Her perfect world: SNN general manager Linda DesMarais is famous for her exacting standards. But can the little station's first live news broadcast possibly live up to her vision? Robert Plunket watches as tension mounts in the control room.
When Linda DesMarais retired from the television business about 10 years ago and went back to school to get a master's in psychology, her friends got a little worried. On the surface everything was fine. She liked taking classes at Lynn University in Boca Raton, and she was living a busy life with her boyfriend, Doug Barker. They were even planning to get married. Her various houses--they had one on Florida's east coast, in Jupiter, and one in Sarasota--were looking better than ever, particularly now that Linda had time to decorate, or more correctly, decorate even more elaborately (her extracurricular passion).[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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But something was missing. Linda wasn't exactly moping around, but she wasn't her old self, either. She was only using part of her brain, and that spark that made her Linda--that jolt of adrenaline that she got from solving problems under pressure--just wasn't there.
It is now. In 2005, her friend Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, who had been working with her as a consultant, talked her into becoming general manager of the newspaper's SNN News 6, and Linda, who is now in her 50s, was once again doing what she was meant to do--run a TV station. True, it is an unusual TV station--much smaller than the ones she is used to managing (sometimes as a part-owner). SNN (the call letters stand for Sarasota News Now) is a 24-hour local news station that first went on the air in the summer of 1995.
As TV goes, it's small town and small time. Market-wise, Sarasota is way down, at number 154 in the country, and little SNN can't begin to compete in viewer-ship or revenue with the network stations that serve the region. But it's in an area of high growth and affluence. It's even world-famous. True, that's because of the Internet clip that showed weatherman Justin Moseley's onscreen meltdown when he discovered a cockroach crawling up his leg a few months ago, but still--the potential is there.
It's the cockroach incident that symbolizes Linda's challenge. Right now, SNN may be small-town cable TV, with its roach problems, technical glitches, and occasional Keystone Cops atmosphere, but Linda is determined, despite her comparatively tiny budget, resources and staff, to make it a serious competitor with WWSB ABC7 (formerly known to us as Channel 40), the granddaddy of Sarasota news operations. To a certain degree Linda is competing against herself, as it was her overhaul of WWSB back in the 1980s that helped it become what it is today--Mount Rushmore, unassailable in its authority and hometown roots. The town has literally watched anchorman Scott Dennis' hair turn gray.
But SNN has its pluses. Since Linda took over, it's developed an edgier, more up-to-date look. It speeds along like an express train--Linda's specialty. Under her hiring and constant tutelage, some of its on-the-air people can hold their own with WWSB's. Its affiliation with the Herald-Tribune gives it an incalculable advantage in news gathering and news judgment. It's constantly showing the local weather--extremely important in Sarasota. And best of all, it's on all the time.
Today, as Linda leaves her house in Southside Village, the stakes are about to be raised. SNN is going live. Yes, instead of a taped reel of news, weather and sports that is updated every half hour, tonight there will be a live one-hour newscast, with two anchors, sports, weather, the works. It will go on at 10 p.m. That way it won't compete directly with ABC7's 11 p.m. news but will, she hopes, get the viewers who want to be asleep by 11. In Sarasota, that's a lot of people.
But, as Linda is the first to admit, the new show is under-rehearsed, has unsolved technical problems and some of her staff have never done live TV before--in other words, an awful lot can go wrong.
SNN PUTS TOGETHER its news broadcast partly by system and partly by serendipity. Associate producer Lindsay Smith attends the 9 a.m. meeting held by the top editors of the Herald-Tribune to get a handle on what the paper is covering that day. The various reporters and other producers go through Internet sites and watch CNN. Tabs are kept on competitors and what they are doing. The result is a commonsense approach to what is newsworthy and what people are interested in.
But you also have to surprise people, delight them, tell them things they didn't know. This where the art of news gathering comes in, where experience and an insider's knowledge pay off. Linda is in an excellent position to practice the art; she's been in TV programming since she was 22, working in markets from Washington, D.C., to Miami and West Palm Beach, and she not only knows who the movers and shakers are in town, she's one of them, and has been since she moved here in 1986. And on her staff are several other old-timers, particularly weekend anchor John Hill, a former Channel 40 stalwart who had retired and gone into real estate before she persuaded him to join SNN in 2005, and Bill Wagy, a producer/videographer who is such a fixture on the social and cultural scene that he's on a first-name basis with every important person in town, and is treated--by the smart ones, anyway--with the utmost care and respect, since his input, or lack of it, can make or break an event.
SNN's first news meeting today is held at 10 a.m., exactly 12 hours before the debut of the new live show. At first it seems a terrible day to premiere anything. The news will be on opposite the Florida-Ohio State football game, and as Linda admits, everybody will be watching the game. But that's part of her strategy. Every rehearsal they've had has presented a new problem. She knows the show will need a shake-down period, like out-of-town tryouts for a Broadway play. "It's a process, not an event," she says.
Everybody shows up for the meeting, spilling out of the conference room and into the hall. These 15 or so people, both on camera and off, will have to come together and put on an hour of live TV. The on-camera people are instantly recognizable to many Sarasotans: anchors Adrienne Stein and Drew Smith, weatherman Tom Burse, and Antawan Smith, the genial sports guy with the bald head and the easy laugh. Charles Brown, who does general on-camera reporting and interviews, is there, too, along with Bruce Asbury, who specializes in features that require a lighter touch. He's the class clown of the newsroom, with a touch of the insult comic that he somehow manages to get away with. When Linda stresses the need to focus the show on Drew and Adrienne, saying, "I'd like to give Sarasota a really good anchor team," Bruce says, under his breath, "I can't wait 'til we find one." Drew and Adrienne laugh harder than anyone.
IF THE FOOTBALL GAME will steal their audience, it is also giving the day a strong news focus. With so many Gators in town, plus all the Ohio transplants, it's one of the biggest football days of the year. All sorts of stories are discussed. Antawan will do a "package" on the two Riverview High graduates who will be playing for Florida. Someone else will go to a sports shop at the mall for a story on merchandising for the game. Bruce will go to a sports bar and watch the game live with the fans.
And he may do his "Someone You Should Know" segment on Betty Schoenbaum, the 89-year-old widow of Alex Schoenbaum, the founder of Shoney's restaurant chain and an Ohio State player from the late 1930s. Betty is one of the great old ladies of Sarasota, and Bill Wagy fills everyone in on the details--her fabulous penthouse downtown, her many philanthropic endeavors, the outfit she wears each year to watch the game.
But there are problems. Betty may or may not be going to the NARSAD gala at the Van Wezel, where Bill will be photographing philanthropist Virginia Toulmin getting an award from NARSAD founder Lee Peterson. If Betty is going, she certainly won't be wearing her Ohio State outfit, which means she'll have to be interviewed earlier, which means it will conflict with another story Bill has to do. Various plans are discussed and rejected, and things are finally left undecided, but it's agreed that there must be a way to photograph Betty in her outfit--there simply must.
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The rest of the news is selected with considerable discussion. The local news is the foundation, of course. Tonight's second biggest story will be a follow-up on the Coralrose Fullwood murder case in North Port. And since a truck will be down there filming, perhaps a stop at the North Port City Commission meeting might be in order. Linda is always on the lookout for stories in Venice and North Port. But the commission meeting "could be a snore," as someone points out.
They also need to cover some national and international news. Doing a big story that has nothing to do with Sarasota is risky. The big networks can do it better, but if you don't mention a major national or international event, you lose your news credibility. The answer is to "localize" it.
Today's big national story is shaping up to be a large gas leak in Manhattan. Ideas are discussed to make it relevant locally. They could call doctors at Sarasota Memorial's emergency room and get sound bites about the health issues. They can call the local utility company and ask, "Can it happen here?" They can stop the man on the street and ask, "So what do you think about that gas leak in New York?"
The meeting ends. Much is still up in the air, but it's supposed to be that way. The world is in a constant state of flux, and what will actually end up on the broadcast will be decided closer to air time.
Linda has two other matters to get settled before lunch. First she heads to Robert Eckhart's desk in the newsroom. Eckhart is a city editor, and he'll be taped just before the newscast, telling the viewers what will be on the front page of tomorrow's Herald-Tribune. "Are we doing that tonight?" he asks, startled. But he assures Linda and Drew Smith that he will be prepared.
Then it's on to commercial production manager Jim Kosub's office on the second floor. Jim has prepared a new set of "bumpers" and "lead-ins" for the new show, and he and Linda watch them. These are the little five-second intro and segues that function as title cards and transitions, those little blobs of color that comes flying off the screen saying "LIVE @10 weather next."
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They are sensational, better than Linda hoped for, and she's delighted.
"They're as good as anything I've seen," she tells Jim. "Very urban. You really got the concept. That nighttime feel, the way they go from light to dark."
She leaves his office vastly relieved. Maybe they're in better shape than she thought after all.
THE POPULAR IMAGE OF a successful, hard-driving career woman with no time or inclination for a personal life doesn't hold true with Linda. She has an addiction to the feminine arts of decorating, shopping, cooking, collecting china, silver and jewelry. The house she shares with Doug Barker in Southside Village is an 82-year-old Tudor Revival, unusual for Sarasota but one which perfectly suits Linda's style--prosperous, conservative, densely packed, with a frilly feminine aura that suggests the pages of Traditional Home meeting Southern Living.
Linda's taste is something she inherited from her mother, a remarkable--and remarkably difficult--woman who was, as Linda puts it, "born dirt poor in Appalachia" but through her ambition and beauty became a top model and married four times, to a succession of progressively richer men. In her mother's life Linda sees many lessons, both good and bad, and it has taken her many years of therapy to put the mother-daughter bond into perspective.
"I was the latchkey child of a single mother," Linda says, describing the early years of her childhood in Washington, D.C. "I came home from school and watched TV." Her friends were the Mouseketeers and the characters on Howdy Doody. A new marriage and stepfather would mean temporary prosperity, but after the divorce it would be a return to reduced circumstances.
Linda planned to become a journalist, but an internship at the Washington Post put an end to that. "All anybody was interested in was digging up dirt," she recalls. "That wasn't what I had in mind."
Just a few credits short of graduating from college (her car had broken down and she needed money to buy a new one), she took a job with an independent TV station in D.C. "I was hooked. It was right for me," she recalls. She still remembers the frantic call that came every afternoon when the station's American Bandstand-type show went on: "Wingding's on and we need dancers!" She'd jump up from her desk and run to the studio and dance like crazy for half an hour.
One of the big attractions of television was the camaraderie. At this time the Mary Tyler Moore Show was America's reigning sitcom, and the vision it presented of a workplace where the employees became a family--a slightly dysfunctional one, to be sure, but ultimately loving and accepting--spoke to her and would shape the emotional content of her entire life. "You could assemble a family," she says, marveling at the concept. "I've done the same thing. I've surrounded myself with a professional family."
Along the way one of her professional family became real family. Doug Barker, whom she first met while they were working for rival stations in Miami in 1979, has been, over the years, co-worker, business partner, boyfriend and finally husband. They were married in December 1999 at Sarasota's Crosley Mansion. The guest list included friends from Sarasota and news people Linda has worked with over the years. The event was predictably warm and elegant, and Linda finally got to use every piece of china she owned.
BACK AT THE OFFICE, the news team assembles for the 2 p.m. meeting. Now it's time to really figure out what they have and in what order it will run. The show is divided into "blocks," each separated by a commercial break. Executive producer Mark Durham is in charge of making all this work, and he's concerned with getting the rhythm and pace right. "I want to make the first block a little more rock and roll-y," he explains, as they try to determine exactly where to place the weather breaks and the things like "Tomorrow's Headlines."
A story's chance to be included rises and falls on circumstance. A fatal car accident would be included--but there's no video. The North Port City Commission has long since fallen by the wayside. Scheduling the Betty Schoenbaum shoot remains a problem, but Linda is pushing it. "The only way that's a good story is today," she tells them. Exactly which restaurant Bruce will do his live feed from is still up in the air.
"Bruce, you're going to be carrying 40 percent of the show tonight," someone tells him.
"That's what we want," Bruce replies. "All Bruce, all the time."
Linda's plans for the improvement of SNN hinge on more staffing and more equipment, but her primary constraint at the moment is the software system, into which commercials, bumpers, stories and other prerecorded segments are programmed and which is supposed to keep everything appearing at exactly the right second. Her predecessors bought the wrong system for the station's needs, and it's been a constant and frustrating battle to get it to do what they want it to do. A new system is gradually being phased in, but at the moment it's a hybrid, part one and part the other, and the potential for error is always there.
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The rest of the afternoon progresses with increasing concentration on everyone's part, mingled with nervous anticipation. Co-anchor Adrienne Smith reviews her copy, looking for ways to tweak it so it flows more smoothly. The anchors take their places for another rehearsal. Since up until now SNN has always used a single anchor, camera shots and lighting must be adjusted for two people sitting behind the desk. One of the cameramen is new, and one of the three cameras is temporarily out of service.
And in the middle it all Linda has to leave for a Van Wezel board meeting. The timing couldn't be worse, but the turmoil surrounding executive director John Wilkes' dismissal makes the meeting too important. It just goes to show that in Sarasota the line between newsmaker and news deliverer is often a fine one.
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LINDA'S FAVORITE EXPRESSION, and one often remarked on by her staff, is "in my perfect world." She uses it most often in the postmortems held after the newscasts, where problems are discussed. "In my perfect world we'd have a shot of the police car," she'll tell them. Or, "In my perfect world we'd have better lighting here." Or, "In my perfect world this story would be 10 seconds shorter." To achieve that perfect world, she drives her staff as hard as she drives herself, and she's famous among them for saying, after she's looked at a piece of work they've slaved over, "That was good, but I want more." But although they sometimes chafe at her endless critiquing and insistence on being involved in everything they do, the staff clearly recognizes how much she's improving the station, and they tend to give her everything they've got, working long hours for what are, even for Sarasota, relatively low salaries.
Linda's perfect world also includes more money for those salaries, better equipment, and more solid footing in the local news market. While the local competition is limited to ABC7, the Tampa news stations are shown here, and they include Sarasota news. And since Tampa is the nation's 12th-largest TV market, that puts SNN in a David-and-Goliath situation that is far from perfect.
But at the moment, as the countdown to LIVE@10 is beginning, abstract concepts about what could be are forgotten in the reality of the moment. Linda knows she is trying to do the nearly impossible. They haven't had enough rehearsals and run-throughs. The new lead-ins and bumpers have never been broadcast. And, as Ricardo Montalvo, the newscast director, says, "If breaking news happens, who's going to cut it? All the editors will be in the control room."
Linda takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. "Please. Humor me."
AT 9:45 P.M. LINDA gathers the staff for a pep talk. At 9:50 p.m. the anchors go onto the set and the technical crew goes into the control room. Linda joins them. There is nothing she can do now. Everyone has his or her own job. She can only sit there and watch--and worry.
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An air of almost funereal calm hangs over the set. Drew and Adrienne sit there, adjusting their hair, psyching themselves up to be witty and charming and not what they really are--exhausted and suffering from colds. In the control room the tension is much closer to the surface. A sound problem suddenly must be resolved. Mark keeps reminding people of things--"Remember, on the first weather opening ..."
At this moment, Linda is thankful that her boss, Herald-Tribune publisher Diane McFarlin, is out of town.
"We'll be coming in 57 seconds late," calls out Craig Burdick, the operations manager. And then, as everyone watches the monitor, SNN makes the giant leap from taped to live TV.
"Good evening, everyone, and welcome to LIVE @ 10," Drew says, and the relief is palpable. They are actually on the air.
The opening goes beautifully. Drew and Adrienne act as if they've been doing this for years. Tom Burse does the "Weather First," and it's smooth and impressive. Onscreen, anyway. Everyone in the control room has an uneasy moment when Tom moves to the weather pod at the wrong time. "Don't move, Tom! Go back!" Mark screams. But then he quickly switches to the other camera, and what comes across to the viewer is seamless professionalism.
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"Old-lady package," calls out someone on the controls, and sure enough, there is Betty Schoenbaum. Her Ohio State outfit has indeed been worth waiting for, consisting of sweaters, jerseys, leggings and red tam o'shanter, all bearing the Ohio State logo. Bill Wagy got some great shots of her watching the early part of the game on TV and showing Bruce her late husband's letter sweater from 1938.
Next we go live to Bruce at the bar, where he's watching the game with the fans. Immediately, trouble surfaces. Number one, there really aren't that many fans there, and number two, the ones who are there, not to put too fine a point on it, have been drinking. Heavily. Linda swallows hard. An annoying kid is even standing right behind Bruce, waving and making faces. Without losing a beat, Bruce deftly gives the startled kid a shove that sends him stumbling out of camera range.
All of a sudden it's time for the first commercial break. Linda lets herself relax for a moment. Things are going very well, indeed.
"Two minutes," calls out Mark.
"No!" responds Ricardo. "One minute. No, make that 53 seconds."
"What are you talking about?" Mark demands.
Something awful has happened. Even though the entire show was to have been programmed for two-minute breaks, the software, with a mind of its own, has programmed it for one-minute breaks. And there's no way to fix it. Inexorably, the recorded advertisements will run for one minute, and there will be nothing to do but to return to the live team. And as everyone in the control room looks at each other, aghast, they realize that all the beautiful new bumpers and lead-ins that were to take up the rest of the two minutes have vanished into the system.
"Oh, my God," says Linda as the implications dawn on her and the crew. "There's not enough stuff in here. We're going to end at 10:45."
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For the next 10 minutes the atmosphere in the control room becomes controlled panic. No one has time now to figure out what happened. They have the double challenge of making the show run smoothly from minute to minute plus thinking ahead to what they're going to do with all that extra time.
Even though Linda is agonizing through every second of it, she knows she has to keep quiet and sit there. Her crew knows what to do better than she does. Any suggestions or recriminations from her will only compound the problem. "It's times like this I wish I drank," she whispers. To make matters worse, the commercials from her inaugural advertisers have completely disappeared. "Where are the sponsors?" she moans.
One solution is to go back to Bruce live at the bar. He can take up a lot of time. But finding sober patrons is becoming a challenge, and though he tries to interview a table of Ohio State fans who, one can only hope, have a designated driver, it becomes apparent that Bruce talking to drunks is not going to save the evening.
"Oh, God," Linda says, her head in her hands.
But whether it's their experience, training, or the sheer force of their leader's will, the cast and crew rise to the challenge. The show starts to pull itself together. The anchors, knowing they must adlib missing intros, wing it beautifully. Tom Burse flawlessly improvises through the technical glitches, and an amazing thing is happening. On the monitor--what is being broadcast, what the viewer is seeing--everything looks fine. The missing commercials are found and broadcast. The anchors banter with each other as if they didn't have a care in the world. Antawan is even more charming than usual. And several strong features toward the end, particularly a story about the cats at the Hemingway House in Key West, brighten things up considerably.
In fact, by 11 o'clock, the problem becomes how to stop. They can't figure out how to get back to the pre-taped stuff. The anchors keep talking and smiling and repeating stories until a solution is reached, and at 11:29 p.m., the first show of LIVE@10 is over.
Linda and the staff are exhausted. She had been planning a postmortem, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Right now, all she knows is that tonight was not her perfect world. It was nerve-wracking, touch-and-go, always a step away from disaster. But in the constant dance above the chaos, in the adrenaline rush that produced an hour and a half of live news, there may have been more of Linda's perfect world than she realized. Who needs perfection when the real thrill comes from trying to achieve it?
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILLIPPE DIEDERICH
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| Title Annotation: | DAY IN THE Life |
|---|---|
| Author: | Plunket, Robert |
| Publication: | Sarasota Magazine |
| Date: | Mar 1, 2007 |
| Words: | 4218 |
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