When I checked out the April 11 copy of GQ at Barnes & Noble, I thought, "Cosmo for men." Endless pages of ads showing impossibly handsome young men doing cool things wearing cooler clothes. Feature stories on uber-males Derek Jeter, Charlie Sheen, and Keagan Harsha.
For real. Well - the story wasn't all about WCAX reporter Keagan Harsha, but he has a prominent role in the toney man mag's profile of Vermont's biggest TV news station. Last spring GQ sent a woman named Raha Naddaf to learn what it's like to be a smalltown TV news reporter. Enroute to doing the voice-over for the Ice Out at Joe's Pond - which she cluelessly describes as the most trivial, out-of-the-way, who-cares kind of story - she stops in at the South Burlington office, which she describes as having "pumpkin-colored carpet," yellowing walls, and no-nonsense furniture unchanged since 1976. Harsha she describes as "square jawed, firm handshake, booming voice" but a Real Person who has nightmares about going live and not knowing what to say.
Naddaf meets Darren Perron ("whose name rhymes) and Anson Tebbetts, whose personal relationship with about half of Danville stuns her. She has never considered the possibility that a reporter might actually live amongst the viewers.
I won't give away the shocking ending, except to say that it makes WCAX look pretty good. The early reviews from former and current CAX'ers are pretty good. Speaking at a freezing outdoor press conference in Middlesex Wednesday, former reporter and Gov. Peter Shumlin's press secretary Bianca Slota said she liked it ("although they didn't write much about me") and Kristin Carlson said she and other staff got a good laugh out of Raddaf's descriptions of some of the station staff. Everyone seemed to appreciate Raddaf's conclusion: this TV news stuff is harder than it looks.
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