The Channel 9 TEAM is a near perfect 10: 'Family' vibes keep decade-old group on top of ratings

That was the sweep that was. Larry and Laurie, back to you.
And back to you, Len and Bryan.
For 10 years that has been the routine for many Kansas Citians.
They may watch other stations besides KMBC, Channel 9, during the
evening hours. In fact, it's overwhelmingly likely they aren't
watching Channel 9 between 7 and 10 p.m., when ABC's sickly
prime-time lineup is on.
But at 10, when it's time to select a "newscast of record,"
the lion's share of viewers go "back to you, Larry and Laurie," Len
and Bryan. The four-week ratings "sweep" that ended Wednesday was
no exception (see chart).
It's not unusual for two anchors to be paired a long time; at
KCTV, Channel 5, Anne Peterson and Wendall Anschutz have been
together 19 years and are believed to the longest-running duo in the
country. But KMBC has managed to preserve all four key elements of
its "A" team - co-anchors, chief meteorologist and lead sports
anchor - since May 1988.
News director Brian Bracco, who was there when the foursome first
took to the air, also is still at KMBC, as are general manager Paul
Dinovitz and program director Pat Patton.
"There's a love affair with this community that goes both ways,
from the anchors to the community and back again," Bracco said.
"There are also a lot of people behind the scenes and a lot of
reporters who project stability."
It's unlikely Bracco could've imagined using terms like "love
affair" 10 years ago. Having arrived from a Columbus, Ohio, station
the year before, he inherited the team of Moore, Everett, Dawson and
weatherman Dave Dusik. Kansas City had once made Moore and KMBC No.
1, but that was before he left town. Five years into Moore's second
tour of duty, Channel 9 was dead last at 6 and 10 p.m. and in a
second-place tie at 5 p.m.
Worse, Bracco had decided to replace Dusik with weekend
weatherman Bryan Busby. Dusik, a 9 1/2-year presence at KMBC, did not
go quietly. His removal brought thousands of signatures and hundreds
of phone calls of protest.
Moreover, despite a change in its ownership and management, KMBC
was still badly tarnished by the Christine Craft age-discrimination
case seven years earlier.
But in the months that followed the weatherman switch, KMBC's
fortunes started to change. In just 18 months, the foursome inched
into first place at 10 p.m. Success at 5 and 6 soon followed.
How did it happen?
"It was the culmination of a lot of things," Bracco said. "We
started doing a different kind of newscast, and we decided to stick
with a team."
It started before Bracco's arrival, when Dinovitz and Patton
hatched a transition plan to make Channel 9's news more personable
and accessible. Nice news. That resulted in Everett's, Dawson's and
Busby's hirings and gradual but important changes to the newscast.
As Moore described it, KMBC started to do "a newscast with a
Kansas City feel," a concept he said was "hard to describe, but I
think the viewers picked that up and gravitated to it."
Bracco put the change more bluntly.
"We stopped covering every friggin' news conference and started
doing stories about people," Bracco said. "And we became more
involved in the community."
And as the anchors involved themselves in the community, KMBC's
cameras often were there to capture it. One civic group at a time,
one town meeting at a time, one Busby "Weather to Go" segment at a
time, KMBC began to raise its profile with the public.
Just consider a few of the stories KMBC did about people - its own
people - during this May sweep:
One Tuesday-night newscast featured multiple cutaways to Kris
Ketz (he of "Larry and Laurie, back to you"), who was presiding
over a financial-planning hot line sponsored by the station. That
same evening, in the course of reporting a story on prostate cancer,
Moore recounted his and Dawson's own battles with cancer.
On other newscasts, Everett visited an animal shelter in Utah;
Dawson sat down with baseball great Buck O'Neil for a series of
legend-to-legend talks; and on one slow Friday night, Busby showed an
embarrassing videotape of himself riding the new roller coaster at
Worlds of Fun. That same night also had a game-show moment, when
Moore gave away a car.
"People feel that our anchors are one of them," Bracco said.
"And besides, our people are nice."
"They are very, very nice people," Dinovitz echoed. "They halo
it and it circulates."
Still, isn't it a bit odd that Everett and Busby, the younger,
less entrenched members of the "A" team, haven't taken advantage of
their success to get themselves into markets larger than No. 31?
Busby, who has admitted to sending an audition tape to a network,
might not mind a national job - who wouldn't? - but seems to rule out
anything smaller than that.
"When Dino and Brian gave me this opportunity, they said, 'Here
you go - reshape Channel 9's weather. ' It's not often you get that
carte blanche in this industry," Busby said. "As long as that
freedom was there, I kept sticking around."
"This is a terrific station to work for, and the fact we've
stayed here this long indicates that," Everett said. "We're all old
enough to know what matters, what our priorities are, and I think for
us those priorities are friendships, neighbors and having connections
to the community. Why would I want to give that up to go to
Philadelphia or Boston where I don't know a soul?"
WDAF: The ties that bind
One feature that has definitely increased under new WDAF general
manager Stan Knott's tenure is the practice of tying news stories to
the Fox network's prime-time programming.
A reality show featuring daredevil Robbie Knievel leads into a
local news segment on daredevils. "Busted on the Job 2," an hour of
workplace hidden-camera video, begets a news segment on surveillance.
And then, of course, there's Harris Faulkner making a cameo
appearance on "Ally McBeal" and telling us about the experience on
WDAF news.
Appalling as some viewers may find these tie-ins, there's little
reason anymore why Channel 4 should avoid them, not when "20/20"
and "Dateline" offer the same kind of infotainment in prime time.
Besides, every newscast in town does tie-ins. KMBC, Channel 9, did
one this month, tying in a news story on juvenile crime to that
night's episode of ABC's "The Practice."
It's all WDAF can do to keep its prized younger viewers from
switching away, as nearly half of them do weeknights at 9, when Fox
shows end and local news begins.
Coming soon: Kansas City fathers whose boys ain't right.
KSHB oversold 'Search'
Meanwhile KSHB, Channel 41, demonstrated that it's one thing to
promote a story and another thing to oversell it. Case in point,
"Search for a Serial Killer," KSHB's six-night look into the
murders of 10 area women whose bodies were later found in the
Missouri River.
The only way you could've avoided the "Search for a Serial
Killer" promos was to refuse to watch any NBC programs during May. "The murders of 10 Kansas City women," an announcer said in a
moody voice-over as black-and-whites of the 10 victims fanned across
the TV screen. "Is it a serial killer? Why hasn't he been caught?"
You have to give KSHB's promotions department credit - they're
producing some of the slickest, most attention-grabbing spots in the
market. But this time 41 went too far. For as we learned in the very
first installment of the "Public Defenders" series, this wasn't
about a serial killer at all.
"Police doubt any one person is responsible," said Jim
Condelles. This was followed by a quote from a police officer who
said investigators had ruled out a serial killer in at least half of
the 10 river-body murders.
The series was a pretty solid piece of work. But it wasn't about
the search for a serial killer - more likely the search for six or
seven killers, maybe even more.
StarTouch: 889-7827 and enter 8852 (TVKC).
E-mail:writeme@tvbarn.com
The news at 10
Viewership for the 10 o'clock news was down this year, but up for
channels 4 and 41.
Station May '98 May '97
Ch. 9 26% 30%
Ch. 5 17 20
Ch. 4 13 12
Ch. 41 10 7
Total 66 69
Based on the rating period April 23 - May 20
Numbers are 'Share' of the 10 p.m. audience