Anchor Away: From L.A. to Pacific Grove : Q: Why did former NBC journalists Kirstie Wilde and Paul Miller move from the second-largest TV market in America to work at a tiny blip of a station? : A: 1) To improve the quality of their life. 2) To start their own newsroom from the bottom up.

It’s a swell place to visit. On TV’s itinerary of glamorous spots for career advancement, however, this area is Nowheresville .

How is it, then, that a woman who was until recently a star anchor in Los Angeles will anchor two nightly newscasts scheduled to debut in August at a bare blip of a Fox-affiliated station in nearby Salinas? “This is the first time,” she says, “I’ve worked without a contract.”

How is it that a former chief of NBC’s Tel Aviv bureau is the news director? “I always thought I was going to be president of NBC News,” he says.

How is it that a former deputy chief of ABC’s Los Angeles bureau is the executive producer? “I’m taking a severe cut in pay,” he says.

Why are news applications from stations large as well as small pouring in? Why this rare confluence of talent at a low-paying, heretofore non-news station like KCBA, which operates out of a former grocery store in an obscure TV market, Salinas/Monterey/Santa Cruz, ranked 111th of 211 in the nation?

“This is not an upward move economically, but it’s an upward move for your life,” answered The Anchor, seated in the large, panoramic-windowed living room of her oceanside home here a pebble’s throw from Pebble Beach and Monterey’s famed Cannery Row.

Her name is Kirstie Wilde, and you may recall that she spent 1988-89 co-anchoring the 10 p.m. news on Fox-owned KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles after six years of co-anchoring at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. on NBC-owned KNBC Channel 4.

As it happens, The Anchor is married to The News Director. His name is Paul Miller, and his 11 years with NBC News included numerous foreign assignments and two years in the Los Angeles bureau.

It was Wilde, 39, and Miller, 36, who, a few months after moving here, persuaded their friend Tim Tison, the former Los Angeles deputy bureau chief, to leave his job as a Dallas-based field producer for ABC’s “World News Tonight” and join them at tiny KCBA as executive producer of a news department that is still in the early stages of formation.

“For career-driven people, it sounds like the dumbest thing you can do,” Tison, 41, said.

What is drawing these people here? The small-town lifestyle is one thing, the chance to play news God another.

“We have the opportunity to do it here the way we think it should be done, to put up or shut up,” Wilde said. “How often do you get this opportunity? How often are news departments created?”

Rarely, especially ones whose creators not only promise good journalism--distinctly separate from the kind of disco news that many local stations deploy as an extension of their entertainment programs--but also have complete autonomy to implement their high-minded plans.

“Paul is designing the newsroom and where the offices go,” Wilde said. “He’s designing the set, and he’s hiring every single person on the staff (of 32). He’s going to make sure there are no problems with people who are dead wood or people with burnout sitting around drinking too much, not holding their end up or mad at you because you’re on television and they want to be.”

Although Wilde for now will be the only weeknight anchor, she’ll have lots of company on the set and promises there will be no cult of Kirstie.

“You can tell by just watching the body language of some anchors that they are protecting their turf,” she said. “They fight about how many lines and stories they get to read and all that stuff. But what Paul and I want to do is have a lot of representation from reporters on the set, because they sound and feel good when they get to be out there.”

The news environment envisioned by Wilde differs greatly from the one she left behind in Los Angeles, where the pressures of anchoring in the nation’s second largest TV market were weighing heavily on her by the time she and Miller decided to move here with their two young children and refocus their lives.

These pressures were unrelated to the star egomania often associated with the stratospheric elite of TV news, Wilde said. “For me, it wasn’t that the other anchor is younger and cuter and is going to get my job or is going to get more money than me. That didn’t stress me out, because I was making more money than I thought I deserved anyway. We’re all making too much money. What really made me nuts--what really turned my stomach into knots--were the ethical pressures I felt in Los Angeles that I didn’t feel when I worked in Louisville or San Diego or Portland.”

She cited an example familiar to L.A. newscast viewers in May and other ratings sweeps months: “Stewing the news” to advertise entertainment programs.

Wilde: “There’s a big TV movie on AIDS or runaway children, you name it, and you’ve got to do six stories on the subject that day because you’re promoting your movie. It really bugged me.”

She produced a copy of a strongly worded memo she wrote to management in 1988 protesting a specific KTTV newscast’s content, including a mere 18 seconds being given an important abortion-pill story in contrast to the news copy’s eight references to that night’s KTTV special purporting to reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper.

“It was blatant, outrageous and silly, and it made us look foolish,” she said.

Also noting the “idiotic” quality of some of the news writing and story selection, Wilde’s memo went on to complain that “after a straight political story on George Bush, I am told to read this: ‘John Wayne Gacy, convicted in 1980 of killing 33 people, says the Republicans have resorted to sleaze. Gacy says Bush should run on his record and not go around scaring people.’ ” Wilde’s memo added sarcastically: “This bit of advice from a homosexual mass murderer!!”

Wilde emphasizes that KTTV management treated her fairly. She said that her frustrations there extended only to news policy and that her general criticisms also applied to KNBC, the station where she worked previously.

That includes “those phony phone polls,” she said. “This is one of those things that Nick Clooney (a KNBC anchor from 1984 to 1986) threatened to quit over. You know, like telling people to call us if they think there should be a ban on guns, and we’ll tell you all about it at 11. It’s not scientific, not even real. So why do they put it on?”

Clooney agrees. “We were attempting to manipulate the viewer,” he said from his home near Cincinnati.

“Stations also forced people to do series on things you thought were stupid,” Wilde said. “There’s so much good stuff we should be doing, but you’re pressured because a general manager will sit in on a meeting and come up with 16 series ideas. A series on cat food? Come on.”

Said Clooney: “These sweeps series are anti-news. They’re anti-journalism.”

Wilde ultimately played the game herself, she says, because she wanted to continue working and because TV “can be corrupting.”

Why will things be different at KCBA?

“The news director isn’t going to tell me to do any of this because he’s my husband, he has the highest integrity and he agrees with me on all of this stuff,” Wilde said.

“Here’s the truth about what local news wants from anchors,” Miller said in his makeshift office in what may have been the produce area of the supermarket. “They want you to fake intelligence and integrity, but if you actually have it, they don’t like it.” Adds Clooney: “They want you to look credible, rather than be credible.”

It wasn’t only ethics that concerned Wilde in Los Angeles, however. Not the least of her worries was the occasional dangerously fixated fan.

“I got this letter from a man who wanted to marry me and do a murder-suicide,” she said. “He had convictions for assaulting his mother, and he even showed up at the station with a gun.”

The man ultimately faded away. Wilde’s fears didn’t.

“I went to great lengths to become anonymous,” she said. “I got unregistered to vote--because voting makes your address public record--but I had to move anyway because the address would still be in the microfiche all over town. I bought a new house under an assumed name and put all the utilities and everything else under Paul’s name and then made sure his name never appeared in print associated with mine. I put my work address on my checks and driver’s license.”

The irony is that this frightening episode motivated Wilde to do a KNBC series on invasion of privacy that earned one of her six Emmys.

As it turns out, however, privacy may be even more elusive in tiny Pacific Grove, where Wilde and Miller moved, never anticipating that she again would be in the spotlight and that he again would be totally absorbed in the news business. Flashback:

In 1987, Wilde and Miller buy a small vacation house in Pacific Grove and start spending occasional weekends there. In 1989, Wilde is on pregnancy leave from KTTV (from which she’ll not return after Fox pays off her unexpired contract) and Miller is fed up with TV news, having already left NBC when passed over for a job as foreign news producer on “NBC Nightly News.”

Wilde picks up the story:

“This real estate guy we know invites us to his wedding up here. We go, and I see another fat lady there who is pregnant and we sit together. It turns out that her husband is a salesman for KCBA, and I say to him, ‘Boy, if your station ever starts a news department, call me, because I’d love to find a way to live up here.’ And he says, ‘OK, ha ha ha.’ It’s a joke.”

No joke. Nine months later, Wilde and Miller are indeed full-time residents of Pacific Grove, having decided to seek a more measured life with their children in an idyllic place they’ve come to love for its small-town ambience, clean air and sea breezes.

And in a parallel development, former Spanish-language station KCBA has decided the surest way to dramatically improve its lowly position in this three-station market is to enter the news business.

Wilde: “The salesman hears from the real estate guy that we moved here--this is like small-town gossip--and he tells the general manager (Barbara Etrick), who calls me up out of the blue and tells me they’re looking for an anchor/news director.”

No thanks, says Wilde.

They have sold their first house in Pacific Grove and bought five acres of oceanfront property. Feeling the resale of four of those acres will enable them to live comfortably without working, Wilde and Miller are not seeking regular jobs. Nevertheless, Etrick persuades Wilde to forward a tape of her work. Without mentioning anything to her husband, Wilde also slips in a note touting him for news director, mentioning his sparkling pedigree and two national Emmys, and dropping the names of Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite, for whom Miller once worked as a young journalist.

Etrick, herself a recent arrival from Colorado Springs, is impressed and wants to do lunch. Miller resists. “I don’t want a job,” he tells Wilde. “It’s just a lunch,” she urges. “What can it hurt?”

The lunch happens. They eat. They have a nice time. And then, when the fun has ended, Etrick pops The Question: “What will it take to get you guys aboard?”

Ten days later, capped by a ski weekend to talk things over, Wilde and Miller are aboard, at a fraction of their previous salaries, she as future anchor of what will be dinner time and 10 p.m. newscasts, he as news director charged with putting everything together.

“All because I met a salesman at a wedding,” Wilde said.

Selling KCBA to job applicants is unnecessary. Up to 25 tapes a day have been arriving. “Some are from unqualified young people who are just terrible,” Wilde said. “And others are from experienced, qualified people from Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and CNN, people like Paul and me who want a lifestyle change. They maybe have saved money, or they’re going to lower their (standard of living), drive the same car for another five years and live in a smaller house. They’re people who don’t want the big nut to cover. They just want to do a job they love and live in a nice place.”

How nice?

Wilde exuberantly describes Pacific Grove as “Iowa with a beach,” a modernized, upscale Norman Rockwell’s America beside touristy Monterey and Carmel.

“Look outside,” she said like a real estate agent selling a hot property. “You can’t see a car. You can’t see the air. You don’t have to lock your door. You don’t use your dogs for protection. You use them for what dogs are supposed to be for, to sit by the fire and lick your hand. You go to the bookstore every morning and get your copy of the New York Times. You go to grocery store, and after three times they know you and speak your name. It sounds stupid, but. . . .”

Wilde is just as eager about the house she shares with Miller and their children Casey, 3, and Hannah, 1, and their three dogs. It’s a bright, airy place that came with the property they bought, sitting about 100 feet from the ocean on a rugged hunk of coast offering gorgeous daytime sights of sea otters and nighttime views of the moon melting into the water.

Figuratively speaking, KCBA’s supermarket is about to melt, too. In July, KCBA is scheduled to move to a spacious building that station owner Ackerley Communications Inc. is paying $3 million to renovate and outfit with gleaming, state-of-the-art equipment that may help Miller-Wilde and Company speed to the forefront of news coverage, if not the ratings.

“If you’ve been on the Concorde 13 times and been in every great hotel in the world and lived the high life on someone else’s money, you don’t need to keep doing that,” Miller said. “This is a very interesting area with lots of great angles and stories.”

To say nothing of great accessibility. “When I was overseas, I would call the prime minister, and his office would call back. Here I can call the Mayor of Salinas and he will call back.”

As a bottom-line operation, KCBA may decide someday that it’s good business to eject its Los Angeles acquisitions. Are Wilde and Miller now inseparable professionally? “I told Barbara (Etrick) not to feel bad if she has to fire me and keep Paul or fire Paul and keep me,” Wilde said. And if she fires both? “Not having a contract was what we wanted,” Wilde said. “If this job doesn’t work out, that’s OK. We told Barbara that she could fire us any Friday.”

That would leave the weekend for bicycling. “I’m almost 40 years old,” Wilde said. “I want to have a beautiful life here, and I’m sure that’s the way it’s going to be.”