Prior to starting his 26-year career as a television journalist, Marc Rosenwasser was stationed halfway around the world in Moscow, where he covered news throughout Europe for The Associated Press. Later, for the big three networks, he covered U.S. news. Now, as executive producer of the recently-launched Worldfocus, a daily international newscast airing on most public television stations, Rosenwasser has teamed up with his former NBC compatriots — anchor Martin Savidge and WNET president/CEO Neal Shapiro — to deliver news from abroad to American audiences.
A seasoned news veteran, this Long Island native leads a notably eclectic, streamlined and multi-talented staff of news producers from around the globe. That staff scours the earth daily in pursuit of a diverse mix of stories largely ignored or overlooked by traditional network and cable newscasts. Rosenwasser recently spoke with mediabistro.com about the state of the news media, building an international newscast from scratch, Al Jazeera’s “huge PR problem,” and more.
How did you get your start in the TV industry?
I had worked for The Associated Press for seven and a half years and spent the last two-plus years [of my AP tenure] in Moscow. I was anxious to come back and had befriended John McKenzie, who’s still over at ABC News — we used to play a lot of touch football together over there in Moscow. He suggested that I contact certain people at ABC, which I did, and I got hired at the end of 1982. So I’ve been in TV for about the past 26 and a half years.
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| “As the newspaper industry is starting to collapse, I think it has major consequences [for TV news] because a great deal of the original reporting in American journalism is vanishing.” |
I started as a clerk on the sports desk at The Associated Press. The backstory to that is: I had been in graduate school [at Northwestern University in Illinois], it was the middle of the 1974-75 recession, and everyone at that time wanted to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Unfortunately, there weren’t jobs for all of us who wanted to be that. Over a vacation I called up The New York Times on a blind call, asked for Dave Anderson, whose byline I knew, a sports columnist. He wasn’t available, so I just threw out another byline I knew who happened to be Murray Chass, who I’ve not met to this day. But he got on the phone, and I told him who I was and said I was desperate [and asked], “Can you help me?” And he put me in touch with the sports editors at the AP, U.P.I [United Press International] and The Bergen Record. I said “Can I use your name?” He said, “Yeah, just don’t say we’re best friends.” I met with all of them and four months later I got a call back at Northwestern from the AP saying they had a 20-hour-a-week clerkship. “Was I interested?” So, I left Northwestern in about two seconds and came to be a clerk at the AP.
I always felt bad about never letting Murray know how his kindness during that one phone call had helped me. So on the 25th anniversary of my start in the business, I hand-delivered a gift basket to the Times building for him. I actually never heard [from him] but trust he received it.
In your view, how has television journalism changed since then?
Well, as it relates most closely to Worldfocus, I do think it’s been documented a number of times that there’s less and less of an appetite on the networks for foreign news and less and less coverage of foreign news. That’s especially important now because television, to a large measure, follows newspapers in terms of original reporting. And as the newspaper industry is starting to collapse, I think it has major consequences [for TV news] because a great deal of the original reporting in American journalism is vanishing. We’re on the verge of losing a lot of original work and a lot of work that television takes its lead from.
Anchor Martin Savidge, WNET president Neal Shapiro, yourself and several other staff members came from major networks –NBC, ABC, and CBS. How have you been able to lead your team through its transition from network to public TV news? What are the key differences between network and public TV that have required the greatest effort to bridge?
There are a few important differences: One is there’s less ratings pressure, for sure. Not none, but less ratings pressure. As Neal’s widely been quoted as saying, you’re not looking over your shoulder minute-by-minute to see how this segment fared and that segment fared. I know the networks are trying to produce the best show they can everyday also, but I think we’re under less pressure to do this or that. And, basically, my goal every day is to try to come in here and produce the most interesting, informative, educational broadcast that I can. I think that content is even more important here. If we’re going to contrast the relationship between content and production, I would say the balance is even more heavily weighted here toward content than it might be at the commercial networks. I like to say content is king, and I really believe in that.
There is much less money to do what we do here [than at the networks], but that’s just a fact of life. Then the question is, How can we do what we want to do everyday to get the people the news we want to share? I think we’ve managed to come up with systems that enable us to produce what I hope is an interesting broadcast, from around the world, with original material every night.
Care to share those systems?
Our budget is about $8 million a year, which is a tiny fraction of what the networks spend on news coverage. So, it was vitally important to come up with a new way to do business. And the most important challenge that I faced was hiring the right staff to do that. What I set out to do was to look for people who had backgrounds that reached far beyond the United States and who were technically savvy at the same time. We only have two devoted editors, which is a small fraction of what the networks would have for a daily broadcast. We have no devoted crews.
In terms of the Signature pieces, which are our original pieces that air four nights a week and are much longer than what airs on a typical nightly newscast, we have staff producers who shoot . So it’s a lot of merging of functions. At the networks, typically, you have people who are correspondents, another group of people who are producers, a third group of people who are editors, a fourth group of people who are shooters. Here, our producers are our shooters. Our assistant producers, except for two people, are our editors. So, we shoot and edit our own stuff every night. It was important to hire assistant producers who were technically savvy and who speak multiple languages, and also to pair them with seasoned network producers who, I believe, are editorially superior. And by melding their respective skills, we have a system that works for us.
What has been the biggest surprise about your transition to public TV news? Anything much easier or more difficult than you’d anticipated?
The challenge of doing a daily show is a major one; We come in at eight in the morning and our first deadline is by four, so there’s very little time to spare during the day. That’s a challenge, but that’s also what makes it exhilarating every day. I haven’t encountered that many surprises, to tell you the truth. The process of broadcast journalism is the process of broadcast journalism, though I think we’re redefining the process a little bit. And, by the way, all the editing is done on Final Cut Pro. The last I knew, was mostly done on Avid, but all our editing is done on [personal] computers, which is fundamentally different.
Another critical difference is that we also don’t have money for satellite feeds, so a huge difference here is that if we take a spot from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — or from ITN of Britain or from Global of Brazil or Deutsche Welle of Germany — it’s all delivered by File Transfer Protocol (FTP). So in addition to the editing savings and the shooting savings, we save an enormous amount of money by using no satellites. Literally, no satellites.
Are the networks catching on to that method too?
I think they’re all moving in that direction. It’s actually easier to start from scratch than to undo systems that have been in place for decades. So, that’s their challenge. We started from scratch. It’s not that it was so simple to put together, but we didn’t have to undo something. We just had to do something.
If you were delivering a “State of the News Media” address, how would you describe media in 2009?
Critical condition: Newspapers, which are vital, are collapsing. The economic model apparently doesn’t work. I read a piece recently about local TV being in trouble as advertising vanishes. There was just a front-page article on The New York Times‘ Web site about whether the broadcast model is still viable. And within that context, news divisions are under a lot of cost pressures. That said, it’s interesting to note that people seek out the news and that the correlation between how a network fares and how a network news division fares is not so close. For instance, I always note with interest that NBC is languishing in fourth place in the overall ratings and NBC News, the evening news and in the morning, is in first place. The correlation is not so certain. But I think people are struggling to figure out how to do things more cost-effectively because they have to and still deliver the news. Again, as other people have been quoted as saying, I think our biggest mission every day is to try to make sense of it, as opposed to just string a bunch of items together. The line we like to use here is “making foreign news less foreign.” And that really is our goal.
Specifically, how does Worldfocus go about making foreign news less foreign? What are the techniques/strategies used to accomplish this?
We talk a lot about the news every day. I’m surrounded by a really talented team of seasoned producers whose judgment I rely on a lot. Martin is very strong editorially. The way our system works is that all of the associate producers who come from different parts of the world — one associate producer from Brazil, another from Sierra Leone, another from Taiwan, a Palestinian guy, a fluent Spanish-speaking person from Chicago, a fluent Russian-speaking person from Connecticut, a Turkish woman — we mostly divide the world up by continents and those are their beats. They spend the first hour here every morning going through lots of different newspapers and Web sites from their respective parts of the world. They report to Martin, supervising producer Mary Lockhart and me what they found, and we make a list of that. We look at partner contributions. We talk about interview guests that we want to have that day about one topic or another. We compile that list and have a run-down meeting at 9:45 a.m. each day. We pretty much set the run-down between 9:45 and 10:30, and then we try to react to news as it happens throughout the day. One advantage of doing a foreign news show is that the news has already happened by the time you walk in here in the morning. That’s one case where the time difference really works to our benefit.
How are partnerships with foreign press companies forged and structured? Does Worldfocus help its partners gather American-based news?
No, we don’t [help partners gather American-based news], to answer that backwards. Before the staff was hired, I was here by myself for some number of months, and I just spent that time trying to make those partnerships.
How did you go about doing that?
Well, I had some contacts. People in the building helped with a number of contacts and basically made a lot of calls, introduced myself and what the show, which didn’t have a name at the time, was going to be. I did lots of different kinds of deals depending upon how often we take their content. Some of the deals, if they’re on an ad-hoc basis and are more irregular, are non-paying arrangements. I won’t go into them one-by-one because they’re private deals. Some of the other suppliers we take material from almost on a daily basis — we do pay for that material.
Al Jazeera is one of Worldfocus‘ partners. What do you say to American viewers who are reluctant to consume news from Al Jazeera due to its perceived anti-American bias?
I think Al Jazeera actually has a huge PR problem that it’s working to address. Obviously, they were associated primarily here [in the U.S.] with the [Osama] bin Laden tapes. But the truth is, when you actually look at their office, they have a very diverse staff with correspondents around the world. The vast majority of content I see from them is completely non-ideological with high production values. And we retain complete editorial control over the material we use from them and other partners. Within various spots that they offer to us, if we think they’ve taken liberties that we don’t agree with, we edit the pieces accordingly. It’s very important to emphasize that Worldfocus is in charge of the material that airs on Worldfocus.
The tension in the daily debate about what to use from them or other partners — but especially from Al Jazeera — is, on the one hand, to tell it as straight as we can, as fact-based as we can. On the other hand, we sometimes like to show how a story is being reported in other parts of the world by one organization or another as [an illustration] of the thinking about a topic from that part of the world. But, we hold them to the same standard as anyone else. Like I said, the vast bulk of material we see from them is completely non-ideological in a way that I think would surprise most American viewers. And I would also say that we have Israeli partners — Channel 2 of Israel, Channel 10 of Israel, IBA, the Israel Broadcasting Authority — and we run a lot of stuff from them, too.
| “A typical person in my position at one of the networks would walk over to the foreign desk and say, “Hey, I’m interested in a spot from Moscow tonight on what Putin said.” We don’t have a foreign bureau in Moscow, so we have to rely on some combination of our own smarts and, hopefully, collaboration with smart partners who do.” |
Even in tonight’s show, back-to-back, almost by coincidence, we have a piece from Ramallah on expectations of the Obama administration going forward from people in Ramallah as reported by Al Jazeera English. And right behind that, we have a piece from Channel 10 of Israel about how everything is political in that part of the world. When two young women singers — an Arab-Israeli and a Jewish-Israeli — got together to compete in a song contest in Europe, they were both kind of vilified and viewed as suspect because they were participating together in a way that the singers thought was completely natural. The goal of the show — a line that Neal made up a long time ago — is, “Diverse voices for a diverse world.” And that’s what we try to achieve as often as possible. And that includes an emphasis on having guests from all over the world.
How does producing a commercial-free newscast affect the depth, scope and range of the stories Worldfocus covers, relative to network and cable news shows?
One big difference between public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting is there’s more time within the half hour: Our show is 26:46 each night. I think the news hole within the network news now is more like 21-something, so we actually have five more minutes to play with each night. Our show has an unusually large amount of tape in it, especially for public broadcasting. I think it’s really important to see the world, not just discuss the world. But we do also try to discuss the world and make sense of it with experts and our emphasis within that is to try to get people from around the world, as well as American experts. Hopefully, we use the extra time well and wisely to bring more depth to the topic.
Our Signature pieces, which are our original pieces that we take great pride in, are five or six minutes long. A long piece on the evening news is typically 2:45 or three minutes. I guess it would be medium-form; it’s not short-form and not long-form. We feel excited and proud of those pieces for two reasons. One is, we’re covering all sorts of stories that aren’t getting any coverage at all [by the networks and cable]. We did a piece that got a huge reaction a few weeks ago on environmental damage in Haiti. Ninety-eight percent of the trees in Haiti have been cut down. It’s the kind of story that gets no coverage at all. The next night, a story that got even more attention was children [in Haiti] who are so hungry that they eat mud cookies. Literally, cookies that are made from mud. We visited Vietnam for a four-part series recently — Mark Litke, the former ABC bureau chief in Tokyo did these pieces for us — on multi-generational damage from Agent Orange because the chromosome pool has been damaged. And people are really responding to these pieces. We really get to go into some depth on those pieces.
Some say the mainstream American news audience isn’t ready for a newscast that’s not focused on America — what’s your take?
I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that the networks talked themselves into. They declare that Americans aren’t interested in foreign news, so they do less foreign news and, therefore, Americans aren’t interested in foreign news. Our show has had pretty substantial growth since it started. The trend is only up as people discover it. If you make it accessible, if you make it meaningful, a good story is a good story. I actually just don’t accept that [Americans aren’t interested in foreign news]. But I do think it’s a higher bar that you have to cross to make it interesting. It’s literally foreign to them to start with. So, I think a goal is to make it less foreign to them.
Worldfocus has been on the air for almost five months, and has replaced BBC World News on several public TV stations. Describe the reception so far.
We got a lot of email, and I think there was some number of people who were nervous about what it was being replaced by. And, honestly, we get a lot of good email and [positive reviews]. I wouldn’t say 100 percent, but something close to overwhelming. What do ya need to achieve overwhelming?
I’d say 75 percent.
Oh yeah, easily. Overwhelming. (Laughs) Easily. I’ll take your definition.
Besides the unyielding focus on international news, what are some differences between Worldfocus and the big three network newscasts?
There are fewer people to do the work, by far, and there’s less money to be spent, so I hope we find and I hope we have found creative ways to make up for those deficits. It’s not just the staff that [network news shows] have, but the whole news division exists, all the bureaus exist mostly to serve the evening news. Now, there are far fewer people on the bureaus than there used to be, but they still exist. A typical person in my position at one of the networks would walk over to the foreign desk and say, “Hey, I’m interested in a spot from Moscow tonight on what Putin said.” And the foreign editor would call the correspondent in Moscow who would then drum up the piece and review it with a senior producer. We don’t have a foreign desk. We don’t have a foreign bureau in Moscow, so we have to rely on some combination of our own smarts and, hopefully, collaboration with smart partners who do. And those also include print partners, who we interview and, as we build our own spots, integrate their expertise into our spots, whether that’s from The Christian Science Monitor or The New York Times. So, it’s not just TV partners.
You have an interesting résumé: The AP; ABC News; NBC; Dateline; Tom Brokaw Reports; CBS Evening News. In which job, at which of those outlets, did you learn the most that you bring to bear on your day-to-day work at Worldfocus?
Honestly, I have to duck that question because I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it enough. I would like to think I’ve learned something at every job. You learn different things from different people all along the way, so hopefully you’re able to absorb what people teach you and integrate it successfully.
Describe being at CBS Evening News in the wake of the Dan Rather era and the Bush Air National Guard “Memogate.” What did that teach you?
I was there well after [Memogate] and… I really like and respect the people I work with there, so I think you should honestly talk to people from there. I was only at CBS for a little less than a year. I just wanted bigger challenges from what I was doing then, so I don’t have enough background on that.
You were brought on in an advisory role to help Phil Donahue’s MSNBC show. Why do you think Donahue’s dissenting liberal voice couldn’t gain traction on MSNBC, but Keith Olbermann’s show has been successful?
I think at the time — the war [in Iraq] started in March of 2003 — I think there was skittishness about [Donahue’s] point of view. He was very outspoken. I think the show, to its detriment, often booked people who were very like-minded. I didn’t think there was, as other networks might say, a fair and balanced debate going on. On a show of that format, what I think most cable broadcasters strive for is conflict. I don’t recall, honestly, enough about all of their guests. I can remember some guests, memorably, just being in total agreement with Donahue from the beginning to the end of the show. The other big mistake I thought they made was — and we tried to rectify it, and I thought we actually had some success with it before they pulled the show — is we brought Donahue back to the studio in front of a live audience. This was a guy who invented the form, and I truly didn’t understand why they were doing the show in a studio with no audience. He invented the form. So, the show actually gained some traction. He was in the audience, we were taking emails during the show, we were taking calls during the show. There were three other people, usually guests, one of whom was a like-minded person with Phil, two of whom weren’t. So it was two against two in a hot debate about something. But it was eventually pulled. Why Keith Olbermann succeeded — I think they do a very clever show… and the times are different.
So, are you saying Donahue was ahead of the curve?
On his political point of view? I’m not saying that, but I think, at the time, my impression was that there was actually some discomfort with where he was coming from.
Discomfort where? With MSNBC, GE?
I wouldn’t even speculate. (Laughs)
You’ve worked with some of the biggest names in broadcast news: Who’s left the greatest impression on you, and why?
I just really respect virtually all of the people I’ve worked with a great deal. I really respect Tom Brokaw greatly. The thing about Tom Brokaw that I think people pick up on — and that it’s just somehow communicated — is I think there’s a great decency about him and a great genuineness about him. It’s so important that people trust you in those positions and I think, because he’s genuine and because he’s decent, people do trust him. Obviously, he’s very bright, too, but I take it as a given that everyone at that level is very bright. I think he’s benefited greatly from personal qualities that he has and people pick up on. My guess is that he was well-raised.
What’s your advice to those aiming to break in and have a career as extensive as yours in TV news?
My advice is not to be afraid, to go hard after it, to make calls that are uncomfortable for you to make, to take any job you can get. What I tell people is, try to figure out where you want to be 10 years from now and get there, even if it’s at the lowest level to start. My overwhelming impression is that most people in the business are decent and they’re generous and, if you show that you’re smart and show that you’re interested, they will help you. Sooner or later, you’ll get your shot, and then it’s up to you to do well with it. So, my big advice is go for it and go for it hard. And don’t be afraid.
Tips for a successful career in TV journalism:
1. Identify where you want to be in 10 years. Then target that specific job title and try to take any job beneath it, even if it’s at the bottom of the totem pole.
2. Don’t be afraid. Pick up the phone, call somebody who is in a position to help you get a job, and introduce yourself. It might be an uncomfortable exercise for you, but it could help set you apart in a highly competitive industry.
3. Display your talent and interest. Most people in the business want to see others succeed, so if you prove you’re a smart and hard worker, you’ll be rewarded with greater opportunity.
4. Seize your opportunity. When you get your shot, use what you’ve learned from others and make the most of it.
Andrew Tavani is a freelance writer living in the New York City area.
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