"He must be important. Look at all those papers!" On the WWSB anchor desk. (2012) An Emmy nomination for news anchoring in 2012 showed me that maybe I should stick with TV news a while longer. I mean, here I am, anchoring weekends at a small station in Sarasota, and I snag a nomination going against every big-name anchor in the state. Don't get me wrong. I don't complain that I have not, and may never, become one of said big-name anchors. I like that that my job at WWSB-TV entails using just about every skill I've developed in more than — gasp! — two decades working at this profession. I anchor news two days a week and report news the other three. I also shoot and edit my own stories, write most of what I say when I anchor, and when our station's lone sports anchor is off on a weekend, I do his job too. But if you keep reading, you'll see it's nothing I haven't done before.
The police scanner crackled with chatter. A double shooting at an auto auction in Indiana, it said. "Two victims!" gushed the executive producer. "This is good sh*t! Go!" I never thought two people getting shot was good anything. Most other aspects of news reporting came easier. The ones that didn't I could usually disguise by telling my stories interestingly enough that you didn't notice any parts of them I missed. It took adjustment to cover murders, rapes and tax issues instead of the stories about football games I did during the 14 years I spent covering sports but once the story was shot, it came down to the same thing it always did: telling someone's story.
Whatever the subject, I have spent my adult life as a television storyteller. My travels and travails have also made me part wandering minstrel. The phrase "career path" accurately describes my professional life. I've gone up, down, around and even off the road a couple of times. A junior at the University of North Carolina, I got a two week long paid internship at WCHL Radio in Chapel Hill, NC to help cover a national Olympic style sports event going on in the area. I was young, willing to go anywhere, cover anything and cover it all day. The station let me. I worked 129 hours in the two weeks, got a full three hours course credit, made more than $400 and, best of all, the station hired me permanently. I stayed at 'CHL through graduation in May of 1988 and the summer following. I read the sports reports for their local daily news program, did play-by-play announcing for UNC baseball and women's basketball, reported local news stories and even did some DJ work.
Shooting all my own work grew old mainly because after two and a half years at the station I thought I was going to have to do it for the rest of my life. I began spending vacation time on job searches. I visited two photographers who had gone from Salisbury to the Lancaster/Harrisburg market in Pennsylvania and showed my tape around. I went to see another photog friend who worked in Norfolk, Virginia. I got to show his news director my tape and he liked it so much that even though he didn't have an opening, in my elation, I almost didn't bother trying to meet the news directors at the other two stations. When I did call, the ND at one simply blew me off and the other didn't go much better. News director Jay Mitchell at WTKR spoke curtly on the phone and sounded about as happy to hear from me as he would have been to hear from the IRS. But he agreed to see me. "Two thirty," he said. "You've got 15 minutes. That's your only shot."
That was all I wanted. Fifteen minutes later he offered me a job. I didn't even know the station had a job open and he didn't tell me until after he watched my tape. "You are really good," he said. I sat there stunned. Here I was, stuck in market 163 and here is this news director in the 40th market telling me how good I am. "How do I get out of Salisbury?" I asked. "I happen to have a job open now," he said. And just like that I had moved up a 123 markets. WTKR fired Jay Mitchell two months after I arrived in Norfolk. I met the same fate about a year and a half later. Mitchell's replacement, John Woodin, promoted me not once, but twice. Then one day he called me into his office and said, "Your anchoring isn't working out. We're going to have to let you go." I'm sure it was merely coincidence that my replacement's father was an executive in the company that owned WTKR.
Ted had liked my work in Norfolk and had even tried to hire me soon after he left for Providence. Fortunately for me, when I became, uh, available, he still wanted me and I left for New England. Four months after I got there, Ted left to become news director at WCCO-TV, the CBS owned station in Minneapolis. His replacement, Dan Salamone, didn't think the sports department needed three on-air people and in the first conversation I ever had with him he told me, "your future is fuzzy here." Nice to meet you, too.
WFSB news director Mark Effron hired me because he thought I had a distinctive style and liked my sense of humor. A month after I got there, he decided that he didn't want anyone with a distinctive style or a sense of humor. You can imagine how much fun I had in that job for the next seven months until the station mercifully cancelled my contract and I was free. I moved back to Chapel Hill, mostly taking a break from television but doing some news and sports reporting at WCHL-AM and freelance news reporting at WBTW-TV in Florence, South Carolina where a friend of mine from a previous job worked as the news director.
I moved to Tampa Bay in April 1997. I heard about the job opening, figured, "Yeah, right. They'll hire me." But they did. I told them to slap me if I ever complained about the heat. I worked there two years as the weekend sports anchor then moved to Kentucky to become a main sports anchor for the first time in my career. That was at WTVQ-TV, the ABC affiliate in Lexington. When I moved to the Bluegrass in July 1999 that made it seven states in nine years. The license plates make a nice deck of cards. Covering the Kentucky Derby was just one of the many fantastic experiences I had working in Lexington. In other jobs, I got free admission and close-up looks at events like pro baseball, basketball, football and hockey games, the Final Four, PGA and LPGA tournaments and the Daytona 500. No one ever had to tell me how lucky I was to get paid to go to these events and then talk about them on TV. And I loved that in my job I was part reporter, part essayist and part showman -- sometimes all in the span of a few minutes. And I'm not likely to ever get press box food at a crime scene.
But I grew tired of having my life's work revolve around the outcomes of basketball games. I just couldn't care enough any more about whether professional baseball players go on strike to act like it was some earth shaking news. Especially in the wake of events that really did shake the world. After 9/11, I felt almost embarrassed to go on television to recite high school soccer scores in light of what was going on outside the sports cocoon. So I moved to regular news, and to Cincinnati, to work for WCPO-TV. I liked telling the stories that led the newscast instead of the ones that ended it. But five days a week of a job that often entails, as a friend in the business put it, "bothering people on the worst days of their lives" began to wear me down.
Here in Florida I did some reporting and anchoring at WTTA-TV in Tampa before it shuttered its news department. I filled in for the morning traffic anchor on WTSP, Tampa Bay's CBS affiliate, and later at WFTS, the ABC station. I produced and wrote stories for a program that airs on Tampa's PBS station WEDU. And in the first tentative steps toward forming my own production company, I produced and hosted a tutorial DVD for TV reporters A Reporter's Guide to the Art of Television Storytelling. I've also reported stories for a statewide sports cable network using my own camera and computer editing system to shoot and edit them. You can watch some of those stories and other examples of my work on my video page. For more information, see my resume. And in 2010, I got back into TV news full time when I took the job in Sarasota. Who knows what's next. |
© JOHN McQUISTON