Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 149

hi Thile Adrianne Baughns fm has chosen the exquisitely WW difficult task of juggling the careers of newswoman and mother, she doesn't necessarily think of herself as a feminist. But, she says, "I think my mother was a feminist long before it was fashionable. My sister and I were always raised to believe that, no matter what, you were going to have to be able to take care of yourselves and your families. If you met the most wonderful man in the world, he could drop dead and you'd have to be able to get out there and make it." "For the most part," she continues, "I have never had a problem with working. I know what it's like to hold two full-time jobs, because I had something I wanted to do.

I decided to forego college initially and go in the Air Force because I wanted to be outonmyowrii tobymypwrtwingsi So, we probably lived a lot of it (feminism), we just didn't articulate it, the theories and so forth. I definitely can sympathize. But it kind of freaks me out sometimes when people say, 'Look at you at what you've done' and I don't feel like I've done that much. When they point to it, I can't say I've done it all on my own. It was because I happened to be in the right place at the right time, the opportunities came, the mood was there 'and I happened to be there.

As I think back on it, I've never really had a struggle, like many others before me. I've been lucky." Luck may have played a part, but, in the highly visible world of television, if a performer can't do the it's immediately apparent. People who are "in the right place at the right time" must be able to handle the assignment or they won't be around very Obviously, Continued on Page 6 Adrianne Baughns on camera. mood hits me, fine, then people remember that. "There's a mood to a show," she says.

"God, when you start out at the top and it's blood, guts, fire and disaster, that sets the tone almost for the show, even though you're supposed to have peaks and valleys. It's still verjr hard to get inter a 'ha-ha' three 'blocks' (program segments) away, unless you've got a story that's so hilarious that it normally elicits that. We don't feel the pressure at this with other stations that have the Eyewitness News format. I think, in part, it's because this market is so conservative. It doesn't demand that.

Nobody is sitting there with a prodding stick, saying you have to throw in a joke here or a laugh there. If you did it like they do in New York or Denver, it would be very hokey here. It wouldn't be well-received, She concludes her thoughts by saying, "I don't think all news has to be dead serious and uninteresting. And I can appreciate the need for the visual element, to look good and fresh and all that kind of thing, but sometimes I think we have a tendency to look for more 'flash' than the kinds of heavy things we should be doing. That's where I have some disagreements, but that's what we're all about a lot of disagreements, a lot of input.

You win some, you lose some. That makes it interesting." cause they lack the visual element, even though that should be the challenge on the part of the reporter, the assignment desk and the producer, to make them visually attractive and still, somehow, get the story out. Our time frame limits us, too. How can you tell a major economic story In one minute and thirty seconds?" But Baughns feels the blame does not lie solely with TV. "I think," she says, "our expectations as television news viewers need to become a little more realisticJt'a unfortunate 4hat the majority of Americans get most of their news from television.

That's a tremendous burden on this visual medium. It cannot be all things to everybody. We have a responsibility to educate our children to the fact that you may find out a little bit tonight (on TV) on what happened here and there. But you have a responsibility tomorrow morning to read the full story, to understand what's happening at the U.N. and all that.

You have to develop the NEED to know and we aren't doing that. I look at the kids in school. The teacher has to assign students to read the paper every day. It's a chore for many of us to read Newsweek or Business Week or The Wall Street Journal. We've become lazy and so we're relying more on television than we ever should.

TV cannot do that. It is superficial. It can't help it." Warming to the subject, she con tinues, "Channel 3 tries what we consider 'in-depth' reports. That means assigning more time to research a project and doing a series on it, like we did with hazardous waste. This is not a promo for 3, but I was very proud of the fact that they were willing to do that." jfnoher development in tele vi-MJm sion news that has been at-Jt JL tacked from both within and outside the business is the so-called "Happy Talk Format," in which the newsweathei and sports to one another with jokes and pseudo-spontaneous chatter in an effort to (apparently) lighten up the news and make it more entertaining.

Baughns takes a dim view of that approach, commenting: "When people turn on the news, I don't think they expect to be entertained. I hope that's not what we're doing at 3. Some things that come out of Don (Lark) or Dave (Smith), they just say what comes to them naturally. Hilton, (Kaderli) he's precious. Hilton is Hilton.

You never have to doubt that. The way he is on the air is truly the way he is. He's beautiful people. I'm not comfortable saying just any old thing. I'm not great with the one-liners.

Don is good at it. R.D. Sahl (now anchorman at Channel 30) was spectacular at it he was very comfortable with that. But when I don't have anything to say, I don't say anything. If the John Birchard is a freelance writer living in New Haven..