captain of a ghost ship. Local TV news in New York lost it's mojo 9 years ago. It was rocking in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Now, it is hollow, plastic, dull, lifeless and looks like all the other crap in all the other markets. And the audience is going away. There is always something you can do -- but there are no Al Primo's out there anymore. The TV news executives have a lack of innovation that is beyond belief. They wouldn't dare try anything unless it was tested in Sheboygan, Wisconsin first. They are uptight, conservative, dullards -- and their newscasts look like it. If I could show you 30 years ago and Eyewitness News you would see passion, spark, and bigger numbers than a national MSNBC audience can get right now.
Yes, I agree.
I'm curious, how long will it be before WNBC has the kind of numbers they had back in 1972 when their 6 P.M. newscast was so dead last behind WABC and WCBS that in lieu of audience rating figures, an asterisk was placed? (At least back then, WNBC tried to get back into the game by creating "NewsCenter4." Today's suits, with each cut, are digging themselves into a deeper hole.)
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