Mornings With Barney (14 page)

Every year or so,
depending on the length of my contract at Channel 8, it was time to see how much more money I could squeeze out of my employer.

I would nervously walk into News Director Lee Giles's office and edge into my seat in front of his desk. At that point, Barney would hop into the chair next to me, sitting straight up in his seat. Barney never snoozed during these discussions. I don't think he trusted me. I was kind of a pushover in this area.

I liked the fact that Barney was with me because he was a visual reminder that I brought to the table something different—a shtick no other reporter had. And Barney always liked being brought to the table. The week before the meeting, he'd made his contribution to the cause during an early morning snowstorm. Luckily, that day Giles was in the control room.

This was generally a bit early for the blue suits to be at the station, but bad weather meant huge ratings. Even non-TV viewers gravitated to the screen for school closings and driving conditions, so our coverage of the inclement weather could be used to attract new watchers and distinguish ourselves from the competition.

During my segment, I tried to give a sense of what the situation would be like for commuters. On this particular morning, snow had drifted several feet in spots, and I was standing knee deep in a pile of white stuff to demonstrate its depth. Suddenly, I heard Giles screaming in my ear from the control room. “Where's Barney? Show how deep the snow is compared to a beagle.” I am confident this was the first time in TV history these words were ever uttered by a news director.

Barney, who had been trudging along sniffing the snow like a pig searching for truffles, plowed chest first into a drift. The snow was up to his neck, his head now poking out, his nose twitching like a man smelling bad fish.

“Perfect,” said a gleeful Giles, in love with his last-minute decision to use Barney as a yardstick for people deciding whether to don galoshes or chance it with loafers. Once the segment ended, Barney retreated to the car and barked to get back inside.

Lee was right. The next day in the supermarket, a procession of people in line to buy salt and snow shovels asked if Barney had survived his ordeal, and a few who had not seen him in later segments were a little concerned he had been lost in the drifting accumulations.

Barney was not lost in the drifts, nor did his appearance—albeit requested by the boss himself—wind up making me a wealthier man. I never got more than a 4 percent annual raise the entire time I worked with Barney. This will probably raise the hackles of some of my colleagues who maybe got 3 percent, but all this speaks to a common misconception about TV salaries. While it's true that longtime anchors and occasionally talent lured from another market can garner bigger salaries, as a general rule, your run-of-the-town general assignment reporter will never get rich.

I had no agent because I always felt that at my relatively low level I would just be giving back whatever extra bucks the guy whittled out of WISH. To bargain effectively you have to be irreplaceable (and no one is) or have a very distorted view of your importance (which everybody does).

So, given that I had this incredible sidekick, why didn't I feel irreplaceable? Why didn't I slam my fist on the desk and tell WISH to take a walk when the offer was so low? Mainly because I felt they would simply tell me to take a walk—and take my dog with me. That would have been okay with Barney. Walking was his favorite thing. Next to being brought to the table.

The truth is that the pairing of my name with the dog was clearly positive for my career, but I also knew that the twist of fate that had brought us together carried some risks. Not only could the dog get old and die, but so could the act. I don't think that anyone—certainly not me—would have predicted a twelve-year run, so it was hard to really use the dog as a bargaining chip. I felt pretty good about my ability on camera, but assigning part of my success to Barney was self-defeating, maybe even demeaning. How would I play it? Ultimately, I let the boss do all the talking. I never boasted in the contract negotiations how popular the dog had made the show. That seemed a dangerous road to go down. But I knew he had made a huge difference.

And Lee Giles knew it. In fact, he was once quoted as saying, “That dog just has natural instincts for TV. That's more than I can say for some reporters.” (I asked for a detailed list of those he was talking about but he declined the request.)

During the discussions, Barney was always with me. He just sat upright in the chair next to mine. Lee recalls that Barney would just stare at him, maybe daring him to go below 3 percent.

When we were done settling the contract, all three of us would shake hands. My partner and I would then walk out the door. Barney's eyes would migrate to the top of his head and roll around as if to say: “You call that negotiating? You rolled over like a well-behaved dog.”

“Fine, Barney, next time you do all the talking.”

Soon enough,
Barney became an integral part of the news, featured almost every day in one form or another in my segment each morning, but he had failed to clear one hurdle that was a true indicator of his value. The station had not run any promotional spots that featured him, nor had he been included in the news opening when the other anchors and talent were highlighted.

I hesitated to push for this. News talent is notorious for feeling left out of station promotions. “Promote me, promote me” is a common request, though the approach is sometimes more subtle. Authors are no different. “Why isn't my book about Barney displayed more prominently?” I'll ask the store manager. Ego, ego, ego. Imagine that.

But I felt I had a good case. Barney created water-cooler talk, a very unscientific but accurate predictor of a show's popularity. Every TV producer with a few years under his or her belt knows that chatter the next day can turn into ratings. My sense was always that this was less true of hard news than the regular network programming, but that is exactly why Barney was so important. He made our news presentation totally unique.

It was unlikely, for example, that people at the Chrysler assembly plant would talk about the bank robbery they heard about on TV the night before, unless it was the bank next door. If they did chat about it, it was not always true they could identify the station they were watching. Similar coverage was usually on all the affiliates and it's hard to connect a particular story with a specific news organization unless you are a very loyal viewer. There are only so many ways to cover a story. True, I always thought we did a better job, but a bank robbery is still a bank robbery.

One method of separating yourself from other shops (TV lingo for news competitors) is with your talent, the people who do the news. But only a small percentage of TV news personalities break through and are connected by the public to a station on the proverbial—but now extinct—dial. What you want to do is build that core audience. But just like in politics, there are independents—folks who are not committed and will go wherever the mood—and the remote—takes them.

This is where Barney showed his tri-colors. “What makes people good on TV is acting natural,” Giles commented. “And Barney
was
a natural. He was just Barney, and it was fun having him around when the news wasn't too serious.”

After a Barney segment, people talked about it, laughed about it, and identified him with WISH-TV. So with that in mind, the promotion people at the station finally made the next bold move. They not only wanted Barney in the news open, but they wanted to feature him in a station promotion that would air throughout the day.

Rather than being taped at the TV studio, this spot was going to be outsourced to a local video production facility, a big deal because when you go out of house with an ad campaign, it costs extra and your expectations are higher because of the increased production value.

A day before the shoot was scheduled, I received a script from the promotion director, Scott Hainey. I knew Dean Crowe, the videographer we were using; he was a real pro but not known for his patience. Not really a problem, except that the draft of the script was heavily dependent on Barney's cooperation in a rather complex scenario where the anchors, Dave and Pam, and our meteorologist, Randy, along with Barney and me, would play musical chairs. The idea was for Barney to jump onto the remaining seat each time the music stopped, leaving only Barney in a chair at the end of the commercial spot.

Sure, and I also wanted Barney to get up early and cook me breakfast every morning. It wasn't going to happen.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Crowe grumbled when he saw the layout of the spot. “I hope I'm home in time for Christmas.” (It was October.)

I didn't blame him for being skeptical. Whoever wrote the ad had a great idea, but just because it looked good on paper didn't mean we could pull it off. Dogs don't know how to play musical chairs. Do they?

Dean had not only underestimated the brilliant theatrical abilities of my dog, he had forgotten the persuasive effect of a hunk of pepperoni. Each time we did a take, the lead anchor cupped a piece of the succulent treat in his hand. Barney kept in close proximity as the Channel 8 talent paraded around the chairs. When the music stopped, everyone sat down, but the anchors always left an open seat next to the pepperoni purveyor. Barney never missed a cue. As soon as the chair opened up, Barney jumped into it, hoping for an opportunity to make a major taste-bud score.

We did twenty or thirty takes, but few, if any, of those retakes resulted from Barney's failure to perform on cue. It was usually one of the camera crew who had missed a shot or one of the anchors who had blown a line or tripped over a chair.

When we left, about an hour ahead of schedule, Dean Crowe just shook his head. “I love working with animals,” he laughed. “They're so much smarter than television people.”

The ad was a success. For months people asked how I got Barney to do that. The secret was in the pepperoni and Barney's experience that an empty chair was an invitation to rest and maybe earn a treat. In Barney's case, a dry biscuit would have fallen short. We had to bring out the good stuff.

Along the way,
there were various signposts that Barney had arrived: He was in promotional ads; he was doing commercials; he had his own show,
Barney's Bad Movies
; he had more air time than most reporters. What was left? What other indicator would clearly demonstrate that Barney was no flash in the pan?

During one remote in the mid-nineties I was on a shoot where several other stations were also broadcasting. I always strived to book segments that were not generally considered traditional news. As a result, it was rare that we would find ourselves in the same venue.

In cases where more than one station is at the same locale, the TV crews have to jockey times and be flexible so that each affiliate has a shot at the guest and no one misses out. While stations are competitive, early morning news people are cooperative so that everyone can get the sound bite or video needed.

One year at the Christmas auto extravaganza at what was then the RCA Dome, photographers were whipping their cameras around, taping the prototype cars, and searching for experts who were roaming the show in preparation for the door-opening later in the morning.

Reporters wear earpieces called IFBs, which stands for Interruptible Feedback, something even I didn't know for almost twenty years. I do know this: it is the lifeline back to the studio, allowing the producer to communicate to the newsperson in the field, providing time cues and input on the segment. They are notoriously unreliable, sometimes too loud, occasionally too soft, and often they don't work at all. If you are a careful observer, you will occasionally see a reporter yank the plug out of his ear, usually an indication that a technical snafu has resulted in what's called a mixminus. Translation: You hear what you just said a second after you said it. It's not just annoying, it's virtually impossible to communicate with that kind of feedback in your ear. You are reduced to a bumbling idiot. More so than usual.

That particular morning, Barney was in rare form. We had just shot a commercial with him and he was enjoying his freedom to dash among the new cars, greeting the cleanup crew and early guests who had arrived for interviews. He did make a point of leaving his calling card on a few tires. Barney rarely had an accident, but in all fairness, what the heck was a car doing inside a building?

I was apologizing to the maintenance staff when I saw a fellow newsman from another station yank the IFB out of his ear. His producer wasn't happy and was sharing those feelings. The reporter had a huge grin on his face and motioned me to walk over to him. He held the IFB up near
my
ear so I could hear what was being said.

“We can't use any of that video later in the morning,” he shouted. “That damn Channel 8 dog is in every shot. They will cook my ass and yours when they see that. Move the camera. I don't even want to see his tail wagging.”

Quite a statement. TV stations never give any air time, even a mention, of a competitor's on-air personalities. Similarly, camera crews assiduously avoid even having the briefest shot of another station's vehicle, a boldly colored advertisement for the company. But a dog's tail. That seemed overly paranoid.

The more Barney appeared on TV, the more he became a household word, the more wanna-be guests realized that the way to my heart was through my beagle. It had reached the point where many requests to be on the show were couched in some reference to Barney and how he could be included in the segment. Guests also knew that not only did a Barney tiein increase their chances that I would be receptive to booking them, but the segment would have additional marketing payoff for them. So even if it wasn't the guest's idea, they jumped when I made the suggestion to include Barney in some way.

Willow Marketing, a downtown Indy marketing and PR agency, had a really nifty promotional idea. They were looking for the worst, that's right, the
worst
corporate logo in the Indianapolis market. Once it was determined, they would create a new logo for the “lucky winner,” and profits for that company would then soar. Or maybe they wouldn't soar. But who cared? It was a great idea for a promotion. I liked the way they were thinking. Then I started thinking.

“Tell you what I'll do,” I told Brad, the president of the company. “Let's create a logo for Barney that I can use when Barney makes commercials. We'll show the creative process on TV. It would help promote your contest.”

“So, Dick, you want my company to make a free logo for your dog, so you can then market your dog and make money? That sounds awfully self-serving, self-indulgent, and self-promotional.”

This guy caught on fast. But he knew it made sense. Barney was a star and a franchise. But what's a franchise without a logo? What's a tin man without a heart? A scarecrow without a brain? You get the point. Every dog has his day, but not every dog has his own logo. Once again, Barney would become one of the exceptions.

Brad's staff drew up several ideas and during one of our TV spots we sat with the creative group while they discussed each artist's renditions—the pros and cons of each logo. They were not haphazardly slapped together. Some honest market research had gone into their designs and production and there was a serious discussion about each option and its chances of success. “Do we want to stress his cuteness or his intelligence? Do we want the logo to reflect his independent nature or his loyalty? Should it just be ‘Barney' or ‘Barney the Beagle'?” Huh? I had never considered stuff like that. For me, it was a crash course in marketing and design. And having a logo paid off.

All twelve logos were shown on TV and the viewers voted for their favorite. They chose my top pick, a caricature profile of the celebrity dog donning some very cool sunglasses. People said he looked like Snoopy, who, I've been told, was another famous beagle. Sorry, never heard of him.

The winning design was so cool that a local Toyota dealership agreed to lease me a car at no cost if I would put the Barney logo on selected spots on the automobile. When I told Mary Ellen, she rolled her eyes, suggesting it would look cheesy. When I told her that it would save us about $10,000 over the next three years, she became a little more lactose tolerant.

That same dealership used Barney for several of their own spots, including one where he appears to be driving one of their top-selling models. We propped his paws up on the steering wheel. It was very funny, but apparently too realistic. The station received e-mails from people concerned that Barney was not wearing a seat belt. So I guess it was okay that a dog was driving a car. As long as he was buckled up.

All over Indianapolis, things were named after Barney. And a few still remain. There's a special place at a local kennel called Barney's Suite Retreat. Pet owners frequently request that space. A sandwich at a local deli was named after Barney. It was all meat, no bun. At one local eatery, Barney even had his own mini wine cellar. At the Humane Society, a dog log cabin bore his name for several years. Dozens of people named their dogs—and cats—after Barney. No children, as far as I know.

But what would be the greatest testament possible to any canine? How about a drink named after him at one of the top steak houses in America: Ruth's Chris. Think of the honor. Patrons sip a very special libation bearing his name, before sinking their teeth into a $35 hunk of heaven.

No dog would turn his nose up at that opportunity. Except maybe a French poodle.

Now, Barney had already had one misadventure at Ruth's Chris. Years earlier, Ruth Fertel, whose name the restaurant bears, came to Indy to open a new franchise. She was a dog lover and had heard about Barney through her local contacts. I planned a show at the new location. Her PR person requested I bring Barney with me, but I argued that this was a bad idea. Technically speaking, I was not supposed to bring Barney into a restaurant because it violated the health code. However, I had often ignored that rule and had never been questioned.

In any case, Ruth's PR person was adamant that Barney come along. When I arrived, I initially left him in the car, but then Ruth insisted I bring him in the restaurant. “Not a good idea, Ruth,” I cautioned.

“Don't be silly. What possible trouble could he get into?”

Heh, heh. That showed she was from out of town.

I brought Barney in and tied him to the leg of a chair. “Oh, let him loose,” said Ruth. “All the food is locked away.”

I unbuckled the leash. Barney disappeared on what turned out to be a T-bone tirade. Ten minutes later, as we completed one of the segments, Barney emerged from the kitchen with a $40 chunk of filet in his mouth. Even he seemed surprised at his good fortune.

Ruth's mouth opened wider than Barney's. “How did he do that?”

“I don't know, Ruth. I really don't. But I knew he would.”

There must have been a human accomplice, but it remains a mystery.

Ruth took it all very well. But she didn't take my credit card, claiming that Barney was a pretty good testimony to how great her steaks were. “He didn't do this at St. Elmo, did he?” she asked on the air, a little jab at the famous steak restaurant just blocks away.

A year later, a second Indy restaurant in the Ruth's Chris chain had opened. Barney was still in Ruth's good graces despite his previous beef burglary. She was fan of anyone who knew a good cut of meat and that's why she asked her marketing firm in Indy to call me.

“Dick, it's Dan Forst from Caldwell Van Riper. We represent Ruth's Chris Steak House. As you know, we periodically name drinks after celebrities, like Mayor Goldsmith, and radio personality Big John Gillis. Anyway, we have a great idea.”

“Dan, why do I think this great idea has nothing to do with naming a drink after Dick Wolfsie?”

“You're right on the money there, Dick. We want to name it after Barney. Isn't that a good idea?”

I couldn't see someone coming into the bar and saying, “Give me a Barney.” As with most ideas, it had potential. But Dan and I agreed that it needed a twist. The result was the Barney “Name the Drink” Contest, an opportunity for Channel 8 viewers to create a catchy name that reflected their favorite news hound.

The first problem was getting permission to do this. Paul Karpowicz had recently left the station. The new GM was not opposed to Barney, but being from out of town, he never fully believed in him and his connection to the community.

Promos featuring Barney had dwindled and the new management questioned many of my segments. My new boss felt I was a loose cannon with no one to answer to. He was right about that. I never asked permission for my subject matter. By the time my request would have worked its way up the bureaucratic chain, nothing would have gotten on the air. It is quicker and easier to say you are sorry than to ask permission—that was my time-tested technique and part of my reputation. If I had asked first, I would have never been allowed to have part of my hair transplant live on television, a segment that created quite a buzz (but not a buzz cut) but made the hair on the GM's back stand up. He thought I had traded TV time for the procedure, which was not the case, but I must admit it didn't look good. Although my hair looked great when it was all over.

No, the new guy didn't like the drink contest idea. He thought it would be a mistake to associate Channel 8 news with drinking. The news—everybody's news—was already associated with murder, drug raids, and plane crashes. But “beagles and booze are a bad combo,” he said.

I explained to the GM that there were drinks named after Big John Gillis, who did traffic reports, and Mayor Steve Goldsmith, who ran the city. No one had a problem with association. Why did he think this was a mistake? I found out the hard way that the GM felt no overwhelming obligation to explain his reasoning to me.

“We're just not doing it,” he said. “Maybe the dog understands English if you don't.” Ooo-kay, message received. This was a version of the old “shut up,” explained.

I tried one more time, suggesting that we name a nonalcoholic drink after Barney. The answer was still no. See why I hated asking permission?

Then the GM left Channel 8. And just when I was starting to warm up to the guy. Scott Blumenthal, the former sales manager at WISH who had left for a few years to run a sister station, returned to run the station. He, of course, was familiar with Barney's popularity.

I asked for a meeting to discuss this idea with him. It took him only four seconds to say, “Why not?” Barney was going to have a drink named after him. Scott later became one of the station's corporate vice presidents. This may have been his first great decision.