Editor’s note: Where have all the good television news directors gone? Well, at least one has entered the priesthood. Guest columnist Jim Travis, the venerable WSMV-Channel 4 senior reporter who recently retired, holds forth this week on the culture of excellence that former news director Mike Kettenring—now a priest—fostered and offers some ideas about what’s gone wrong with the TV news game.
We should have known that he was Father Mike all along.
Mike Kettenring, 57, former WSMV-Channel 4 news director and station manager, stood with six other men: two teachers, two Vietnamese students of theology, a human resources manager, and an auditor. In New Orleans’ 18th-century Cathedral of St. Louis, King of France, air-cooled to protect an overflow congregation from oppressive heat and humidity, the seven men one by one prostrated themselves before New Orleans Archbishop Francis Shulte to receive the Catholic sacrament of Holy Orders, departing the two-hour ceremony as ordained priests.
Saturday morning’s Times-Picayune advanced the ordination in a front-page, below-the-fold piece headlined “This N.O. Priest Already a Father,” and focused in part on Kettenring.
Indeed, Kettenring’s two grown children, son Christopher and daughter Heidi, brought up the rear of a ceremonial procession bearing symbolic gifts.
In 1998, just after their 30th wedding anniversary, Kettenring’s wife, Kacky, died of cancer. With his children grown, the immediate future held prospects of his taking the reins at Nashville’s public television station. The widowed Kettenring instead turned to his first calling. After high school, he had entered a Jesuit seminary, in 1966 abandoning its disciplines for marriage, family, and a news career in his native New Orleans.
By 1974, he was managing editor at WDSU-TV and the subject of a Money Magazine article on rising executives. A year later, he became news director of Nashville’s Channel 4. Always in close competition with WTVF-Channel 5 for ratings dominance, Channel 4’s news department was in disarray, according to those working there at the time.
Kettenring brought discipline and order, radically changing the way the station covered news. Story selection became less event-oriented, more issue-driven. Promising staffers remained, new talent was hired. A new special projects unit treated timely subjects with multipart series and documentaries that were up to an hour long.
By the early 1980s, the newsroom entrance was lined with awards for excellence—such as the Dupont-Columbia and the Peabody, plus numerous plaques from regional and state competitions. You could not walk that hallway without thinking you’d better get a few up there too.
In Kettenring’s newsroom, there were venial sins and mortal sins. Arriving late for the morning meeting without calling ahead was venial. Missing your story slot in the newscast, missing deadlines for series you had three weeks to prepare, breaching journalistic ethics—those were mortal.
Mike worked 12 hours a day, 7:15 a.m. to 7:15 p.m., had his own contacts, clipped newspapers, checked story files for follow-ups. His morning meeting began at 9 a.m. You did well to have story ideas. If not, Kettenring was ready for you.
Tough, fair, respected, sometimes intimidating—he was all of that. Yet Kettenring engendered loyalty that few news executives achieve. Scattered about St. Louis Cathedral Saturday were a dozen ghosts of newsrooms past and present. Among them: Al Tompkins and Valerie Hyman, who spread their own brand of Kettenring journalism gospel as consultants. Mike’s successor, Bob Selwyn, who once asked new station owner George Gillett to stay out of his newsroom, was also there. Carol Marin and her producer, Don Mosely, distinguished themselves reporting on Blanton administration scandals in the late 1970s. They now work for CBS’ 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II after a losing battle to keep alive a critically praised 10 p.m. Chicago newscast intended to treat serious news seriously.
How does a newsroom move from what Kettenring once proclaimed the “most honored newsroom in the nation” to an operation that employs a psychic to find a missing socialite, leads a newscast with an interesting but essentially featurelike story about bees in a house, or runs a series on soiled hotel bedspreads?
Blame the ratings game—desperate efforts to hold audiences who have more choices. Blame vision redirected more to the dollar than to excellent journalism. Blame a lot of things. Don’t blame reporters and photographers who do the heavy lifting and try to give you their best, no matter what the subject.
Today, a Terry Bulger story will show you good writing, a Nancy Amons story is a lesson on digging for news, a Dennis Ferrier story shows you personality. There is good work, but there aren’t very many Mike Kettenrings to show the way.
He has a new flock. Father Mike soon reports to St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church in Algiers, a New Orleans suburb, as an assistant pastor.
Interestingly, the Archdiocese owns a television station. To his old charges asking the obvious question, Kettenring insists station manager is no longer his mission: “Been there, done that.”
Father Mike’s old journalism disciples remained after the reception to chat but failed to ask for his blessing.
Perhaps we should have.
