KRON's Last Gasp

Others are more vehement.

"You can call the VJ experiment anything you want, but a pig is still a pig," says former television journalist Hub Brown, who heads the communications department at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. "When you shove a camera and editing equipment into everyone's hands and expect them to do it all, you devalue the entire news-gathering process."

At KRON, meanwhile, "there's no question that people are running scared, and who could blame them," says Greg Lyon, a longtime former reporter who left the station before the VJ initiative, but who nonetheless is pessimistic about the kind of journalism it has wrought. "There's no way you can ask one person to do the work of three people at the same time and expect that quality won't suffer, and it has," he says.

He and others acknowledge the "fear and anguish" at Young's applying the one-man-band concept — long common in small markets among stations with meager resources — to a major market like San Francisco. One staffer, echoing what some of his colleagues are saying privately, brands the move as "horrifying," adding: "There's nothing wrong with one-man bands. That's why God created Bakersfield."

Terisa Estacio is running late. The veteran reporter-turned-video journalist is supposed to be at an apartment building in the Tenderloin, where Mayor Gavin Newsom is making an appearance to showcase a housing initiative, but she's stuck in traffic.

By the time she arrives, a phalanx of news crews from other stations have staked out positions in the lobby where Newsom is speaking. Putting aside notebook and handbag — not to mention her ego — Estacio, 41, a former CBS News correspondent who also covered the Clinton White House for Tribune Broadcasting, pulls out a puppy-dog-sized video camera. Then she does something that no TV news reporter outside of small-town markets whose stations can't afford otherwise could, until recently, ever imagine: Instead of focusing on reporting, she's shooting her own news footage. She's still at it after the mayor leaves, pressing a tenant for a tour of the new apartment he shares with his teenage son. Then, camera rolling, she interviews a city housing bureaucrat before rushing outside for a "wide shot" of the building. She even manages to shoot her own "stand up" — a clip of herself speaking into the camera — as if someone else is operating it. She does it by carefully positioning the camera atop a concrete planter.

Back at the newsroom, after transferring the video onto a laptop computer, Estacio settles in at a communal desk beside other VJs and hurriedly edits her story in time for the 5 p.m. newscast. As "shooter," reporter, and video editor, she has done the work of three people. "Do I get snickers [from the other stations' crews]? Sure, sometimes," she says, answering her own question. "It's more fear than loathing."

The fear among some in the TV news industry is that what KRON is doing may take root at other major-market TV stations, here and elsewhere. "People at large-market stations all over the country are looking at KRON and wondering if it can happen where they are," says Cathryn Poff, a producer at Voice of America in Washington, D.C., and a KRON alum.

Estacio hears it all the time. "I've had people from other stations say to me, 'It's nothing personal, but I sure hope you fail.'"

Willingly or not, she has become a poster girl for what KRON management hopes the VJ enterprise becomes. But, so far, at least, she's more the exception than the rule. In the heady days of last summer, when management brought in VJ guru and former CBS News producer Michael Rosenblum to train its eager-or-not-charges, the prevailing mantra was that — far from being solely about cost-cutting — VJs would give the beleaguered station the chance to do more with less.

Instead of a dozen or so traditional two-person news teams, mostly working under daily deadlines, the station would have up to 50 VJs. That, in theory, would make it possible to produce more daily content, as well as free up some of the VJs to develop the kind of in-depth pieces that require more time to produce.

The economics of the move are unassailable.

Equip the VJs with handheld digital cameras that retail for under $5,000, give them a high-powered laptop that costs less than $2,000, making it possible to edit and transfer video via the Internet from any Wi-Fi hotspot — or from home for that matter — and voila! Gone is the need for videotape analog editing booths that run $50,000 apiece and traditional cameras that cost upward of $25,000.

As for those TV trucks stuffed with expensive microwave and satellite equipment? Swap them for Pontiac Vibes, the station's economy car of choice for its VJs. And, of course, that doesn't begin to address the payroll savings derived from training one person to assume multiple jobs.

Yet, nearly six months into the new era at KRON (and slightly longer at much smaller WKRN-TV, a Young sister station in Nashville, Tennessee, which has also gone one-man band), reality hasn't quite matched the corporate ballyhoo. Much of the VJ material that makes it to air features the disembodied voices of former cameramen, assignment editors, and behind-the-scenes players such as tape editors who probably never dreamed of being on-air.