Majer Setback - When Brian

Majer Setback - When Brian Lambert knocks off with his absurd political commentary, he's a very good media columnist.

This week, some almost-inside dirt on the departure of Paul Majers from KARE11. Lambert's account differs from the antiseptic, collegial account given in, say, Minneapolis/Saint Paul magazine.

Flopped in a leather chair in his handsome Lake of the Isles home in Minneapolis, Magers prefers the story of moving on to a new challenge. The shift to Los Angeles, he says, "already has new emotions for me — nervousness, anxiety — all those wonderful things we like coping with on a daily basis. It really has created a whole new set of stimuli."

The secret to Magers' success has been analyzed endlessly, even though the discussions are usually quite brief. He's a natural. The relaxed, quick-witted, self-effacing guy you see on camera is pretty much exactly what you get in person. In private, however, he's confident enough to pepper conversation with a few mild, strategically applied profanities and, well off-record, some vivid, funny dissections of other local personalities.

Magers jokes about shifting from the Twin Cities, where he's easily one of the half-dozen most recognizable and sought-after people in town, to L.A., where local TV news anchors rank somewhere between midlevel sitcom actors and last year's pop divas in terms of heart-fluttering star power...

Magers also makes light of the near-miraculous effect he'll have to have on KCBS. It's been an also-ran in the Los Angeles market for years, and many industry pros are skeptical even Magers can do much to raise it from near oblivion.

"Yeah, this thing could go wrong pretty easily," he cracked during the summer. "By this time next year we could be living in a double-wide on the Salton Sea," he said, referring to the parched, windswept hellhole out in the Mojave.

In a city this size, you don't have to go far to find people with Paul Majers stories. Mine? Well, back in the mid-eighties, I talked with him several times; he was a regular listener to the old Don Vogel show, and he called in to the program line at least once. And when I got whacked at KSTP, I used that "connection" to call him up, cold, to see if there might be a job of some sort out at KARE.

While most anchors - hell, most news directors, producers and cameramen - would have put that call in their mental File 13 without much further thought, Majers invited me out to KARE, had a cup of coffee, and introduced me to their then-News Director - something I can imagine very few anchors anywhere doing for someone they'd "met" only via phone on a talk show. (The News Director, on the other hand, rejected me for a dispatcher job, calling me "overqualified", which, given the reputation of KARE's behind-the-scenes production staff at that time, was kind of a slap...)

Anyway, while I watch very little local news these days, I guess it's significant that I don't think I can even name any other local anchors without thinking about it (and thinking about it only yields me Robyne Robyneson, Jeff Passolt and Amelia Santanielle. That's it).

Now that's marketing.

Posted by Mitch at November 24, 2003 06:04 AM