Reege hits the wall
UPDATE 9/1/07 -- Bark reports Ducas is out at KTVT.
Regent Ducas, the formerly high-flying news director of Kansas City's KCTV-5, has apparently been dealt a major setback at the newsroom he's now running in Dallas. As you may have seen on the Ticker, our good good friend Uncle Barky is reporting that Ducas on Monday was ordered to stop packaging the "First Five Minutes" of the late news, a gimmick that emphasized whatever crimes and tragedies were breaking in the metro. Ed writes that Ducas's boss, KTVT GM Steve Mauldin, has "express(ed) his displeasure with both the content and the ratings of the 10 p.m. newscast."
And who said no one pays attention to the July book? Actually, it's fitting that this comes after the summer ratings sweep, one that is often discounted by local stations since the networks are in reruns-and-reality mode and HUT levels are way down. Five years ago, as Ducas and his then-boss, KCTV-5 GM Kirk Black, were beginning their extreme makeover, they poured money into promoting their newscasts during the July 2002 sweep. The effort paid off in higher ratings and an early, if manufactured, vote of confidence in the live! late-breaking! investigative! format.
A couple of years after KCTV had turned itself around and won a couple of books at 10 p.m., Black told me something. I thought of it this week. KCTV was a sleepy little station, a solid No. 2 in news, with an aging audience and no real plan in sight. Black and Ducas had a plan. It would make people mad but it would also set KCTV utterly apart from the rest of the field. It would, as they say, break through the clutter. "We had a unique opportunity to turn a station around," said Black, "and we made the most of it."
KTVT is a CBS affiliate, but that's about the only thing it has in common with KCTV. Regent Ducas is finding that out. Among other things, it appears that at his new station, the GM no longer has his back.
Here are some of my reports on Regent Ducas:
