As for the anchoring duo, my initial impression is that Vargas, who had plenty of anchor experience at the network before getting the permanent job, pretty much looks and acts the part. She is solid, composed, and professional. I’m less sure about Woodruff. I hate to hold a guy’s movie-star good looks against him, but in Woodruff’s case, they are a bit distracting. (He’s actually prettier than Vargas, no slouch herself.) And his voice seems to lack that authoritative timbre we’ve come to expect.
But it’s early, and I’m a firm believer that good anchors are made, not born. “One thing you can do is you can learn as anchor,” says Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes network newscasts. “You don’t come on fully formed.”
In the meantime, these are no longer your parents’ network newscasts.
Rethinking radio at WRKO
It’s my contention that some time ago, talk radio came to a fork in the road and — to paraphrase Yogi Berra — didn’t take it. The conservative-driven political “issues” talk that flourished a decade ago when Bill Clinton was in the White House has grown tired and gaseous. The “hot talk” genre — which generated a slew of salacious and silly Howard Stern imitators — has fallen victim to a puritanical FCC and its own inanity. Despite this, talk radio has been painstakingly slow to innovate.
Making it clear he is speaking for himself, Brian Whittemore, the new (he arrived on Labor Day) operations director at WRKO-AM, is one of those who believe it’s time for a different direction in talk.
“There’ve been studies recently that have studied passion in radio,” he says. “What happened is there are so many derivative programs it’s affecting the time people are listening. That passion aired and waned and now people are leaving because they’ve heard it.”
As the steward of Boston’s most storied talk-radio call letters, Whittemore isn’t exactly a wild-eyed radical. He is happy with the core of WRKO’s lineup — relative newcomer John DePetro and talk warhorses Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr — and emphasizes that “no changes” are in the works there. But in other daily time blocks and on the weekend, Whittemore has embarked on an experiment in localism, something radio did quite well and naturally before massive media consolidation transformed and homogenized the business.
“I don’t want it to be derivative,” says Whittemore of his programming lineup. “I want it to be original radio.”
It started in October with the change of the am drive show Boston This Morning, featuring Scott Allen Miller (formerly “Scotto” of “Blute & Scotto” fame) into a newsier, more Boston-centric format. Starting last week, Boston This Morning began airing daily reports from two of the city’s financial-media mavens — Herald business editor Cosmo Macero and Globe business columnist Steve Bailey.
A bolder move was the mid-December decision to roll out Todd Feinburg’s lifestyle show Taste of Boston Tonight, at seven o’clock each night. “I was looking for a concept that would allow me to sell Entercom on the concept of ... a local show,” says Whittemore. “AM stations in America have so much issues-oriented talk — so much conservative-oriented talk — I just think there needs to be more information.” So he gambled on a format that focuses on eating, shopping, partying, and entertainment, and that includes 60 separate segments each week.
