Wake up and smell the profits.
Early-morning television is an alarming assault on the body clocks of its anchors, reporters, and off-camera crews. It’s become a gilded cage, too, for those who, in a way, are unfortunate enough to be good at it. No longer a dumping ground or an after-thought, the a.m.’s now have it over the p.m.’s, save for the showcase 10 p.m. newscasts. Money talks at any hour of the day, and those once-gaping gaps between the 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. revenue sheets are now tilted in favor of the yawn patrol.
| THE TAKEAWAY |
| 1. Personality prevails in morning news. 2. People rise earlier and work later than in the past, giving a.m. news shows a boost over p.m. programming. 3. There’s no getting used to a 2 a.m.wake-up time. |
“Our early-morning news, behind the late news, is our second-biggest revenue generator,” says WFAA-TV (Channel 8) President and General Manager Mike Devlin. “The money is gravitating there.”
KXAS-TV (Channel 5) Vice President of Content Development Susan Tully says the early mornings aren’t a springboard anymore. “I tell my morning team constantly that they are the second-most important thing that we do,” Tully says. “They could go to an early-evening newscast, but that would be a step backwards.”
Tim Ryan, Dallas-Fort Worth’s dean of early-morning anchors, has been rolling out of bed at ungodly hours since just after KDFW-TV (Channel 4) made the switch from CBS to Fox on July 1, 1995. He first took the mornings plunge, though, in the late 1970s at a Phoenix station in need of an entry-level guinea pig.
“I was not long out of college and it was kind of this wacky experiment,” Ryan recalls. “We started with a half-hour at 6:30 leading into the Today show and then expanded it to an hour. People thought it was the nuttiest idea in the world to be doing news at 6 o’clock in the morning.”
Devlin was a reporter in the mid-1980s for WFAA before returning years later to a management position. “The mornings were thinly staffed” during his first tour, he says. “There wasn’t a lot of discussion about them inside the newsroom. It was a newscast that simply wasn’t a high priority.”
That started to change in the 1990s. Longer work commutes, earlier wake-up calls, and the easy availability of round-the-clock information began cutting into the audiences for early-evening and late-night newscasts. But mornings are still a mother lode of essential weather and traffic information for gainfully employed audiences that also are prime targets for many advertisers.
“Mornings are the one time where it’s considered mandatory viewing,” says Channel 5’s Tully. “Can I get to work? What am I gonna wear? Is anything going to disrupt my day? When I walk out that door, I’ve gotta know what I’m going to face.”
There’s this, too: KTVT-TV (Channel 11) News Director Scott Diener believes that more viewers also look to the early-morning shows as security blankets after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Weather and traffic updates are the breakfast of champions, but it’s also reassuring to find that Earth remained in one piece overnight.
“I want to know when I get up in the morning what happened in my world,” Diener says. “Am I safe? Is it gonna be all right for me to go off to work, send my kids to school? I think this really has taken on a much bigger significance.”
Diener’s early-morning show, anchored by Scott Sams and Ginger Allen, is still running a distant last in a four-horse field. Diener cites slow, steady progress from 5 to 7 a.m. But in last November’s “sweeps” ratings period (the last for which complete results were available at presstime), both KDFW’s Good Day and WFAA’s Daybreak had twice as many total homes and 25-to-54-year-olds, the main advertiser target audience for news programming.
Daybreak continues to battle Good Day for the top spot despite a recent rash of anchor shuffles at WFAA. Michael Rey and Debbie Denmon were replaced by the new team of Justin Farmer and Jackie Hyland in 2005. Hyland then left the station late last year to return to her native New York. Her replacement, Cynthia Izaguirre, made her Daybreak debut on Jan. 4, arriving from an Albuquerque, N.M., station. But that turned out to be the same day that Farmer surprised station management with news that he’d be joining WSB-TV in Atlanta, where his father, Don Farmer, had been a star anchor. Farmer’s contract with WFAA doesn’t expire until July, and the station intends to hold him to it, Devlin says. In his view, anchors are still important, but content is key in times when “it’s very difficult to find a dominating personality.”
“The weakness of the morning newscast is that there’s not a lot of original reporting,” he says. “Most of the news that’s new tends to happen overnight, and it’s usually crime or fires. We try to hold that down. What you have to do is a highly efficient newscast that prepares people for the day. If you try to over-complicate that, you sometimes get feedback from the audience that you’re wasting their time.”
Early-morning viewing takes a seasonal hit in the summer, when school is out, and on holidays, when many viewers sleep in. Audiences, in turn, spike upward on bad-weather mornings, when modes of dress and travel are paramount. Many viewers are listening as much as watching, and they don’t want stern voices or grouches.
“Mornings are more personality-based than any other day-part,” says KTVT’s Diener. “So likeability’s an important part of it, in addition to being a good communicator.”
KXAS’s Tully has ridden through both first- and lately third-place finishes with morning news anchors Deborah Ferguson and Brendan Higgins. The “ratings roller coaster,” as she calls it, hasn’t soured her either on the team or how the mornings should roll.
“Our style is that we’re full of information,” she says. “In the morning you want that routine of weather and traffic repeated at the same times. If you make people smile, if you make a ‘moment,’ that’s an added bonus that’s going to keep viewers coming back.”
Ad Libs, Weird Hours for Megan and Tim
It’s the first day of the February “sweeps” ratings period, and someone had the bright idea to get vertical and in-studio for the 5 a.m. start of KDFW-TV’s daily four-hour Good Day show. Anchors Tim Ryan and Megan Henderson, respectively rebounding from pneumonia and a cold, are nonetheless almost supernaturally cheerful as usual.
In the interest of full-immersion in the pre-dawn TV experience, I’m mainlining coffee and faking a happy face while watching the two of them constantly touch up scripts on their anchor-desk laptops. Whatever changes they make immediately show up on teleprompters affixed to three unmanned robot cameras. It’s a case study in precise tick-tock news reading spiked with ad libs, occasional laughter, and constant segues to weather and traffic updates.
Henderson and Ryan log 20 hours of TV a week on Good Day, first taking on the three competing local morning shows and then going against a trio of network attractions from 7 to 9 a.m. No one else comes close to having a bigger chunk of local TV face time. And it’s not as if they don’t have an audience. In the November “sweeps,” the 6 to 9 a.m. portion of Good Day averaged more 25-to-54-year-olds (the main advertiser target audience for news programming), than their Fox station’s 5, 6, or 10 p.m. newscasts. Only Fox’s 9 p.m. newscast beat them.
“Most people are not necessarily watching in the earlier hours. They’re listening,” Ryan says during a break. “So if your ego gets a little bit too inflated, you realize that you’re basically radio with pictures to most viewers who are very busy getting ready in the morning.”
Henderson joined Good Day four and a half years ago after working the morning shift for three years in Salt Lake City. Wake-up time is 2 a.m. and lately she’s been going to bed at 6 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday nights.
“I’m still trying to tweak things,” she says, having recently given up on naps. “It’s a constant struggle, and something I’m always trying to fix or find a magic pill for. But the truth is there isn’t one.”
Ryan sleeps in two shifts and gets to bed a second time around 10 p.m. before the alarm shocks his system at 3 a.m. At this point, he sees himself as a pre-dawn lifer.
“It’s a less tense atmosphere. We’re allowed to have a lot more fun,” he says. “My hope and prayer is that I retire from this job, hopefully when I want to. I don’t have any desire to move to nights or to another city. If it all came to a crashing end, I guess I’d sell cars or something. I wouldn’t pack the family up and move just so I could get another TV job.” —E.B.
Ed Bark, former longstanding TV critic for The Dallas Morning News, is now proprietor of the Web site unclebarky.com, which was launched in September 2006. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a past president of the national Television Critics Association.
