Maass, who's been at Channel 4 for nineteen years, says he appreciates how often his stories have been featured on the promos with which the station has blanketed the airwaves, but he's even happier about what he sees as a renewed commitment to the investigative process. Whereas some stations have cut back on long-term projects, he's got his own team of helpers (producer Carisa Scott and photographer Bob Pearce), the freedom to work at his own pace and the sense that the boss is behind him.
"Walt is a huge supporter of what we do," Maass says. "He believes in it from a marketing standpoint, and that's a significant departure from the way things were done before he got here -- and hopefully it's paying dividends. But he also believes in it from a journalism standpoint. For people who are journalism purists, it's great, because it goes back to the roots of what we should be all about, which is breaking important news stories."
John Johnston
Brian Maass could be a key to Channel 4's recent
ratings surge.
Related Content
More About
Channel 9 may have come to the same realization; in March, the station hired a new investigator, Chip Yost, to supplement Woodward and fellow longtimer Ward Lucas. Signs also point to a speeding-up of the search for a new anchor to team with Arakawa. A May column by the Post's Joanne Ostrow said that Sardella might keep his chair through the end of the year, which, if it happens, could drive him over the edge permanently. Luckily for him, insiders say that possible successors are being paraded through the station to test with Arakawa, including Steve Daniels, a former Dateline correspondent who's currently an anchor with WTVD in Raleigh, North Carolina.
If Daniels gets the nod, he'll know the competition well, since he once did weekends at Channel 4. This background could add even more spice to a TV-news scrap that may finally get out of the middle rounds. Let the slugfest begin.
Weekly vs. Weekly: "Fact or Fiction?," the May 22 edition of this column, made mention of complaints levied against the Boulder Weekly by the Salt Lake Weekly earlier this year. In January, the Boulder publication purchased the rights to print a Salt Lake Weekly story about the Sierra Club by writer Shane McCammon, but a few weeks later, it ran a version of the piece under the byline of reporter Ron Bain instead. A note at the bottom of the article dismissed McCammon as a mere contributor even though he was much more than that; the last several paragraphs reprinted his writing word for word.
After the Westword item on this brouhaha was published, Bain called to clarify his actions, stressing that he in no way wanted to take credit for work he hadn't done. Instead, he reveals, that credit was foisted upon him.
Bain says Wayne Laugesen, the Weekly's editor, purchased McCammon's story with the intention of localizing it himself, but ran out of time; Laugesen had already announced that he was stepping down as editor, which he did about a month later. According to Bain, Laugesen gave him the story on January 20 and asked him to have it ready for the January 23 cover. "I got right on it," Bain says. "I got quotes from both sides of the issue -- former members of the Sierra Club from Boulder County who were very unhappy with them, and longtime members from Boulder County who were very happy with them." After he turned in the story, Laugesen wrote a new opening paragraph that Bain found to be "a bit inflammatory and goading. It was written in a style I wouldn't use and said things I wouldn't say." Bain suggested that Laugesen put his own name in the byline and says he "also thought it wasn't fair to the person who wrote the original story. I thought his name should be in the byline, too." Laugesen disagreed, and because Bain was in line for a full-time writing position that he expected to become official in April, he didn't feel he could pitch too much of a fit. "The paper ran it with only my byline, over my protestations," Bain says.
Laugesen, who is contributing occasional columns to the Weekly, has a hazy memory about what happened with the Sierra Club story, but in a heartwarming example of forthrightness, he takes responsibility anyway. "There was never any intent to pass off someone else's intellectual property as our own, because that's wrong. So evidently, I was just sloppy in my work," Laugesen says. He adds, "Ron would never try to pass off someone else's work as his own. He has far too much integrity for that. I'm certain that this was an error or a misunderstanding on the part of the editor at the time, and that was me."
Unfortunately for Bain, the job at the Weekly he'd been anticipating failed to materialize after Laugesen resigned, so he's looking for work. Potential employers should look upon Laugesen's words above as a letter of recommendation.
