The legal beat is like the medical beat in one way, and this is not a malpractice lawsuit joke. Like the health-and-science beat, you do need some special knowledge or training in the law to get to the top. In the case of legal reporting, there seems to me to be no shortage of qualified candidates. I don’t know what it is about the law business, but I get more students from that profession wanting to switch careers and go into television than from any business. And usually, they make terrific students in my class.
One well-known legal reporter and anchor never thought about switching careers. The television business came calling on her. But I’ll let her tell you the story. This is probably not how it will happen to you, but it did to Catherine Crier.
Report from the Trenches
“I’ve got a Schwab drugstore story,” she says, recalling the Hollywood spot where starlets were discovered. “I’d just been reelected to my second term on the bench (she was the youngest judge ever elected in Texas) in 1988. I went to a Christmas party and I met a fellow who had been a former recruiter at CBS News — that was not the topic of our conversation, we were talking politics,
Fig. 10-1 Catherine Crier. courtesy of court tv
and he called me a couple of weeks later and asked me if I would ever be interested in doing a political show on television. I said, sure, sounds like fun.
“He brought over a camera on Valentine’s Day in 1989 — two friends of mine who had written books came over to my house.
We sat in the living room. I did an interview tape. A month later, I was doing a pilot for three different news organizations and six months later I was offered the Evening News with Bernie Shaw at CNN.”
Catherine Crier went on to ABC and Fox as a news anchor and reported on almost everything but the legal beat. She finally got back to her legal roots as Executive Editor of Legal Specials and Anchor of Catherine Crier Live at Court TV.
She believes that training in law is essential for anyone tackling the legal beat. The reason: The law today is so intricate.
“It’s dealt with too superficially as it is . . . particularly on television . . . and without legal training it would be even more so.”
Fig. 10-2 You have to know the law.
But she credits her training for giving her some of the skills needed to be on air. “It was my many years as a trial lawyer, a criminal prosecutor and as a civil litigator that gave me the experi-ence talking in front of audiexperi-ences — albeit a judge or a jury instead of a television camera. And then as a judge you have not only to listen to the evidence and determine what the facts are and apply the law but you have to render social and public policy, which is very much what a journalist does. So all of that, in addition to the inherent training and analysis and sort of intellectual background that comes with a law degree, prepared me for many aspects of television.”
Catherine says she knows now how that training prepared her.
But in the beginning, she struggled when she took everybody’s suggestions. She pleads guilty to trying too hard and not relaxing.
Report from the Trenches
She had done a pilot for CNN that got her that first job in television, the one as anchor at CNN. Before putting her on air, she was sent to a television coach (Not me!). She spent about two or three weeks being told things like, “This is a camera, this is what you do, sit up straight, pretend you have a rod down your back, talk like an anchor.” Then she was sent along to anchor the news.
Six months into the job, the head of the network called her into his office. He said, “Could you emulate someone?” He played a tape for her. She was watching herself. It was that original pilot she had submitted to get the job. A time when, she says, “I had absolutely no training, no coaching whatsoever.”
The boss said, “Would you be that person, please?”
“It was harder to let go of the rigidity that they had instilled in me than it was to fumble my way as a complete amateur. It took years.
Now I’m laid back as all get out, for better or worse. If someone doesn’t like it, they don’t like it. I giggle, I make faces, I do my own thing, just going back to being myself.”
Or as I tell my students, the best person to be on camera is YOU. That way, you don’t have to try to pretend to be someone you are not. Catherine says she believes the audience reads that superficiality.
It may not be easy at first to relax and let yourself shine through.
You may think you should project this image of an anchorperson and what they ought to be and sound like. But you shouldn’t.
Be yourself.