By Michael Winetip

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

 Thank God it was Friday, the end of a very bad mid-October week for the men who run Channel 2 News in Orlando. They looked beat. They were beat. And they were reminded of it every morning, before 9, when the overnight Nielsen ratings were dropped on their desks by a smiling newsroom clerk.

 If only there were something to smile about. Channel 2's local-news ratings had never been so low.

"Worst numbers I've seen since I've been here," said Bill Bauman, the general manager of Channel 2, WESH-TV an NBC affiliate, Bauman, a veteran newsman with a reputation for producing top-quality local news, was hired this past year to remake the station's programming remake it from No. 2 to No. 1 in Orlando. Instead, the Nielsen sheets he was scanning that Friday made it quite clear: Channel 2 News was rapidly sinking from view.

 Was this the price you paid for trying to do smart television news? When Bauman arrived in April, he announced that the news was going to become more issue-oriented, more in-depth. They would cover more education, transportation, environment and zoning stories and fewer crime stories.

 Like most local television news coverage, Orlando's newscasts are awash in crime, violence and silly fluff. Bauman wasn't proposing to stop covering crime but to put crime into its proper perspective. On the day he announced this to the staff, the newsroom erupted in applause.

 Kathy Marsh, a reporter who under the previous regime was assigned to do a special report on penis and bust enhancers, leaped out of her seat, clapping. Dan Billow, who covers the space program at Cape Canaveral, said, "It's like we're having honor restored to our occupation."

 The Orlando Sentinel found the changes so remarkable that it ran a front-page story. Community leaders and ordinary citizens called to thank Bauman.

 "It is now a pleasure to watch "real' news, rather than the police blotter," wrote Maxwell W. Wells Jr., a local lawyer. "You have at least two (my wife and 1) converts from the Channel 9 crime reports."

 But six months later, the Channel 2 newsroom was wondering where everyone had gone. Certainly there was plenty of thoughtful news to watch on Channel 2 that mid-October week.

 Marsh, now an education reporter, broke the story about local elementary schools that made the state's list of failing schools. Billow reported several smart, analytic pieces on the Atlantis and Cassini space missions that the other stations didn't have. Greg Fox, Channel 2's tourism reporter, did a four minute story on Disney's new advertising campaign aimed at black families, who now make up 12 percent of Central Florida's tourist trade.

 But sadly for Channel 2, more than 80 percent of Orlando viewers watching the early evening news were glued to the two big crime channels. Both Channel 6 and Channel 9 did major pieces longer than two minutes - on a Lake County dog stabbed in the eyes.

"This case even has seasoned animal-cruelty investigators shaking their heads in disgust!" reported Channel 6's Jackie Keenum. "It's anyone's guess the pain the dog endured before her death."

 Channel 9's Phil Robertson got an exclusive on-the-air confession from a man arrested for stealing six guns from the Hock Your Rocks pawn shop in Cocoa after the fellow had second thoughts and was caught returning some of the guns.

 "Why'd you steal the guns?" Robertson shouted. "Why'd I re-turn them?" Joey Christian shouted back as police led him away. "Because I was intoxicated, and I knew I did wrong."

 How do you compete with Channel 6's exclusive on a 400 pound man accused of intentionally sitting on a 22-month-old child? It was the top story on the 5:30 news one evening that October week. "He tips the scale at 400 pounds, and tonight he's calling the Marion County Jail home!" began David Wittman, a Channel 6 anchor. "The charge: sitting on a sleeping toddler! Good evening. The accusations are shocking, jarring. A 22-monthold baby trapped beneath a hulk of a man."

 Wittman's co-anchor, Lisa Colagrossi, continued, "It sadly doesn't end there. The baby's mom said he sat on her, too! ... Tom Abrahams is in Ocala and live with a story you'll see on' 6!"

 So what if the charges were so ludicrous that the state attorney refused to prosecute? So what if no one was hurt? So what if a family's odd, little domestic squabble was beamed to tens of thousands of homes?

 At Channel 6 and Channel 9, news directors had no qualms about filling their broadcasts with crime.

 Crime pays

"Crime is what the audience wants -- all the surveys put crime at the top of the list," said Bill Berra, news director of Channel 6. "Who am I to second-guess the audience?"

The audience does appear contented. National surveys by organizations such as the Pew Research Center and the Times Mirror Center indicate that the public trusts local TV news most -- more than local daily papers, more than network news, more than national papers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

"We don't agonize. We just go," Berra said. "We don't sit and talk and thrash it out. We've got two other stations breathing down our neck. News happens, and then it goes away. Your job is to chronicle it with your cameras."

At Channel 2, during 9 a.m. planning meetings, editors fretted about which crimes and fires and animal-abuse cases were worth covering. They disagreed over whether to do a story on Dennis Johnson, an Orlando resident and former National Basketball Association star who was arrested for threatening his wife with a kitchen knife. Producers debated whether to cover a 12-year-old boy bit by his pet rattlesnake. And as they agonized, Channels 6 and 9 beat them to the snake boy and to Dennis Johnson's house, getting "exclusive" footage of Johnson ducking down in a police car.

Before heading home that Friday evening in October, Russ Kilgore, Channel 2's news director, met with Ken Ericson, the assistant news director.

"Tough week," Ericson said. Four televisions were on, all turned to the 6 p.m. news.

Kilgore asked, "You see that bullfighting video Channel 9 ran tonight?" It was a 30-second tape from Spain that showed a man dodging a bull, getting caught on the bull's horn, being hoisted into' the air upside down, losing his pants as he landed and then running across the ring to safety, his naked backside exposed for all to see. Channel 6 ran it, too.

"I said we're not running that," Ericson said. "It was totally gratuitous."

"And then, less than a minute later, there in Ericson's office, on his own Channel 2 screen, was that very bullfighting video, the last segment on Channel 2 sports. Ericson stared at his monitor in disbelief. He had told his news producers not to run it, but he hadn't thought of his sports guys. And all over the Channel 2 news room, as people watched their monitors, faces lighted up at the sight of the half-naked Spaniard running, and they laughed and said what a terrific video it was.

Most anyone in the press and academia who has given it much thought has concluded that, although there are exceptions, local television news is atrocious. Crime has been going down for years: The Justice Department reports that the rate at which Americans were victimized by crime in 1996 fell to the lowest level since data were first collected, in 1973. Yet crime and violence continue to be the mainstay of local TV news. A survey last February by Rocky Mountain Media Watch of 100 stations found that 72 news shows led with a crime story and that one-third of all news stories were about crime. A University of Miami study in eight major markets found twice as much crime news on local television as political news, and 15 times more crime news than education news.

During the October week when I taped the evening and late-night news on Orlando's three network affiliates, more than 30 hours of news, Orlando's mayor was never interviewed on camera.

On the other hand, of the approximately 13 minutes allotted to news during the 11 p.m. broad casts, Channel 6 averaged 7 minutes of crime, and Channel 9 averaged,6 minutes. (Channel 2, in the midst of its overhaul, averaged 3 minutes.)

Oprah is fed up. A former TV news reporter, she devoted a show last fall to exploring why TV news is so full of gratuitous violence. Even Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, agrees that local television news leaves much to be desired.

A decade of change

The past decade has been a time' of extraordinary tumult at local television stations. Flawless looking anchors are truly a facade: Right behind their hightech sets are newsrooms in chaos. The upheaval began with the federal government's deregulation of the communications industry under President Ronald Reagan.

Suddenly, corporations could own three times as many stations as the old regulations permitted, and those corporations were no longer required to keep a station for three years before selling. In 1981, before deregulation, 24 stations were sold nationwide for a total of $228 million; in 1986, according to a survey by Broadcasting and Cable magazine, 128 stations were sold for $2.7 billion.

Laurence Tisch, meanwhile, was making deep budget cuts at CBS's network-owned local stations, and the upstart Fox network caused a free-for-all in 1993 by stealing a dozen local stations from the Big Three network affiliates.

TV newsrooms throughout the country were hit with one new owner and management team after another. Channel 2 in Orlando, now owned by the Pulitzer Company, and Channel 6, recently bought by the Washington Post Company, have each had three owners in a decade.

A corporate vision? A longterm plan? A network philosophy? The average tenure for a TV news director in America is less than two years.

"A news director comes in and has a very short time to make his vision work, or he's gone," said Bob Papper, a telecommunications professor at Ball State University.

Bill Berra, who recently arrived from Phoenix as news director of Channel 6, has in the past four years worked for five companies, eight general managers and three stations affiliated with three different networks -- and most of that time he was sitting in the same building.

Ken Ericson, the 33-year-old assistant news director at Channel 2, has switched stations 10 times in his career, working as far north as Chicago and Green Bay, as far west as Los Angeles and as far east as Pittsburgh before landing in Orlando two years ago.

 Feeling the pressure

 Spinning that revolving door is the pressure to make lots of money. Every morning, station managers get a report on how they're doing, in the form of ratings from Nielsen. In Orlando this fall, the top-rated station, Channel 9, could get $1,400 for a 30-second ad on its 11 p.m. news, while second-ranked Channel 2 charged $1,000 and Channel 6 charged $900. With eight minutes of commercials in a half-hour newscast, Channel 9 collected $22,400 for one night of its 11 p.m. news, while third-ranked Channel 6 received $14,400. In a year, that's a difference of $3 million between first and last place, just for the 11 p.m. news.

 Pressure?

 "We can't get beat," Channel 6's Berra said. "Our livelihood is at stake. There are two other competitors just waiting to eat our lunch. And I want to eat theirs."

 When I asked newspaper critics and TV-beat writers why they believed that TV news in their cities was so weak, they'd invariably mention that the medium attracted the nation's most beautiful people but not the brightest. Based on my 22 years as a newspaper reporter in six cities, working alongside TV journalists, I don't think that's fair. And it was not what I found as I spent time in TV newsrooms for this article, meeting many bright, hard-working reporters and editors.

 Granted, they often spent too much time doing stories of too little consequence, but that usually wasn't their call. The Kathy Marsh who did the special report for Channel 2 in 1995 called "Boosting Your Assets" is the same Kathy Marsh who in November scooped every TV station in the state on Florida's biggest education story of the year. The difference was her general manager.

 Paula Walker, the news director of WNBC in New York, speaks as eloquently as anyone on the harmful effects of nonstop crime coverage. Suburbanites see crime after crime beamed live from our urban centers, she said, and are afraid to venture into the city, dividing us as a people.

 As I went throughout the Orlando area, I'd ask people what they thought of TV news. Always, I heard the same lament. Bobbi Case, a bartender at the Link Inn, said she hated it and wouldn't let her 12-year-old granddaughter watch, because of the violence, and David Pursley, a businessman getting a haircut at Dom's, called it "a joke -- car fires, wrecks, murders, animal abuse."

 Wayne Holmes, a state prosecutor, couldn't believe how trivial many of the crime stories were. "They spend the first 10 minutes of a newscast showing every pervert they can find," he said.

 Even Ken Shuba, a Channel 6 camera operator who spent four hours waiting to get 10 seconds of video of Dennis Johnson being arraigned and ducking into a car, said, "I wish we did less."

The thing is, people watch it. A 1997 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 81. percent rated local television news favorably, compared with 74 percent for daily papers, 73 percent for network news and 41 percent for national newspapers. Surveys also support what Channel 6's Bill Berra said: Viewers want to see crime. A 1996 Pew study concluded that crime outranks sports, local government, religion and politics.

It made me think of a woman a story with Bob Kealing of Channel 2. He was do the 11 o'clock news on the history of break-ins at the St. Martin's apartments, including a recent rape. While Kealing conducted interviews, I talked with a young woman drawn out into the night by, Channel 2's bright lights. "I don't watch the news," she told me. "Too depressing."

 Then how did she know about the rape?

 "Actually, I did see it on the news," said the woman, who wouldn't give her name. "I do watch, I just don't watch a station -I switch back and forth to see if there's anything really bad going on I need to know."

 It occurred to me that interviewing people about TV news is like asking married couples how often they have sex or North Carolina residents whether they would vote for Jesse Helms or Harvey Gantt.

 Watching local TV news seems to be one of those dark, little secrets Americans lie about to strangers.

 Local boy makes good

 Broadcast people say that if anyone can do serious TV news in Orlando and win the ratings war, it is Bill Bauman, Channel 2's new general manager. Bauman, 49, grew up in Orlando when it was a small town with a Southern flavor. By 1978, he was an investigative reporter for Channel 9, when the news director offered him a chance to move off screen and into management.'

 "I was 31," he said, "I've never been much to look at. I was getting bald, and I was pretty paranoid about it."

 He took the offer and helped take Channel 9 into the top ratings spot.

 By the time he left Florida in the mid-80s, he'd worked at all three local stations, two as news director. Channel 9's news director, Lauren Watkins, started as Bauman's assistant, as did Robin Smythe, the news director for CFN13, the 24-hour cable news station that Time Warner and The Orlando Sentinel just started up in Orlando.

 "Bill Bauman taught me how to be brave," Smythe said. "He's a very brave man."

 In 1988, Bauman joined KCRA in Sacramento, Calif. KCRA is an anomaly. Locally owned, it is a station that perennially leads the ratings while producing serious, issue-oriented news. In 1992, with Bauman as news director, it won the national Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence.

 In January -1997, drenching rains brought devastating floods to California's Central Valley. Levees collapsed, forcing 100,000 people from their homes and leaving eight dead. Bauman quickly realized, that in an area divided into so many government entities, there was no central source of emergency information - except television. He kept his news operation on the air for 84 straight hours.

 Last spring, Bauman returned to Orlando to take the general manager's job at Channel 2, as part of a push by the Pulitzer Company to improve news at its nine stations. The general manager runs the station, overseeing both the news and business operations; in the current profit-hungry atmosphere, it's rare for a newsman to get the job.

 For Bauman, every day was a surprise. His first week, he was home watching the news, and at the end of a segment, on came Channel 2's health reporter, Dr. Todd Husty. And Husty, wearing a white coat with the name Columbia over the pocket, was telling viewers who needed a mammography test to get it at one of several Columbia hospitals.

"I nearly fell off the couch Bauman said. "The ethics were awful."

 Bauman's predecessor had signed up Channel 2's health reporter to do commercials for a for-profit hospital chain. The next day, Bauman made it clear that when Columbia's contract expired, reporters wouldn't be doing any more commercials.

 Bauman believes that TV news is so crime-laden that a lot of viewers find it ridiculous and turn it off. He thinks that polls showing crime news to be popular are distorted: Because that's all people see, that's what they mention to pollsters. His plan is not so much to steal viewers from other stations as to pick up viewers who don't find local news relevant. There are a lot.

 In 1977, before cable, 92 percent of Orlando households watching television at 11 p.m. were tuned to local news; in 1997, only 57 percent were watching it.

 As he set out to create a different news program, one thing Bauman did not change was his anchors, keeping Wendy Chioji, a nine-year veteran, on the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts, and Claire Metz, an 11-year veteran, on the morning and noon reports. Bauman believes that viewers trust local TV news because they develop a bond with the anchors. They see the anchors at charity events, bump into them at the mall and, hopefully, invite them into their homes each night.

 The rest of the newsroom underwent a major reorganization. Instead of the traditional room full of general-assignment reporters dispatched to cover breaking news, he set up a beat system that assigns reporters specialties, such as education. Bauman believes that for families, the most important issue is local schools, which are usually ignored by TV news (unless a student gets shot).

 When the Orange County school system hired a new superintendent from Irvine, Calif., this, past summer, Bauman sent Kathy Marsh, his new education reporter, out West, and Orlando got its first look at the man. When the new superintendent met with 20,000 teachers and administrators in Orlando to describe his vision, Bauman pre-empted "Access Hollywood" to broadcast live for a half-hour.

 "I'm trying to own education," Bauman said. "To win the war you have to win the small battles."

 Good TV reporting takes tremendous drive and energy, strong visuals-- and you have to look good. For a feature on book banning, Kathy Marsh raced to Disney's MGM theme park to interview R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps books, which have' been banned by some schools for their horror content.

 As the Channel 2 van barreled down Interstate 4, trying to catch Stine before he left town, Marsh used her cell phone to interview an expert on censorship and a local principal. At Disney-MGM, she popped out of the van, redid her lipstick and hair, then rushed off, carrying the camera operator's tripod, her high heels clicking. They hitched a ride on a Disney cart with Chip and Dale on the way to their park assignments, arriving just in time to catch Stine.

 All fall, Marsh did education stories -- on effective reading programs, teacher standards, special education, But more than anything else, she hammered away at school overcrowding. It is a serious problem here in Florida; the state's population is still booming, but there has been little support to raise taxes to build new schools.

 At West Orange High School, the overcrowding is so bad that Marsh found students who regularly ate lunch on hallway floors. In Ocoee, a town in the electoral district of Florida House of Representatives Speaker Daniel Webster, Marsh did a story about a school where three-fourths of the students are taught in portable classrooms.

 "Sweeps" matter

 For reporters like Marsh, "sweeps" are the roughest time of year. Four times annually, stations go through these monthlong periods when viewership is measured to set ad rates. A-11 sorts of series are concocted to increase ratings. Marsh's special report for the May 1995 sweeps, "Boosting Your Assets," about the latest bust-and penis-enhancing underwear, is legendary at Channel 2.

 "I had to go into Mulligan's," Marsh recalls, "carrying penis-enhanced underwear in my hand and ask men at the bar whether they'd wear it. I was ashamed."

 For the November 1997 sweeps, Bauman planned a different look. He sent Husty to New Orleans to cover a national pediatric convention. He sent Marsh to Tallahassee for a special legislative session on school overcrowding. In 13 years as a TV reporter, Marsh had never covered a legislature.

 "I can't wait," she said a few days before leaving. "It's a very big story."

 For his part, Bauman was dreading the sweeps. "We're going to get clobbered," he said. He was worried about his 5 p.m. newscast. The program that leads into the news is crucial for building a viewership. Channel 9 had the top-rated "Oprah" as a lead-in; Channel 6 had "Rosie." And Bauman had "Discover Orlando," a community-events show he had just developed, which was running a distant third. He feared that Channel 2's early news would meet the same fate.

 He also knew that his newsroom was confused about which crimes were still worth covering. Although his reporters liked the idea of more thoughtful news, in their guts they loved those crime scoops. "They're angsting over it," he said.

 They were. Many were critical of Ken Ericson's decision not to cover the arrest of Dennis Johnson for threatening his wife. Ericson termed it "a minor domestic," with no one injured, involving a man he felt was not that well known anymore.

 Bauman would later say that Johnson's arrest did deserve modest coverage, but he had deeper worries. "I have to mature the culture of the newsroom," he said. "I'd like to see us get as excited about a Kathy Marsh story as an airplane with no landing gear."

 Shortly after 9 p.m. on Oct. 7, the police scanners in the Channel 2 newsroom had started crackling with confused reports about a cargo plane circling the airport, unable to land, because the pilot couldn't lower the wheels. You could feel the adrenaline surge in the newsroom. A crew in a satellite truck raced to the airport. The station has six Channel 2 sky-cams atop local buildings, and the one pointed at the airport picked up a distant shot of flashing lights.

 "You can see the fire trucks!" an editor shouted. Reporters worked the phones. At 9:35, an editor rushed to the producer's desk, saying the plane had made an emergency belly landing with no reports of injuries.

 "This isn't as big as it was 10 minutes ago," said Chioji the anchor. Still, Channel 2 interrupted the baseball playoff game, and Chioji ad-libbed a brief report. Afterward, there were congratulations all around for beating the other stations. The win was especially sweet because earlier that day News Chopper 2 had been the last helicopter to/arrive at a smoky brush fire that closed down an expressway during rush hour. "We looked like we were in slow motion," complained Kilgore, the news director.

 Not on the plane. It was 15 minutes before Channel 6 aired its bulletin, which did sound a little juicier. It talked about the plane crashing, bursting into flames, the pilot being removed, and the reporter not knowing if there were injuries. Suddenly the mood in the Channel 2 newsroom dampened. Channel 6 seemed to know something they didn't.

 By 11 p.m., the cargo plane was the lead on all three stations. Channel 6 opened with the words "Plane Crash" on the screen. 'A plane crash-lands on a runway and bursts into flames!" began the anchor, Grace Rabold. "We're live at the scene."

 Behind Chioji at Channel 2 was an illustration of an airport tower engulfed in flames. And Channel 9 had the most exciting report of all, saying the plane was on fire as it approached the airport. "Fire on board a plane forces an emergency landing!" began Channel 9's anchor Marla Weech.

None of the reports was true.

 There was no fire before or after the plane landed. There was no crash. There was an emergency landing and sparks when the plane's belly touched down on the tarmac.

 "Very minor incident, no fire," Carolyn Fennell, an airport spokeswoman, said later. "Airport didn't close. No damage to the runway. The plane was intact."

A few days later at Channel 6, Bill Berra discussed the "plane crash."

"It's so competitive," he said, "we think we don't have what someone else has and tend to believe the worst. You give up something for breaking news. Sometimes you give up accuracy. It was accurate at the time that someone said it was on fire. But it wasn't the case. The technology that lets us be instantaneous it's a blessing and a curse. The blessing is, you have it right now. The curse is, the information may be wrong."

Television stations battle one another the way newspaper tabloids did 50 years ago. Although most daily papers are now the only show in town, the number of TV stations doing local news keeps increasing. Orlando got its fourth in October with the debut of the 24-hour cable station, CFN13.

Newscasts multiply

As competitors have multiplied, the deadline pressure has ratcheted up. Until 1980, Channel 2, like most stations, did one and a half hours of local news daily a half-hour at noon, 6 and 11. But then came sophisticated video cameras, editing machines and satellite trucks that can broadcast live from the field. Stations could be flexible about when to do news.

Station managers saw an opportunity to boost profits by programming more local news: TV news is cheap to produce and commands high advertising rate because it attracts relatively upscale viewers. In 17 years, Channel 2 more than tripled its local news broadcasts, to five hours daily.

Unfortunately, staffing did no keep pace. If television news seems thin, consider this: Channel 2 has 95 people to fill 28 hours of air time each week; 60 Minutes, the best TV news show has 100 people to fill one hour a week. When companies do put extra money into newsrooms, most of it goes for equipment that helps a station get news faster. satellite truck with editing equipment sells for $350,000; a state-of-the-art gyro-stabilized camera for Chopper 2 costs $300,000.

But reporters are left to do more in less time. There are days when Dave McDaniel, a reporter for Channel 2, will cover five stories. On Oct. 10, he did a piece encephalitis for the 5 p.m. news a feature on a space launch for the 5:30 program; and for the 6 newscast, stories on Westinghouse's laying off 1,300 local people, a Boys Town counselor fired for having sex with an under-age girl and the cleanup of the St. John's River.

Television could not fill that extra air time if it weren't for what Bauman calls the "Niagara Falls of video" that began flooding into local stations' feed rooms a decade ago. Until then, most video or film on your local station was shot by that station and was about your community. Then CNN began selling its video to local stations. That pressured the networks, which had always hoarded their video for the national nightly news, to release their footage to local affiliates. And that is why, when you turn on the local news, you see murders, stickups and exploding tanker trucks from all over the world. In Orlando, Channels 6 and 9 fill large blocks of time with 10- and 15-second reports using whatever interesting piece of video lands in the feed room. Stations could easily afford to hire more staff, give reporters more time for stories and produce a better product. Those operations are enormously profitable, and the most profitable part of their operations is news. The operating profit margin at a typical station is between 40 percent and 50 percent, two to three- times more than newspapers earn. The Pulitzer Company, owner of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has a 15 percent operating margin on its newspapers, while its nine stations, which include Channel 2, have a 37 percent margin.

The Washington Post Company, the new owner of Channel 6, makes a 15 percent margin on its newspapers, while its six television stations have an operating margin of 46 percent. These companies with great newspaper traditions make more from their television stations than from their famous newspapers; for 1996, the Washington Post Company had operating income of $155 million from its broadcast division and $117 million from newspapers. (Orlando's Channel 9 is owned by Cox Broadcasting, the nation's 14th-largest TV chain, a privately held company that analysts say is extremely profitable.)

I asked John Kueneke, a Pulitzer vice president based in St. Louis who oversees Channel 2, why companies don't settle for less profit to make local news stronger.

"A lot of it is the historical expectations for television stations," he said. "We're a publicly owned company, and we have to pay attention to what our peers do and what analysts on Wall Street expect."

Most stations are treated as cash cows for the mother corporation. A newspaper with a 15 percent operating margin is doing fine; a television station with that margin would be viewed as a disaster. For decades, stations have been bought by corporations to bolster overall company profits, taking some pressure off the holdings that are dearer to the corporations, like their flagship newspapers.

Absentee ownership

Absentee ownership also contributes to the poor quality of the local news. Pulitzer has owned Channel 2 since 1993, but only in the past year has it moved to upgrade the newscasts. Kueneke,-who was hired by Pulitzer in 1996, is the force behind the improvement and the man responsible for hiring Bauman. Why didn't Pulitzer move sooner to produce better news?

Kueneke said that before he joined Pulitzer, "there was really no one at our headquarters in St. Louis watching our Orlando station regularly. Our headquarters is 1,000 miles away."

There is a school of thought about local TV news that it's most enjoyable if not taken seriously, that, like professional wrestling, the only people who believe it deserve to.

Ken Thomas expressed this view between shots of tequila at PR.'s restaurant in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park: "It's funny The cops are chasing some car; someone's running around in drag -- it's better than the talk shows."

Channel 9's Phil Robertson was not shy about telling viewers how he helped capture Joey Christian, the man involved in the Hock Your Rocks gun the

"A suspected gun thief apparently watched Channel 9 at noon today and then decided to return the guns he had allegedly stolen," began the anchor. Unfortunately for the man, Channel 9 taped him trying to drop the guns in the pawn-shop parking lot and running into the woods. "That video may actually become evidence against Christian," Robertson said. "Christian was seen not only by Eyewitness News but by our your News 9 camera!"

 Robertson, who was very worked up, closed by saying, "He could be looking at more than 100 years behind bars!" (Actually, Christian, who was charged with burglary, would face a maximum of about four years if guilty.)

 While it is entertaining, this kind of TV news makes trouble. News is about real people. A good part of Channel 6's report about the 400-pounder sitting on the toddler was an in-the-face interview with the man' s girlfriend. Embarrassed, she pulled up her T-shirt to cover her face, standing in front of her home, trying to get Channel 6 to leave. She kept yelling that nothing had happened, no one was hurt, the charges were being dropped all of which was true.

"To be fair, we're going to be reporting it, and we wanted to give you an opportunity to defend the individual," said the reporter, Tom Abrahams, with camera rolling.

"No, you don't want to be fair," she said. "You want to ruin people's lives."

Reporting is a harried, seat-of the-pants business, hard enough to do responsibly when you're striving for the facts; if you're striving for entertainment, the truth might well be damned.

Heart attack story

One day in October, a local man named Dewain Terwilliger phoned his mother-in-law, Betty Bracone, several times and got no answer. At 7:30 that night he went to her house, found her slumped in bed and called 911. At 11 that night, Channel 6's Nicole Smith stood in front of Bracone's house in suburban Lake Mary, 18 miles north of Orlando and, thanks to the station's "live truck," was ready to go, another exclusive for Channel 6.

"A shocking scene in a Lake Mary neighborhood tonight," began the anchorman. "A home surrounded by crime-scene tape. And, a death police are calling suspicious." Up on the screen flashed the words, "Neighborhood Shocker!"

Smith began, -Police say they don't know much about the life of Betty Bracone. They do know that she was 66 years old and she lived in this home. They do know she had a family, and they found many pictures of children inside her home." Smith then segued to an interview with a policeman who said there was no forced entry, that everything in the house was intact and that nothing indicated a robbery

"The autopsy will be held tomorrow, and they're not exactly sure yet what they will find," Smith said. "So they want to keep a very tight lid on what happened. . . . Live in Lake Mary, Nicole Smith, Channel 6 News."

Technically the piece had gone beautifully. There was just one glitch, which Channel 6 would have known if it had waited for the autopsy the following morning. Betty Bracone died of a heart attack. Journalism Shocker! On Oct. 16, 1997, making use of the most sophisticated communications technology available, Channel 6 led its 11 p.m. news with a 66-year-old woman's fatal heart attack.

Newspaper critics have given TV news a hard time in recent years, making broadcast journalists defensive. The news director it Orlando's Channel 9, Lauren Watkins, wouldn't even be interviewed. Local television newspeople don't trust print people to appreciate even the best aspects of TV news. "TV and newspapers --our missions are entirely different," said Channel 6's Berra. "My biggest argument with newspaper people is they want us to be like them, to be like The MacNeil-Lehrer Report. There's a need for that, but that's not what TV is mainly. TV is about pictures. Pictures allow you to capture personal moments, and you have great stories. It's powerful. That's what separates us - we can bring that emotion into your home."

 One night last fall, around midnight, I was in bed, half.-watching CNN, when on came a piece about a flood in Turkey. As surging river rushed by, a Jeep sat partly in the water, a woman trapped inside. People were trying desperately to pull the Jeep to safety when suddenly it fell into the river. I popped up in bed to see what would happen, as people lining the banks jumped up and down, screaming in frantic Turkish. The Turks and I scanned the river for signs of the Jeep, but there was only water. Then suddenly, the scene shifted. The woman was in a hospital bed, the CNN anchor said, miraculously with only minor injuries.

 For a newspaper, there is no news value to that event: one person injured in a flood in Turkey. But months later, that is what I remember from that newscast. After watching more than, 50 hours of Orlando news, it was clear to me that Channel 2 was the most thoughtful, the least crime-driven, the least predisposed to embarrassing excess of all the Orlando stations. It didn't do the 400-pound man atop the toddler or the stabbed dog whose pain can only be imagined.

 But somewhere in the other stations' crime-laden newscasts, there was usually a story or two with edge and emotion that was missing from the more cerebral Channel 2 reports -- and from the daily paper.

 Michael Gormley, a reporter with Channel 6, did a piece on a seemingly routine building condemnation. Five families lived in a 50-year-old house that had been carved into apartments. One apartment had no door, and an other was swarming with cockroaches. And there, sitting on the front steps, was a well-groomed mother with her polite, little son, telling the reporter she didn' t know where she'd live now. She was missing work because her car broke down, and she didn't have money for a deposit on another apartment It was like having a Walker Evans photo come to life and talk to you, and part of the poignancy was that you could feel that there was a large, sad story behind this little family that you would never know. Somehow, Gormley had coaxed the landlord on camera, and there was the man saying he'd tried to fix up the place but that his attempts were "sabotaged" by a few bad tenants. Then Gormley closed by saying that the landlord was taking in $25,000 a year in rent from this house.

 Good local TV news needs both the raw emotion of Channels 6 and 9 and the thoughtfulness of Channel 2. That combination is very hard to pull off, largely because of meager resources allocated by parent corporations. One of the toughest things that TV news editors do every day at 9 a.m. is figure out which stories to pursue. The decision is easier for newspapers because of their staffing advantage. Orlando's TV news staffs are about a third the size of The Orlando Sentinel's. The newspaper has staff to cover police story and county government, the building condemn and the school board.

 For television, it's a matter of choosing one or the other, a given the need for pictures, police story is the safe bet -- least there tape to shoot.

 Barbara Cochran, executive director of the TV news direct association, said that inadequate staffing is a major reason for the number of inconsequential stories on TV news. "You have to make the call on what you're going to cover very quickly," she said. "And then you're committed to the coverage, and that is powerful impetus to run it, ever you get. What else do you have?"

 Bill Bauman is gambling he can make serious community issues - education, environment transportation - the core of news and trusting that an appropriate amount of mayhem find its way into the broadcast.

 When I said his newscast seemed to lack emotion, he it a fair criticism.

 "It's what TV does best," he said, "and we don't do enough of it right now. The other guys do. We may have gone too far in one direction. But we're working on it."

 Bauman understands

 One thing in Bauman's favor: He understands the challenge. He is a TV news hound who has harnessed the medium's emotional power before and knows that high-quality TV news must also be entertaining.

 Bauman knows that he needs entertainment to go with Kathy Marsh's education stories. Given the time, he said, he can teach his staff to be smart enough to find this balance with the resources available and build an audience. Although Bauman believes that crime-driven news is a distortion, and although he believes that stations have a civic duty to cover issues such as education, he made clear to me several times that he is not on a do-gooder mission.

 "I'm out to finish first," he said. In the end, he said, it comes 'down to a simple faith that high quality will win out.

 It's probably a long shot. Still, there are signs that the "If it bleeds, it leads" school of TV news has peaked. In Austin, Texas, top-rated KVUE has cut crime coverage drastically and has continued to lead that market. And although Joel Cheatwood, as news director of WSVN in Miami, caused a stir several years ago by taking crime coverage to new heights (or lows) to boost ratings, the top-rated news in that market continues to be WPLG's.

 For Bauman, remaking Channel 2 is a matter of patience. "We're not looking from ratings book to ratings book," he said.

 How much time will that take? "I don't have the answer," he said.

 Kueneke, the Pulitzer vice president, said the company is strongly behind Bauman. In the newsroom, though, I kept hearing the same fear: "Bill's great, but I just don't know how long he'll have if the ratings aren't there."

 So far, they're not. Bauman was right about the November sweeps: Channel 2 got clobbered. Although it held on to second place at 11 p.m., it fell to last at 5 p.m. for the first time. Even so, the station did much fine journalism during the sweeps, including Kathy Marsh's coverage of the special legislative session. On the last night, the Senate president and House speaker agreed to spend a record $2.8 billion on new school construction. Marsh was the only reporter from a local TV station still there. At 11 p.m., NBC affiliates all over Florida went to their feed rooms for Marsh's exclusive report on a story that will affect the state's children for years to come.

Channel 6, meanwhile, the station owned by the Washington Post Company, had its own sweeps exclusive, "The XX Zones: Peeking Inside the World of Adult Strip Clubs." And to hold on to first. place in the ratings, Channel 9 ran a sweepstakes, giving away $5,000 to viewers who called within nine minutes and said, "I saw my lucky number on Channel 9 Eyewitness News."