Remember WHEN?

Before he retired in 2005, John Darnton spent more than 40 years reporting for the New York Times. Now a novelist, toward the end of a 2008 satirical mystery he penned titled Black & White and Dead All Over, the “surviving” members of a newspaper that has been metaphorically murdered gather at a bar to talk about the future of journalism. On Friday, March 6, that scene was sadly reflected in Syracuse reality. Several former and as of Monday, March 2, spontaneously out-of-work newsroom employees of WTVH-Channel 5 gathered at Riley’s Tavern on Park Street to say fare-thee-well to one another.

On Dec. 1, 1948, WTVH became the first television station to hit the city’s airwaves, and now, ironically, it’s the first to become a victim of the times as they ceased their flow of information.

But at Riley’s, the only gloom in the air was when a toast was raised and the glass became empty. Familiar faces that have graced the Channel 5 airwaves, including Matt Mulcahy, Donna Adamo, Bill Carey, Liz Ayers, Tom Hauf and Rich Isome, among others, as well as the behind-the-scenes crew that were just as important in making everything run smoothly, raised their spirits and libations as optimism of their unwritten future was conferred and a lifetime worth of station memories regaled.

“There were many, many great off-air moments for me,” said Maureen Green, an anchor at WTVH from 1983 until she was let go in a decision that was met with ill-favored fervor among Syracuse’s general public in December 2007. “They all involved laughing when I wasn’t supposed to and usually involved Matt Mulcahy making me laugh during the commercials, right up to the moment the camera turned on for some serious story. I blame him completely. I had nothing to do with it.”

Although she departed the station almost 18 months before the shutdown, she said there were telltale signs that the station’s static transmission was having trouble shifting forward. “My first reaction was it can’t be true,” said Green upon hearing that Channel 5 news was no more. “But when I thought about it, it made sense. I don’t know how they were paying to heat the building; things were so bad. The cost-cutting became extreme and you couldn’t hide it from the audience anymore.

“There was more than just a whisper about the station being in trouble,” she continued. “For years, trade journals featured articles that Granite Broadcasting {the New York City-based holding company that owned WTVH-Channel 5} couldn’t pay its debt, and a year or two before I was fired, Granite declared bankruptcy {on Dec. 11, 2006}.”

Less revenue means raising rates for publishers, as exemplified by the The Post-Standard’s recent 25 percent increase in the toll of sitting through a perusal of their paper—while The New Times remains free. But this problem isn’t confined to Syracuse. Print and television media outlets across the country are in contention to see if they can stay one step ahead until the first rays of economic expansion break through the current cloud of deflation.

“Unfortunately, I think mergers and station closings will continue,” said Green of the short-term outlook for television stations. “The stations at the bottom of the ratings just can’t get the advertising revenue of the stronger stations at the top and what you’ll have left is a hybrid that’s pretty confusing. Managers are calling this a shared-services agreement, which is flowery language {they’re using to describe the} takeover of WTVH by WSTM. The very few Channel 5 employees who still have jobs now work for Channel 3 and the news is very much WSTM.”

The closure sent more than 40 people in the WTVH newsroom out of work—news that doesn’t bode well for aspiring journalists and Newhouse School journalism students or for those who have lost their jobs. In such a small market like Syracuse, the opportunity to remain in journalism may not be there and people might have to leave town to stay in the field. Others foresaw journalism’s plight and decided to leave the field entirely.

“I left WTVH in April of 2008, almost a year now,” said former staffer Amber Wakefield from her hometown of Chicago; she is now pursuing a master’s degree in elementary education at the University of Illinois. “My contract was up and I wanted out of the television news business. In general, I feel the whole news industry is changing rapidly. With the boom of Internet and cable and now the economy, advertising revenues are down, which unfortunately leads to less money coming in for stations and fewer jobs. 

“Keeping this in mind,” she continued, “I was very worried about my future and employment. I put a lot of hard work into my career and it was tough to leave, but knew it was the right decision in the long run.”

MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS

Wakefield first began an internship at WTVH during the fall semester of 2003 while she was enrolled as an undergrad at Syracuse University. “I spent three of the best years of my life working for the station and living in Syracuse,” she recalled. “As soon as I started, I felt right at home. My heart goes out to all my friends at WTVH; we were a close-knit news family and they {still} are some of my dearest friends.”

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But like Green, Wakefield sensed the station was in decline, although she maintains the integrity of the work was never compromised and everyone tried to pull together to help right the ship. “There were quite a few changes at WTVH in my time spent there,” she said. “However, looking back, I believe everyone was trying everything possible to make the station stay afloat. It was hard to see people being let go and gradually throughout the years, the building became more and more empty.” 

Journalism is seeing more and more talented up-and-comers leaving the business every day to ensure a more equable livelihood. Combine that with the fact that anyone can start a Web site and call themselves a reporter, and you have another factor negatively compromising the integrity of “real” journalism, as well as its imminent future.

“I see journalism landing somewhere in the middle between traditional outlets like newspaper, television and radio,” continued Green, “and the Internet with ‘citizen journalists’ challenging the mainstream. We saw it during the election where ordinary people were scooping the papers. Quality and ethics will suffer for this, and that’s a little scary.”

Chris Geiger, president of WSTM, WSTQ and now, WTVH, does not see the army of bloggers trolling the World Wide Web as a realistic threat to the profession; instead, he believes readers and viewers will still turn to the trusted source they’ve come to know. “Anybody can start a blog,” he said, “but not everyone can start a TV station and Web site that has 50 years of experience to validate it.”

And while many believe technology—mainly the Internet—has altered the landscape of journalism, Geiger believes the only thing it has really changed is the job description of journalists. “People getting into broadcast journalism have to have a diverse skill set,” he elaborated. “It’s becoming a multi-task job as journalists have to be able to shoot , edit and post news online. It’s reflective of a more competitive world.”

The competitive world he speaks of is the one that forced WTVH under the guidance of WSTM, and although he mentioned that it was “more than difficult” to have to let more than 40 members of the WTVH newsroom staff go, he believes it’ll turn out to be a positive outcome in the long run.

“WTVH isn’t going anywhere,” continued Geiger, “and neither are their newscasts. The future isn’t dual broadcasts at 5 p.m.; in the near future, we’ll look to other time periods for WTVH newscasts where we’ll still be providing news from WTVH, but we won’t be competing against ourselves in the process.”

—Tom Kahley