Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

survived his ordeal, and a few who had not seen him in later segments were a little concerned he had been lost in the drifting accumulations.

Barney was not lost in the drifts, nor did his appearance—albeit requested by the boss himself—wind up making me a wealthier man. I never got more than a 4 percent annual raise the entire time I worked with Barney. This will probably raise the hackles of some of my colleagues who maybe got 3 percent, but all this speaks to a common misconception about TV salaries. While it’s true that longtime anchors and occasionally talent lured from another market can garner bigger salaries, as a general rule, your run-of-the-town general assignment reporter will never get rich.

I had no agent because I always felt that at my relatively low level I would just be giving back whatever extra bucks the guy whittled out of WISH. To bargain effectively you have to be irreplaceable (and no one is) or have a very distorted view of your importance (which everybody does).

So, given that I had this incredible sidekick, why didn’t I feel irreplaceable? Why didn’t I slam my fist on the desk and tell WISH to take a walk when the offer was so low? Mainly because I felt they would simply tell me to take a walk—and take my dog with me. That would have been okay with Barney. Walking was his favorite thing. Next to being brought to the table.

The truth is that the pairing of my name with the dog was clearly positive for my career, but I also knew that the twist of fate that had brought us together carried some risks. Not only could the dog get old and die, but so could the act. I don’t think that anyone—certainly not me—would have predicted a twelve-year run, so it was hard to really use the dog as a bargaining chip. I felt pretty good about my ability on camera, but assigning part of my success to Barney was self-defeating, maybe even demeaning. How would I play it? Ultimately, I let the boss do all the talking. I never boasted in the contract negotiations how popular the dog had made the show. That seemed a dangerous road to go down. But I knew he had made a huge difference.

And Lee Giles knew it. In fact, he was once quoted as saying, “That dog just has natural instincts for TV. That’s more than I can say for some reporters.” (I asked for a detailed list of those he was talking about but he declined the request.)

During the discussions, Barney was always with me. He just sat upright in the chair next to mine. Lee recalls that Barney would just stare at him, maybe daring him to go below 3 percent.

When we were done settling the contract, all three of us would shake hands. My partner and I would then walk out the door. Barney’s eyes would migrate to the top of his head and roll around as if to say: “You call that negotiating? You rolled over like a well-behaved dog.”

“Fine, Barney, next time you do all the talking.”

Showing His True Spots

Soon enough, Barney became an integral part of the news, featured almost every day in one form or another in my segment each morning, but he had failed to clear one hurdle that was a true indicator of his value. The station had not run any promotional spots that featured him, nor had he been included in the news opening when the other anchors and talent were highlighted.

I hesitated to push for this. News talent is notorious for feeling left out of station promotions. “Promote me, promote me” is a common request, though the approach is sometimes more subtle. Authors are no different. “Why isn’t my book about Barney displayed more prominently?” I’ll ask the store manager. Ego, ego, ego. Imagine that.

But I felt I had a good case. Barney created water-cooler talk, a very unscientific but accurate predictor of a show’s popularity. Every TV producer with a few years under his or her belt knows that chatter the next day can turn into ratings. My sense was always that this was less true of hard news than the regular network programming, but that is exactly why Barney was so important. He made our news presentation totally unique.

It was unlikely, for example, that people at the Chrysler assembly plant would talk about the bank robbery they heard about on TV the night before, unless it was the bank next door. If they did chat about it, it was not always true they could identify the station they were watching. Similar coverage was usually on all the affiliates and it’s hard to connect a particular story with a specific news organization unless you are a very loyal viewer. There are only so many ways to cover a story. True, I always thought we did a better job, but a bank robbery is still a bank robbery.

One method of separating yourself from other shops (TV lingo for news competitors) is with your talent, the people who do the news. But only a small percentage of TV news personalities break through and are connected by the public to a station on the proverbial—but now extinct—dial. What you want to do is build that core audience. But just like in politics, there are independents—folks who are not committed and will go wherever the mood—and the remote—takes them.

This is where Barney showed his tri-colors. “What makes people good on TV is acting natural,” Giles commented. “And Barney was a natural. He was just Barney, and it was fun having him around when the news wasn’t too serious.”

After a Barney segment, people talked about it, laughed about it, and identified him with WISH-TV. So with that in mind, the promotion people at the station finally made the next bold move. They not only wanted Barney in the news open, but they wanted to feature him