There's news in Sirott's lifestyle interviews, too: It's time to prune shrubs before they wake up with the spring, advises a guest from the botanical garden.
Tradition tweaked
Chicago Tonight ‘came up smiling’ after
overhaul
If there’s one program that demonstrates a stalwart and longstanding commitment to local service, it’s Chicago Tonight, the hour-long newsmagazine produced and broadcast live every weeknight by WTTW.
Since 1984 the public affairs icon has weathered cable-news competition, viewers’ waning appetite for public affairs, WTTW’s financial freefall after the dot-com bust, and a controversial 2002 overhaul that brought in host Bob Sirott, a former morning news anchor and rock deejay.
Two years later, some critics who lambasted WTTW for dumbing-down a serious news venue have joined fans who praise the new incarnation of Chicago Tonight. Its once dwindling audience has rebounded.
Viewers can still catch the roundtable that defined Chicago Tonight since its beginnings with founding host John Callaway. Phil Ponce, who became host after Callaway retired in 1999, is managing editor and anchor for public affairs elements of the program, which include discussions of news of the day and field reports from veteran correspondents Elizabeth Brackett, Rich Samuels and Joel Weisman.
It’s the second half-hour of Chicago Tonight that diverges from the civic and sober Callaway-Ponce style into the softer end of the classic NBC Today mix. The Feb. 21-25 programs featured short docs about the famous Chicago Seven conspiracy trial in 1969 as well as an off-beat exhibit of presidential portraits, a blind piano tuner, and high school students exploring racial identity through art. Producers for Chicago Stories and Artbeat Chicago contributed many of these elements, which are repackaged for later broadcast in those stand-alone series.
Sirott also interviewed the author of a book about deluxe Lake Shore apartment towers, the producer of a pubTV documentary on the Harlem Globetrotters, and Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Roper. He debriefed regular business and medical commentators and handled lifestyle segments in Matt Lauer style, eulogized Hunter Thompson, and, on the night WTTW aired the Frontline with swearing GIs, gave an opinionated riff on the FCC indecency rules. “A film done by the best documentary series on television is not obscene, but censoring it is,” he said.
“It keeps some of the core strengths of previous program—which was a very strong news segment hosted by Phil—as an element of the program, the most significant element insofar as the time devoted to it,” says Bruce DuMont, a former producer and political analyst for Chicago Tonight who heads the Museum of Broadcast Communications in town. The added features give viewers “a good taste of what is happening in the city.”
The new format is “pretty eclectic,” says Michael Miner, senior editor of the weekly Chicago Reader. “Most people here seem to think it works pretty well.”
“Bob Sirott is somebody who wears well,” Miner says. “He’s
bright, smooth and a genuinely curious person. He’s an adept and disarming
interviewer, and his chats are worth tuning in for.” But Miner adds
that he doesn’t tune in often.
Zooming in on Chicago
Before joining WTTW, Sirott anchored a local newsmagazine, Fox Thing in the Morning, reported and anchored for the CBS-owned station and the network’s West 57th, a newsmag for young adults. He cut his teeth hosting afternoons on Chicago rock powerhouse WLS in the 1970s. “I still think of myself as a radio guy, even though I was in radio for 10 years and now have been in television for 25,” Sirott says.
He joined WTTW shortly after it hired his Fox colleague Randy King to revamp its productions, and they brought the concept “that localism underlies everything,” Sirott says. They aimed to mix public affairs coverage with features on other aspects of city life—from business to arts, health, media and sports. “We felt that we could expand and get into these other areas and still maintain the same level of integrity—whether we were talking in-depth about the judicial system or whether Marshall Fields will change its name to Macy’s,” Sirott says. “And we try to inject fun, which is not a bad word.”
“There was a concern that we would lighten up the show, but we’re broadening the show,” says Mike Liederman, executive producer. “It’s CBS Sunday Morning with more caffeine and Meet the Press, a destination for people to learn about where they live and the big story of the day.”
As Ponce describes it, Chicago Tonight has zoomed
out and zoomed in at the same time. “We’re expanding the range
of stories and narrowing the focus on Chicago,” he says. The new show
is “a
creature of the area” that seldom ventures into national and international
topics as the old one did.
“What you get when you tune in is damn well informed,” Liederman
says. “You get a sense of where you live and what makes Chicago Chicago.”
Surfers welcome here
Retooling Chicago Tonight was, by many accounts, a harrowing process.
It followed revenue shortfalls, budget cuts and layoffs as WTTW began changing
its name and identity to Network Chicago, a multimedia service for local
content.
WTTW President Dan Schmidt, who came under fire from the local press and some staffers for spending too much on the Network Chicago remake, hired King to shake things up as head of TV operations.
“I give a lot of credit to Dan Schmidt for getting Randy in here and letting him go with his creative vision, and sort of allowing him to put it into action,” Sirott says.
“It certainly was an adjustment, and we had to deal with a whole bunch of issues,” says Liederman, a veteran Chicago broadcast journalist who joined WTTW in late 2000 as producer of Chicago Stories. Producers had to adapt to a more frenetic schedule, keep the program’s topical prism turning and adjust to a new host with a different sensibility, he says.
“We wanted Chicago Tonight to be the centerpiece for everything we do as far as local production,” King says. For example, Chicago Stories, the most successful of the weekly series introduced with Network Chicago, appears less frequently as a stand-alone program. Instead it feeds seven-minute segments into Chicago Tonight. The reconfiguration helps to “get viewers interested so they’ll tune in for the whole thing,” King says.
King wanted channel surfers who don’t catch all 60 minutes to know that if they tune in for just part of the broadcast, they would find something interesting. To him, the old single-topic half-hour didn’t fit this bill. “If you were not interested in the topic that was thrown out at the beginning of the program, you probably wouldn’t stay and watch,” he says.
When audiences can go to cable news, radio talk shows and the Web for heaps of material about a story as soon as it breaks, Chicago Tonight was still going in-depth two to four days later. By then, King says, the story had been talked out.
His solution was to grab a ball CNN wasn’t even watching: “We could cover Chicago better than they could.”
Though the changes were difficult for the staff and the program’s fans, they’ve been worth the trouble, according to a Chicago broadcaster they respect.
“I am immensely proud of it,” John Callaway says. “It’s very watchable. They came up smiling out of an earlier sense of conflict and controversy.”
If Chicago Tonight’s newshounds are battling lifestyle mavens behind the scenes, it doesn’t show on the air, he says.
“My sense of the new Chicago Tonight is that, except that the set is more tasteful, it doesn’t feel that different from a network morning show, but they’re not doing stories on Lacey Peterson and all that,” says Steve Johnson, TV critic for the Chicago Tribune.
Johnson once panned Chicago Tonight as one of the worst TV shows of the year—he felt the news and entertainment elements should be separated into different programs—but he has since reconsidered.
“I’m reluctant to criticize Chicago Tonight because at least it’s somebody doing some local programming and doing it a lot more aggressively than other commercial stations and PBS stations do,” Johnson says. “At least it’s an effort to keep in touch with the community and not turn the station over to the network feed.”
Loyal Chicago Tonight viewers, and younger adults who stop by while channel surfing, seem to recognize this. The average audience for Chicago Tonight, which had dropped to a 1.3 before the change, now hits a 2.1 on a good month, says Dan Soles, program director. “The 25-to-54-year-old audience is coming in, which doesn’t usually happen in primetime.”
“This is the best audience mix that we’ve had in the show’s history, in terms of ages,” Soles says. Chicago Tonight was always able to attract older viewers who make up WTTW’s core audience, “but now we have younger viewers too.”
Web page posted March 13, 2006
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee
