(Above: KMBC-9's very first "FirstNews," from 1988, wasn't much of a high-stakes affair. KMBC-9 will be joining other Hearst-Argyle stations with its own YouTube space. Official launch, I'm told, is Wednesday.)
Last night, if all went according to plan, Kris Ketz and his 2-year-old went to bed at the same time. That way, one of them could wake up at 2:30 a.m. for his first day as KMBC-9 morning news anchor.
“I'm already having dreams,” Papa Ketz said the other day, “that somehow I've slept through my alarm and I wake up suddenly and it's 4:15.” Then he laughed, perhaps at the notion that 4:15 a.m. is some kind of crazy-late sleep-in hour -- which it is when you're being paid to greet thousands of viewers as they're rolling out of bed.
Or maybe he laughed because, in his wildest dreams, Kris Ketz never imagined being taken off the 5 o'clock news and put on the other 5 o'clock news.
Ketz has spent half of his 48 years at KMBC-9. The son of a broadcaster who grew up in the Quad Cities, he arrived with a booming radio reporter's voice that has become his signature. He's been kissed by a stranger and had beer thrown on him while on the air. He's been the marquee reporter at 10 p.m. and, for 13 years, co-anchor of the post-Oprah newscast, which at one point was so popular that its Nielsen rating was the highest of any newscast in Kansas City, save KMBC's 10 p.m. news.
It has been a sweet gig; he even got to co-anchor a newscast with his father in 1998. Not until a couple of years ago did Ketz even stop to think hard about the personal cost of being away from home five nights a week.
“It was when I took Jonathan to high school for his first day,” he recalled. “That was a really difficult morning for me.”
Jonathan, now 17, is the oldest of his four children, and that day was even harder than when Kris took him to kindergarten class. “All those baseball games and school events I had to miss,” he said.
After that., he told KMBC's news director, Michael Sipes, that it would be nice to someday move to “dayside,” reporting for the 5 and 6 and giving up the anchor's chair. Reporting was his real love anyway. Sipes said he'd think about it.
Then, two weeks ago, Sipes abruptly resigned, and along with assistant news director Gerry Roberts and general manager C. Wayne Godsey, an old presence asserted himself in the newsroom: Brian Bracco. As news director from 1987 to 2000, Bracco, a no-nonsense former anchor with laser-beam intensity, engineered KMBC's worst-to-first turnaround, in part by putting the right people in the right places at the right time. He was the one who paired Ketz with Kelly Eckerman in 1994.
And just like that, Ketz got his wish -- sort of. He wasn't moving to dayside, but to “FirstNews.”
Mornings, you see, are the new evenings. In a business that is struggling with viewer declines, early-bird newscasts remain a bright spot. They have replaced morning radio in many homes. They make a pile of money. At two hours long, they are like four regular newscasts strung end-to-end.
Much of the recent attention on KMBC has focused on its declining ratings at 10 p.m. But 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. is the only ratings period the station loses in both total viewers and younger demographics. Under Bracco, KMBC-9 ruled the early-bird shift. Later, it settled into a good-natured battle for first with WDAF-TV (“Fox 4”).
WDAF news director Bryan McGruder said he thinks Fox 4 started to pull away when he and Jana Calkins, the executive producer for morning news, decided to do more hard news and less of what he called “anchors yukking it up.” They added traffic coverage and a second field reporter. By then every station in town was adding reporters to mornings -- every station but KMBC-9.
According to McGruder, a KMBC staffer said something to one of his reporters that became “a rallying cry” around the Fox 4 newsroom. “When you're number one in the mornings,” the KMBCer said, “you don't have to waste more reporters there.” (Channel 9 assigned a second reporter to mornings in 2004.)
Adding Ketz, the station's best known reporter, to the mix that already includes Donna Pitman, Joel Nichols and chopper king Johnny Rowlands is a clear sign of KMBC-9's attitude adjustment.
And then there's the involvement of Bracco, a senior news executive with Hearst-Argyle Television, KMBC's owner. He's only stepping in until a replacement for Sipes can be found. But Bracco has been advising KMBC-9 for several months now, has his office at KMBC's new Swope Park digs and is well-known as someone who finds second a totally unacceptable place to be. So it's fair to assume that Ketz's transfer, and the chain reaction of reassignments it set off, is Bracco's gift to whoever takes the job as news director.
“Brian Bracco's a brilliant news executive and I should be concerned any time he gets involved,” McGruder said. (Bracco wouldn't comment for this story and has told me he'd be delighted if I never wrote about him.)
Speaking of gifts, this brings Ketz one step closer to inheriting the 10 p.m. chair, though Larry Moore seems decades away from giving it up. Morning news has become the path to lead anchor. Tom Brokaw, Charles Gibson and Katie Couric all had success in morning news. And, Ketz added, “it wasn't a bad thing for Lara Moritz, either.” Before becoming Moore's co-anchor, Moritz worked the early shift.
“Having been here 24 years, I hope that I'm a known commodity to the people watching us,” said Ketz. “I think that's an advantage. That's why I think this is going to work great for everybody.”
Well, that's the idea. But morning news is a different bird from late news. It's two hours long, requires lots of banter (often about your kids) and you have to look like you enjoy getting up at 2:30 a.m.
“It's going to be tough,” said Fox 4's McGruder. “He's not a spring chicken. It's a physical grind. And if you have people who don't want to work mornings, it shows through. Heather (McMichael) told me the best thing she ever did was get off mornings.”
For now, though, Ketz said he isn't going to find mornings tough at all.
“It's a plum assignment,” said Ketz. “It's terribly flattering. And my family's thrilled.”
- for the record. My alarm never went off. woke up at 2:17 and shut it off myself. And true - I'm no "spring chicken" but I'm not dead either. Take care Aaron. Kris.
Posted by: Kris Ketz | October 22, 2007 at 07:04 AM