Ginger Daril says she isn’t feeling pressure as the new news director at KARK-TV, but maybe she should.
After all, KARK, Channel 4, has its third news director in a year and has slipped behind perennial third-place finisher KTHV, Channel 11, in the 10 p.m. ratings race — all on the heels of losing such talent as sportscaster Steve Sullivan and meteorologist Barry Brandt to rival KATV, Channel 7.
KARK is undergoing an overhaul since former news director Al Sandubrae left the station and KTHV began making strides toward KARK’s No. 2 spot. Since Sandubrae left KARK last year, the station has retreated from the fast-paced, in-your-face style some in Little Rock media circles dubbed “Al TV.”
Among the more viewer-friendly fare offered by KTHV and KATV, Sandubrae’s newscasts stood out but not because of big ratings gains. The station remained behind KATV, the No. 1-rated station since 1989, and watched as KTHV, backed by new owner Gannett Co., began building a newscast that officials at KATV now regard as their main competitor.
So gone is the grinding guitar that once heralded a hurried half hour of shootings, fires and wobbly camera shots. Today’s KARK has adopted a more traditional newscast, complete with a new set, graphics, music and personnel. In fact, in the latest set of Nielsen ratings for May 1999, KARK seems to have stopped the ratings slide, showing growth in its evening newscasts and staying one rating and one share point off the 10 p.m.’s second-place KTHV.
Enter Daril, a young Pine Bluff native who has the task of leading the NBC affiliate, seemingly damaged by a bout of Sandubrae’s tabloid journalism, back to solid No. 2 status. At 32, Daril is the market’s youngest — and only woman — news director. As an Arkansas native and someone who’s worked at KARK for about 10 years, she further sets herself apart from Sandubrae and predecessor Mark Lambert, whose tenure lasted less than a year.
The Right Time
Daril is confident in her mission at the station, which she says is to put the viewers first, give them news they can use, provide stories no one else has and present a newscast with a local focus.
Though Daril served as interim news director after Sandubrae left last summer, she was pregnant with her first child and wasn’t sure whether she was ready for the job. The station hired Lambert, a managing editor at a Baton Rouge, La., station.
Daril says that after looking at the qualifications of news director candidates, she realized she was just as qualified. The experience gave her the confidence to vie for the job when Lambert left this spring for an executive producer’s job at WGNO-TV in New Orleans.
“I think now the time is right. When I took this job, a lot of people said, ‘Hey, we felt like you were news director anyway,'” she says. “The mind-set was, Ginger’s been doing this; let’s let her do it.”
Letting her do it might have been a good move for KARK, judging from May ratings. KARK general sales manager Bob Denman owes the station’s May Nielsen numbers to the station’s new look, new faces and special reports. Another asset has been the return of Betsy Pilgrim, a former KATV anchor, who joined veteran Steve Barnes on the 6 p.m. anchor desk at KARK in February.
Denman says all those factors stem from leadership in the newsroom. Daril, happy over the ratings, stops short of taking all the credit.
“I think it’s a combination of everything,” she says. “A lot of people are excited for me. They know I want to be No. 1.”
She’s not the only one. KTHV news director Lane Michaelsen, who’s been at the station 20 months, has designs on moving up in the ratings, though he says he’s paid little attention to KARK’s format change.
“I don’t watch them very much,” he says. “We always want to do our own thing and not emulate them. But I have noticed their new set. They’ve brightened the look and apparently picked up tripods again. They seem to have turned from the tabloid journalism.”
But for all the outcry surrounding “Al TV,” no one can say it turned KARK into a solid, third-place station despite its recent slide behind KTHV at 10 p.m. And, as Michaelsen says, it did set the station apart from its competitors.
“I think viewers are interested in crime but also in good things. And we try — and do — give viewers good news regularly,” he says, referring to their “Good News” segments. “We all try to have a format we think is right for Arkansas. If they want to go back [to tabloid format], we certainly won’t stop them.”
Through the Ranks
Daril is a far cry from her most notable predecessor, Sandubrae. The two are a study in opposites.
Sandubrae, a man with a reputation for bluntness and poor interpersonal skills, began his career in North Dakota as a reporter. He took producer and news director jobs in Pittsburgh, Wichita, Kan., and Oklahoma City before coming to Little Rock and KARK in 1993.
Daril, a congenial woman with a bright smile, began her career in 1990 as an overnight producer at KARK, and it was her first broadcast job.
Daril was born in Pine Bluff. While attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Daril shadowed Channel 4 weekend anchor Jack Martin and interned at the station in 1989. She graduated from the university in 1990 with a degree in broadcast journalism.
In the fall of 1990, then-executive producer Ron Blome, now a free-lance news producer for NBC, hired her as the station’s overnight producer. Daril worked the graveyard shift for two years. Though she did some reporting in front of the camera, she says she honed her skills better as a producer.
“I tried to learn something from everyone. I worked under three news directors here, and l learned a lot from a lot of them,” she says.
Since then, Daril has held every management position in the KARK newsroom.
Looking Out for No. 1
Daril calls attention to her youthful staff — executive producer Tammy Arnett and assignment editor Greg Yarbrough, who are both in their mid-20s, for example — which she wants to take to the top. And, according to the station, KARK is achieving that goal in a pair of demographic areas.
Among adults 18-49 and 25-54, the station says it’s No. 1 at 5 p.m. The station also boasts its 10 p.m. newscast is No. 1 among adults 25-54.
When sizing up the competition, Daril chooses her words carefully. She recognizes that KTHV’s emergence has tightened the market, even while KATV remains unmoved in its household-rating and share-point supremacy.
“We’re definitely going to out-work them,” she says of her competitors, particularly KTHV.
“They’re definitely not where they used to be. It’s definitely a three-station market again. They’ve put a lot of money back into their product,” she says, referring to Gannett Co.’s deep pockets. “And they have a new look; they’ve got good people.”
The Agenda
To win the Little Rock ratings game, Daril is banking on the station’s strengths: three American Meteorological Society-certified weathercasters — Michelle Leigh, Mike Nicco and John Champion — and reporters Isiah Carey and Bob Clausen, who Daril says are adept at finding exclusive, compelling stories. She says the station’s emphasis on local stories will also serve as an asset.
“I think [viewers] want [the newscast] to be informative,” what is going on in Arkansas and what will affect them,” she says. “Weather’s No. 1. And they want to know what’s going on in the community.
“I don’t want our newscast to be predictable. I want it to be interesting enough and different enough.”
Daril says viewers won’t see any drastic changes in the newscast, but she does concede that KARK’s newscasts are different now that Sandubrae has left.
“I think we were doing a certain kind of news when Al was here, and I think Mark tried to implement some new ideas that were completely opposite from Al’s,” she says. “The bottom line of my agenda, of my goal, is the viewer is the top priority, obviously. So I want to bring our viewers stories that nobody else has. They’re not stories you get from the wire; they’re not stories you get from the newspaper. They’re stories that our reporters have gone out and brought to the table.”
Whereas her out-of-state predecessors often thought of the news director’s position at KARK as just another job, Daril says it’s the only place she wants to be.
“Channel 4 is my home,” she says, “and it always will be.”
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