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Focused on Winning Rebecca Funk Campbell grew up watching Channel 6 and now runs the place. Her job -- to keep it the leader in the nation's fourth-largest broadcast market.
On the opposite corner, directly across City Avenue, are the studios and offices of WCAU-Channel 10, Philadelphia’s NBC television affiliate. KYW-Channel 3, the CBS affiliate in the country’s fourth-largest media market, is just a few minutes down the road. Both are also constantly playing on the bank of TV sets in Campbell’s office. Campbell’s team is ABC – represented in Philadelphia by Channel 6, WPVI. Channel 6 has led the ratings here for decades but, in recent years, is having to work a lot harder to do so. Just a couple of years ago, Channel 3 was such a distant competitor that, as Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ellen Gray observed, "KYW’s entire anchor team could have stripped on the air without many people noticing." In the February 2005 sweeps, however, channels 3 and 10 were almost tied for second place – and hungrier than ever to be first. Campbell’s job is to stop them. As president and general manager of Disney-owned Channel 6 since 2003, Campbell’s task is to maintain – and grow – the ratings gap between WPVI and its two network competitors. Millions of dollars are at stake and competition is fierce. At each station – and at each parent company – great minds are focused on defending broadcast turf and exploring new opportunities to bring in more viewers. "See these faces?" says Campbell, picking up from her desk a miniature billboard plastered with the smiling portraits of WPVI’s six most-prominent personalities. "That’s the brand and I’m just a steward of it." In an era in which television is defined by cable and satellite, "free" local news broadcasts might seem like an anachronism. Viewers have dozens of channel choices with CNN and newcomers like Fox for national and world news. But none of those have really cracked the market for local news, weather, sports and traffic. In Philadelphia, the audience for Fox affiliate WTXF’s 10 p.m. news is only about half that which watches Channel 6’s 11 p.m. broadcast. Campbell has no on-air ambitions. "I have a voice like a French horn," she says, a fact that didn’t keep her from pursuing communications, even as a teen-ager. In high school, she’d been a member of the communications club, which did the daily announcements on one of the state’s first closed-circuit TV stations. Her first taste of professional broadcasting was, ironically, with PBS. Former adjunct professor Bill Kelly, who is president and CEO of Channel 44-WVIA in Pittston, Pa., and chair of BU’s Council of Trustees, assigned students to help during a fund drive. What she remembers is answering phones and looking around a lot. "I think I was just fascinated with how things came together," says Campbell. "I loved the production part of it. Putting it all together. That’s me." Campbell was a small town girl from a family not awash with money. Her father was a minister and she had two siblings attending college at the same time. "I’d considered Temple," she says, "until I found it was in the middle of Philadelphia." She chose Bloomsburg because it was a good value, and also because the university gave her a job. For two years, she was a resident assistant at Montour Residence Hall where the girls gave her a plaque that still sits on her desk: "Department of Sunshine & Rainbows: Hopes restored, spirits lifted, enthusiasm renewed."
"No one outside of Pittsburgh knew who Dennis Miller was," she recalls. "He was hysterical, and unbelievably bright." After graduation in 1983, Campbell went on to programming jobs with stations in Allentown and Lancaster, Pa. She joined Channel 6 as programming director in 1997. Six years later, she replaced a retiring 37-year veteran as president and general manager. At Bloomsburg, Campbell foresaw a career as a news producer. With that in mind, she double-majored in communications and political science, expecting that the long hours talking government and world affairs with political science professor Charles Jackson would prove productive. At small stations, though, the production needs turned out to be for non-news programming. "At WFMZ (in Allentown), we did ‘Talk With Your Doctor’ and ‘Talk With Your Animal Doctor,’ " she laughs. "It was great experience. Now, I tell kids to jump at opportunities to go to those small-market stations like WMFZ that allow you to learn while you’re doing your job." TV production is not particularly glamorous, says Campbell. Instead, it’s a ringleader sort of function: Producers coordinate writers, actors, set designers and anyone else involved in a show. It’s stressful, because anything that goes wrong is ultimately the producer’s fault. But the field tends to be attractive to those with problem-solving personalities who enjoy seeing tangible results for their work. In fact, it was eerily like her broadcasting class assignments. At BU, she was once part of a team that filmed a toothpaste commercial. Another time, the group was assigned to transcribe an episode of "General Hospital," convert it to a script and then act it out word-for-word. "I helped direct that," recalls Campbell. "It was all behind-the-scenes stuff – putting it together, coming up with ideas and implementing things. That was me. That is what was fun for me." In 1987, Campbell was invited to Lancaster to produce WGAL-Channel 8’s "PM Magazine," a syndicated feature program with local hosts. By the early ’90s, she was head of all non-news programming, which included both the purchase of syndicated shows and production of local programs. "We did a live 12:30 p.m. talk show every day," says Campbell. "You’d come up with an idea for a program or a segment, then you had a group of people who all worked together to get it from concept to on-the-air. It’s a rewarding thing because everyone brought his or her own thoughts to it. Then you get to put it together and share that with everyone." Fifty years ago, she notes, nearly all television programming was produced locally in this fashion. Now, it’s split three ways – local, national and syndicated – and one way to separate minor from major stations is how much programming is produced locally. And Channel 6 produces a lot. When Campbell arrived as program director, she found herself producing "AM Philadelphia," a daily talk show; the Thanksgiving Day parade; Fourth of July coverage (huge in Philadelphia); the Philadelphia Auto Show; the Philadelphia Bike Race; and special events such as the opening of the $265 million Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and the $185 million National Constitution Center. The principles of production were the same, but everything else was larger – audiences, budgets and events. WPVI serves 18 counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. That’s a challenge in two respects. First, says Campbell, the station is committed to covering the region in the same "ma and pa" way that is common in smaller markets. That means lots of people in lots of news trucks covering lots of municipal-level stories. Second, it also means covering major events that, in a city the size of Philadelphia, might easily crowd out smaller stories. Channel 6 tries to do both. Campbell was shocked, for instance, when she was handed responsibility for the Thanksgiving Day parade soon after her arrival. She added up the budget and discovered that the station was spending nearly $1 million on the event. "It’s rare that stations will invest the staff and resources to do big community events," says Campbell. "But this area has so many of them – the Kimmel opening with Elton John and the Constitution Center with (Supreme Court Justice) Sandra Day O’Connor – and people in this area are able to ‘attend’ many of them live because Channel 6 has made that commitment. We are truly part of the community here." To which, of course, Channels 3 and 10 would reply, "Me, too!" Much of the competition among the stations can seem pretty silly. New Channel 3 anchor Alycia Lane caused a stir locally when she modestly turned aside compliments on her looks by remarking that she was "the ugly duckling" in Miami, a city of "incredible" women. Local bloggers raged over Lane’s supposed implication that Philadelphia women are, in comparison, unattractive. Then there was the former Channel 10 anchor who left town in a huff for Cleveland, where she did a story about artistic "mass nudity" by joining in. Sharon Reed then made herself available for an interview about the experience, but not to her old station. Instead, she was interviewed by Philadelphia’s Channel 3 – an interview credited with helping that station move ahead of Channel 10 in the November 2004 sweeps. In this environment, says Campbell, WPVI has chosen to defend its integrity with a vigorous branding effort that emphasizes the experience of its news people. Campbell likes to point out that 11 p.m. anchor, Jim Gardner – a 29-year veteran at Channel 6 – was there when she was a Tamaqua, Pa., teen-ager watching on cable. Even Cecily Tynan, a 30-something meteorologist known for running triathalons, has been on-air for almost a decade. Gardner calls Campbell "a joy to work for…her people skills are so good that you can walk out of her office after being gently admonished (and) feel better than if you had been praised by somebody else." Campbell also likes to talk about new projects. In one of WPVI’s latest ventures, a partnership with the Philadelphia Zoo, the station is helping the zoo create an on-site interpretive program. Then, later this year, zoo researchers will allow Channel 6’s Action News to tag along on trips to Kenya and Mexico, where it will report on efforts to preserve wildlife habitats. It’s a lot to pull together, but gives the station another feature to distinguish itself in the too-common mix of fires and traffic accidents. "My dad always told me find something you love to do and it won’t seem like a job," said Campbell. "And that’s what I did." Bloomsburg: The University Magazine Fall 2005
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From her office window, Rebecca Funk Campbell can literally see
the enemy.
As
a senior, Campbell interned at KDKA-Channel 2 in Pittsburgh. She was a
production assistant on "Punchline," a local teen show hosted by
comedian Dennis Miller who later went on to join "Saturday Night
Live."
Mark
E. Dixon
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Wayne, PA 19087-2022
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