Lynne Live (Southwest Airlines Spirit, Nov 98)
Marc Galindo
By Lawrence Wells
Viewers of CNN's primetims Headline News know anchor Lynne Russell for her
sly, on-camera cool. Off-camera--as a PI, first-degree black belt in karate,
and sometime bodyguard--she's really a kick.
My philosophy of life is simple: Life is too short not to live it the way
you want to. It isn't about money.It's about attitude. It's giving up
limitations and understanding you have choices. Begin by believing that
everything is possible.
--Lynne Russell, from her upcoming autobiography
Radiating energy and confidence, CNN's Headline News anchor Lynne
Russell arrives at work less than thirty minutes before she is to go on the
air. She laughs easily, moves with a bounce in her step, and stands a
statuesque five-feet-nine. The title of her forthcoming autobiography
reveals her dual nature, friendly but fearless: How to Win Friends, Kick A--
and Influence People (St. Martin's Press; publication date to be
determined).
In her newsroom, her fellow anchor, Chuck Roberts, is broadcasting the
6:30 news report. Russell is due to relieve him at the half hour. She wears
a sleeveless orange sheath dress and high heels and greets her fellow
workers with a smile and a wave. On the wall of the compact "Anchor's
Office" she shares with Roberts is a sign that reads, "Please do not annoy,
torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle,
persecute, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, tease, tantalize or bluff me." There's
also a blown-up photo of the Great Wall of China, along with an abstract
painting belonging to Roberts. "Only Chuck knows what it means," she says
over her shoulder. A mirror over her desk, along with a clock, a phone, and
a word processor, round out the spartan furnishings.
Russell sits down and goes right to work, editing copy on her computer
monitor, scrolling through the text, deleting certain words.
"I'm trying to take out anything that refers to 'downing trees and
power lines' or 'battling blazes'--you know, journalese," she says as she
works. "They'll hyphenate anything that stands still. I don't read off the
prompter, but it is a crutch. I'll use it only when I absolutely have to. If
I don't have hard copy, I won't do the story."
Editing the news is second nature to her. As she speaks, her eyes stay
glued to the moving copy moving down the screen.
"Sometimes I do a word search just for 'but,' " she adds. " 'But'
doesn't have anything to do with anything. For some reason it shows up in
the second graf of every lead to every story. I also search for 'bad' and
'worst.' They don't explain anything. If you say, 'This is the worst storm,'
is it the most serious, the most destructive? In terms of human life or
what? Just say it."
When told that her production supervisor says he has learned more about
writing fromm Russell than all his former English teachers combined, she
looks up beaming and exclaims, "That's wonderful!"
With five minutes to go until air time, she is not concerned about how
she looks. "I think getting out the news is more important than a woman's
makeup," she says, still scrolling. "They only see me from the waist up. I
could be wearing jeans under a $2,000 Givenchy jacket. I like to arrive
camera-ready. I do my own makeup. Spending a lot of time on makeup is silly.
Plus, you don't know what is going to happen in traffic in this city
anymore. There have been days when I was putting on makeup for the show
while doing surveillance in a parking lot."
The day before, at Maggiano's Restaurant in Atlanta--over roasted
peppers with mozzarella and "lots of basil"--Russell explained about staking
out parking lots.
Her former husband, Jim Dunlap, once casually suggested that Russell
might enjoy being a private detective. Characteristically decisive, she
opened a phone book, closed her eyes, and pointed to United Securities
Group. After undergoing training and testing, she is now a licensed private
investigator.
"I love getting to the bottom of a mystery as long as it's somebody
else's problem," she said. "You ca walk away from it and go home."
Her other pursuits include:
*RESERVE SHERIFF'S DEPUTY in Fulton County. ("Mostly directing
traffic.") Currently on leave.
*SCUBA DIVER. ("The open-water certification test took place in waters
off Panama City, Florida, and the water temp was sixty-two
degrees, and it was sixty feet in three feet visibility. It was a
certification from hell.")
*BODYGUARD for visiting celebrities. ("Can't say who it was; I'd blow
my cover.")
*And FIRST-DEGREE BLACK BELT in choi-kwang do, full-contact Korean
karate. ("A woman should be able to defend herself.")
When she moved into her new apartment, the first thing she did was turn
off the circuit breaker to the stove. Today, wine bottles and a bust of
Beethoven decorate the top of the oven, and inside it Russell keeps her fax
machine and printer. "I still have a microwave," she insists. "Nobody
starves while waiting for the champagne bottle to be opened."
At about two minutes before airtime, she heads for the newsroom, where
more than a dozen news editors and writers sit checking their monitors,
editing stories, or gathering news from wire services. The anchor's desk is
walled off on one side by a production supervisor's massive console and the
control room on the other.
Russell sits down and puts on her mike. An old friend and former news
editor greets her, and she gives him a snappy high-five. Directly in front
of her is a TelePrompTer mounted on a two-way mirror in front of the camera
lens. The mirror reflects text from a flat projector so that the anchor may
look directly at the camera while reading news copy.
The control room staff of a director, a producer, an audio operator,
and a technical director is under the control of director Bruce Daniel. His
casual demeanor and informal dress--jeans and hiking boots--belie the
tension and responsibility he faces. It's like choreographing a Broadway
play by computer. Scripts are always changing and the director has to check
for key codes (the still-sort code, it's called) that have to be correctly
programmed the first time. There is scant margin for error.
In today's television news, all video is digitized, along with the
graphics, and coded so that it fits a certain time slot. At Headline News,
two giant file servers nicknamed Tom and Jerry run the show. Most of the
time everything runs smoothly, though many veterans--including
Russell--sometimes prefer the good old days of editing regular videotape.
Like an airline pilot settling into the cockpit, Daniel sits at his
console and checks stories, counting down to takeoff. The news is in his
hands. Seconds tick off a digital clock marking the exact airtime of each
show. More than a dozen monitors show stories queing up to run.
At thirty seconds to airtime, Russell combs her hair. At twenty
seconds, she checks her lip gloss in a compact. "Ten seconds, Lynne, stand
by," says Daniel over the mike. As the seconds tick off she glances in her
compact mirror, rubbing her teeth with her finger. A born juggler and
natural magician, she is reading her e-mail while the theme music plays.
She snatches her compact out of camera range, turns to the camera and
smoothly begins talking as if resuming a conversation.
This is Headline News. I'm Lynne Russell. The tax-man is getting a
facelift. Today, the Senate pushed through legislation that drastically
changes the way the IRS does business. Jonathan Aiken has more...
Russell's delivery is her forte. She snuggles up to the camera and
makes friends with it. "The camera to me is one person," she observes. "Only
one. And I talk to it just as I'm doing now with you." Humor is her
trademark. Her arched eyebrow and knowing looks have become hard currency in
the world of television news.
"I loved Roger Mudd," she explains. "He had a kind of twinkle in his
eye, too, you know? And I know he was thinking, 'Okay, now that some of this
is bull, but I have to tell you anyway, and you just have to figure it out
for yourself.' "
One of Russell's biggest fans is Headline News president Bob Furnad.
"Lynne has a style that's very much her own," he notes. "People pick up on
that immediately. She is an anchor that people feel strongly about. She
leaves quite an impression, and that's good because hopefully people will
remember tomorrow that they watched Lynne russell and tune in to see her
again. She stands out among all the Headline News anchors as a truly unique
talent."
Russell's friendly, relaxed manner inspires trust. "I hope it inspires
lots of things--trust and a freedom on the viewer's part to accept what he
is seeing and believing," she says wryly. "That is part of not being
editorial: to present the news and let the viewer figure out what to do with
it. A program director in Miami once told me, 'The masses are asses.' I
don't believe that. I'm just delivering the information to the people. It's
a breach of trust to try to push what you're thinking on somebody else."
Boxing promoter Don King is calling it a victory for America. A federal
jury in New York today found him not guilty of wire fraud...
In the control room, Daniel holds up two arms, mnimicking Don KIng's
V-for-victory sign. He cues Russell as each story comes up; she reads the
lead-in and voice-over; on most stories there is a reporter on-camera, and
during these off-air moments Russell returns to her e-mail or edits her next
lead-in statement.
Russell was born in Orange, New Jersey, on November 1, 1946, a
self-described "army brat." Her father, John Russell, was assigned to tours
of duty in Germany and the United States. Lynne Russell graduated from high
school in Albuquerque and attended the University of Colorado where she
majored in nursing, then got into radio broadcasting almost by accident.
"I went home and cried every night when I was tending to patients; and
I needed a job, so I lied and said I could write radio copy, in Fort
Collins. Foolishly they gave me the job, and the next thing i knew, after a
year, I was on the air, having just too much fun and getting paid next to
nothing for it and not caring. Standing outside with a broom beating snow
off the transmission lines at this radio station and thinking I owned the
world."
In Daytona Beach, President Clinton met with firefighters who have been
battling wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and burned hundreds
of thousands of acres since Memorial Day...
After the 8 p..m. news program, Daniel is relieved by Mike Levine. The
directors work only a half-hour stretch. Everything is going smoothly until
seconds before airtime, when Levine discovers that the 9 o'clock show is
logged into the computer. "Something's wrong, I can't make it go away!" he
yells. Daniel remains in the control room and both directors figure out a
way to override the incorrect computer command and reprogram the 8:30 show
with all its codes and queued video.
The crisis averted, everyone in the control room holds up two arms,
again mimicking Don King's V-for-victorysign. It's the tension-relieving
in-joke of the night.
A new CNN/USA Today Gallup Poll asked Americans what they think about
the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Thirty-five percent of those surveyed say
they think the Tripp tapes should be made public...
Russell suppresses a smile and continues her reporting. Off-camera, one
of the production supervisors says jokingly, "A lot of guys watch her at
bars or on the road. Their wives won't let them watch her at home." Russell
does not quibble about her sex appeal, though she argues that gender should
not make any difference where news reporting is concerned.
"Sex has its place," she says, grinning, "but not on the news.
Seriously, it took me by surprise when I was well into my broadcasting
career that any of the people I worked with would consider the work a woman
did--on the air or behind the scenes--could possibly be any different from
that of a man. It cracked me up. I never knew there was any difference.
Maybe that came from my army upbringing. To this day, I don't think in those
terms at all."
Still, in a story on body language Russell wrote for Playboy, she
observes that it is not exactly an acquired skill: "It's a woman thing.
Something we were born knowing."
A powerful earthquake shook Alaska's largest city and the surrounding
area today, sending people scurrying into the streets for safety...
Russell admits to a fascination with actress Jane Russell and is
searching for a genealogical connection, based on the fact that both their
families wound up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at the turn of the century.
Jane Russell's ancestors migrated there from Canada, while Lynne Russell's
family travelled up the river from New Orleans. ("Now, you tell me we're not
related!")
In the soft-news segment at the close of the half-hour, there is a
video piece on cancer-curing research involving sharks. Gulping coffee
during her break, Russell is concerned whether the sharks had to die in the
experiment. A production supervisor assures her they did not.
When she was a TV news reporter in San Antonio, animal rights became
one of Russell's favorite causes. "We had this enormous snowstorm," she
says. "All the humans were taking cover. Bitter cold; one of those
unexpected things. We could barely get around in the news vehicles. I went
out and interviewed the cows. I didn't think they were all that happy. They
had to stay outdoors.Who's gonna speak for them?"
...The earthquake is taking an emotional toll on people.
Russell has to ad-lib when the copy on the TelePrompTer doesn't match
her script: "What the hell was that about?" she says as soon as she's off
the air, then hears her voice on the air and hits the cough button. "Check
out the TelePrompTer...'emotional toll one people,' " she complains. The
control room staff scurries to assess the problem. Later they apologize to
Russell for having missed the typo.
"The computers are out to get us. I know they are," Russell quips.
"Back when we were running videotape, we had a pretty good handle on things.
Now it's so complicated. You have to know the exact code in the control
room. You can't just punch something up anymore. That's progress, I guess."
Her workload is a grueling eight shows in a row a night. When she
started at CNN, however, she worked eight hours a day, sharing sixteen shows
with two other anchors. When the CNN news team rebelled, Ted Turner called a
meeting of the news staff to reconsider their workload.
"I used to run into Ted in the parking lot," Russell says of her early
days at CNN. "He used to drive a Toyota, and he'd be so friendly and
wonderful, and he still is--CNN has just grown so much--but my first real
contact with him was at a staff meeting for all the anchors. We wanted off
that eight-hour schedule. I was late to the meeting, as usual, and was
wearing a kind of cat-woman outfit--you know, a turtleneck, pants, and
boots, all black; to this day it's my favorite outfit--and when I came in,
he stopped the meeting and said, 'Awww, I like that outfit.' I thought,
okay, this is the Ted Turner I've heard about."
In the end, Turner agreed to a reduction in the anchors' work hours.
Russell might be the first to admit that her cat-woman outfit didn't hurt
the staff's cause.
During the weather and sports segments, Russell takes a quick break to
visit the restroom. In the hallway, she pauses to reflect on what keeps her
job interesting.
"I'm always interfering in other people's lives--trying to help them,"
she observes, "to effect some change in the world, you know. Broadcasting is
a wonderful way to do that. To improve other people's lives, to speak for
them, present them, gain the attention of politicians who won't give them
the time of day because they don't have a microphone."
A few seconds later she's laughing and joking, never serious for long.
Like open-sea scuba-diving, it's her style to dive deep, then kick to the
surface and come up smiling.
On the way back to the anchor's desk she pauses to offer a few
well-chosen words of advice: "Do what you feel you must do with your life.
Don't let anything get in the way. You don't have to do just one thing. And
there's nothing wrong with this world that fifteen minutes of Victoria's
Secrets won't fix."
Moments later she's putting on her mike, looking as fresh and focused
as she did three hours ago. At the last second, she glances up as if
greeting an old friend, smiles, and begins talking in her patented,
conversational style.
This is Headline News. I'm Lynne Russell.
(Frequent contributor Lawrence Wells lives in Oxford, Mississippi.)
Al Smith
had a lot of new information. Now if you could only scan the photos of Lynne
from the magazine, my gratitude would be doubled.
-**** Posted from Supernews, Discussions Start Here(tm) ****-
http://www.supernews.com/ - Host to the the World's Discussions & Usenet
Earl Cooley III
>LYNNE, LIVE
>By Lawrence Wells
>
Well, that's a lot of good info. Time for me to update the Lynne FAQ file. heh.
--
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