Outgoing NBC Exec Praises Successor

A philosophical Lawrence K. Grossman, out as NBC News president after four years, said Thursday he was surprised by the choice of Michael G. Gartner, a print journalist and executive, as his successor.

He said he had “no idea” that his bosses would go outside broadcasting, but praised the former Gannett Co. executive and former editor of the Des Moines Register as a serious journalist and fine choice.

“I’m very pleased that they picked someone who’s obviously serious,” he said. “I think it will speak well for the future of NBC News and demonstrates a seriousness about it that’s very healthy.”

Grossman spoke in his office to a small group of TV reporters shortly before Gartner--whom he said he hadn’t met--talked to NBC News staffers and affiliated station executives around the country via a closed-circuit hookup.

The new NBC News chief was introduced by NBC President Robert C. Wright, who praised all that Grossman had accomplished at a time of “higher cost and less audience” and called Gartner well trained in all aspects of the journalism business “to lead NBC News for many years to come.”

Grossman, in what probably was his last meeting with TV reporters, was quietly upbeat, although he admitted he was upset when news leaked out Tuesday that he was resigning and “I didn’t have a chance to talk with my colleagues before it broke.”

The news division’s outgoing president resigned--he said he got “a terrific settlement” but declined to elaborate--after sporadic friction over the past two years with the budget-minded, cost-cutting management that took over NBC when General Electric purchased it in 1986.

He declined to get into specifics, but said the issue was not disagreement over whether costs should be reduced to put NBC News on a self-sustaining basis, but rather over how that should be done.

Alluding to staff cuts that over the past year have included 11 correspondents, the belt-tightening had “to be done in a way that was sensitive, measured, with concern for individuals,” he said.

And now, he said, NBC News “is well on the way to self-sufficiency and the road map is there.”

Given the new management at NBC, he said, it was inevitable that he--a holdover from the era of Grant Tinker’s chairmanship--would be replaced by someone of the management’s own choosing.

He said he had heard rumors about a search for his successor, “but it didn’t come as a surprise to me.” He and NBC president Wright, a former G.E. executive, were uncomfortable with each other, he said.

“I think Bob Wright is a very decent guy. . . . We’ve gotten along OK, but neither of us has had a very good time,” he said.

He finally decided last Friday, he said, to meet with Wright and get the matter of his future settled.

“Since I was uncomfortable and he was uncomfortable, it seemed the healthiest thing to do would be to make a change,” he said, explaining his resignation.

Grossman said that he was still considering his future, but that he won’t be returning to the Public Broadcasting Service, which he headed until Tinker hired him in 1984.

He declined to comment on persistent rumors that NBC News plans to close at least three domestic bureaus--in Houston, Atlanta and Boston--and to rely more on affiliates’ coverage as a cost-cutting measure.

“The reality is that there’ll be changes,” he said, “and I think you’ve got to talk to my successor about what those rumors are.”

Gartner was not immediately available for comment. But during his 12-minute closed-circuit appearance, Wright, his boss, gave some indication that more use of affiliate coverage by NBC News could lie ahead.

Wright said that NBC News, as an “experiment” in Seattle and Salt Lake City, has been using affiliate reporters and coverage “to supplement network pieces.” He asked Gartner what he thought of that.

“Well, based on the little I know about it, Bob, on first blush it seems to me to be a terrific idea,” Gartner said. “And I would hope that we could expand it to other cities. . . . It just seems like a very wise use of people and resources.”

In introducing himself to affiliates, Gartner noted that he’d been asked what he knows about TV journalism, “and the answer is: not very much. But I think what this job calls for is experience well beyond just a knowledge of the basics of television, which I’ll learn.”

Two veteran network newsmen, each of whom began in print, agreed that Gartner’s lack of broadcast news experience shouldn’t prove a drawback to him, even though his appointment may have startled some in TV news.

“It absolutely is not a drawback,” declared Robert Schakne, who today will end 33 years at CBS News. It may even help, he added, to have “someone who is not wedded to television and its own peculiar emphases that often have nothing to do with news.”

Two-time NBC News president Reuven Frank, who started there as a news writer 38 years ago and soon will retire, agreed.

“If he (Gartner) comes respecting the professional skills of the people who are doing the work, he can set the tone and the news policy out of his experience very easily,” he said.

“He really has a distinguished record and that’s really the most important thing. . . . The other stuff will come to him as it came to all of us: by exposure and by gradual absorption.”

Gartner’s hiring without broadcast news experience, while unusual, is not unprecedented: Grossman had none, Roone Arledge was head of ABC Sports before being named to head its news division too, and former CBS News president Richard S. Salant was a CBS lawyer before his appointment.

Former NBC president Robert Mulholland, who spent most of his 23 years at NBC in news until he left in 1985, said that Gartner is “a terrific journalist and has a good business sense--a combination that is desperately needed.”

But television news has its own unique requirements and can do things that newspapers can’t, he said, “and you have to be able to judge that. There’s no doubt he knows good journalism. Now he’s going to have to learn good television journalism.”

Schakne said there are risks in coming from print to television and not understanding what it can do.

“But I have a feeling,” he said, “that if one cares about news, and committing a little truth every now and then, that’s more important than anything else.”