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Best Place to Catch Up On Current Events
KMOV
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

The first thing you notice as you walk into the newsroom at KMOV—aside from Virginia Kerr and her knee-high boots—are the clocks. Big and digital, with red numbers that keep time to the second, they hang at the top of each wall, in plain sight of every desk on the floor. “Oh, that’s nice,” you think to yourself. “What a lifesaver for the putz who’s prone to forgetting his watch.” But then as the evening news approaches and the room gets a little bit smaller with each passing second, you doubt their benevolence and get the feeling that even when you’re not looking at them, they’re looking at you, their angry crimson digits burning a hole in your back.

“It’s not as intimidating as you think,” producer Patti Smith tells you, and this comforts you. The fact that she says it without looking away from her computer does not. (To make matters worse, you discover it was a slightly skewed assessment anyway, because she reveals that she does not need a clock to tell time: “You’re either born with it or you aren’t.”)

The clock is there in the conference room, where you file in with the others at 9:30 a.m. to hash out what will appear in the 5:00 p.m. newscast, but it has yet to bear its teeth. Reporters straggle in, pick up assignments and casually wander out again. Their ambivalence toward the ticking taskmaster disturbs you a little, and you’re more than a little surprised when they all stop—mid-sentence—for Donald Trump’s announcement on CNN that he’ll let Miss USA Tara Conner keep her crown as long she enters rehab. “I knew it!” executive producer Bill Siegel yells with a laugh and slaps the table next to you.

The clock is not there on the street in front of a burned-out shell of a house, where Stan Kostecki is filming Russell Kinsaul for a story about arson fires, but when Smith calls from the newsroom for a status update, you learn that it’s 1:00, and time feels like a factor again. You do your best to stay out of the way until you realize you couldn’t possibly screw them up. They have done this before. You watch as Kostecki puts the camera on his shoulder and Kinsaul starts talking. Kostecki puts the camera down again, and they walk back to their white Ford Explorer with the grinding breaks. “The nice thing is that at the end of the day, I go home with a clean slate,” Kinsaul told you earlier in the day, and you remember it now, here in the SUV with the grinding breaks, when he admits that the hardest part of the job is entering a family’s moment of grieving to ask questions for a story.

Back in the newsroom, as 3:00 becomes 4:00, the urgency is immediate, and you wonder what exactly acting news director Genie Garner was talking about when she told you she occasionally walks out into the newsroom to relax. Then, as Smith is talking about her love for the challenge, news has the audacity to happen: A report comes in that there’s been a fatal car wreck at St. Louis Ave. and N. Grand. It’s too juicy not to lead with—something about a drag race gone tragically bad—but the only way to do it is to scramble a team and report live from the scene.

And in the control room half an hour later, watching Kara Kaswell calmly tell the story on Grand, you remember that director of operations Jim Rothschild warned you this might be a “slow day.”