Finding the Challenge in Glitzy News

Now that she’s off the most no-nonsense newscast in the city and spending her work days reporting and cavorting with the likes of Richard Simmons and Charlie Sheen, Jann Carl can own up to her “terrible secret.”

“Even though I went to journalism school and received a degree from the University of Missouri, and even though I know it’s not hip to say, I’d have to admit that I am more of a feature reporter than a hard-news person,” said Carl, the former co-anchor of KTLA-TV Channel 5’s newscast, now reporter for “Entertainment Tonight.”

“I love being here because I get to use more of my personality. As a news reporter, you aren’t supposed to show your opinions about anything, and most of the news we concentrated on was either very serious or very dry. And I just felt that there was a part of my talent that wasn’t being utilized.”

Which is not to say that Carl wasn’t a force in news. After she left the anchor chair at KTLA late last year, the perennial news champ fell during the February sweeps into a tie with KTTV-TV Channel 11 for the first time in more than 20 years.

The station explained the unprecedented decline by pointing to a stronger lead-in during prime time on the Fox-owned KTTV. Greg Nathanson, KTLA’s general manager, said at the time that KTTV benefited from the huge audience brought to the rival station’s newscast by such Fox shows as “The X-Files.”

Carl’s absence for the first time in more than eight years wasn’t mentioned as a contributing factor. After all, the conventional wisdom has long credited KTLA anchor Hal Fishman for the success of “KTLA News at 10.” He has been anchoring the news in Los Angeles for more than 35 years.

As long as he was there--and he still is--it didn’t much matter who sat next to him at the anchor desk.

When questioned this week, KTLA news director Craig Hume also said that it was KTTV’s lead-in advantage that most affected the ratings. He added that there is no statistical data to back up the idea that Carl’s departure affected the ratings significantly. But several KTLA employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that an internal station review indicated that it was Carl’s departure from the newscast, more than anything else, that hurt the station in the February numbers.

The news staffers said that as good and popular as Fishman is and always has been, Carl’s pleasant looks, sweet personality and overall popularity as a youthful counterpoint to Fishman’s fatherly academic approach played a larger role in the success of that newscast than anyone had thought.

A number of viewers called The Times to say the same thing. Carl responded by joking that she must have made a lot of really good friends at KTLA, but she took some pride in the hypothesis that her absence hurt Channel 5.

“I think that every person in this business who is on the air would like to believe that they make a difference on their show,” she said. “And if the ratings dropped because I was no longer there or was at least part of the reason, I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I wasn’t thrilled because it is some proof that my presence there mattered to people.

“And in some ways it really doesn’t surprise me because of the response I’ve been getting from people in the grocery store or the dog-wash place,” said Carl, who, in her mid-30s, is married and the mother of a 3-year-old daughter.

Hume acknowledged “we had many viewers who were big fans of Jann.” But he added that market research showed that current anchor Marta Waller rated higher than Carl, and that Waller, who gained a huge amount of recognition last year as the anchor of KTLA’s full-time coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, and Fishman together rated higher than any other anchor team in the market.

“Jann made an important contribution to the newscast when she was here, and we were all sad to see her go,” Hume said. “But she ‘After eight years of telling mostly bad news, it’s kind of a nice switch for me to sit down and tell the world something funny and entertaining.’

Former news anchor Jann Carl was interested in moving on and doing other things.”

When Carl took the job in 1987, after several years as co-host of KABC-TV Channel 7’s slick and breezy “Eye on L.A.,” she understood that the position called for her to play second banana to Fishman--read a few stories, do the weather and the Hollywood report.

“I learned so much from Hal and he was and still is a dear friend to me, but I felt that I had outgrown the position and all last year I was basically interviewing and auditioning at other places,” she said. “There was just so much more I wanted to do, so much more that I knew I could do.”

KTLA, she said, made no real effort to keep her, though she refused to reveal the details of her negotiations. Hume said her departure was by mutual agreement.

When “Entertainment Tonight” called, Carl decided to go to a glitzier new ball. “She is very aggressive and a really strong interviewer and those are things she didn’t get to show all that much as a news anchor,” said Linda Bell Blue, who as executive producer of “ET,” hired Carl in December. “I think the nicest thing someone said about Barbara Walters was that she went ahead and asked Ladybird Johnson about LBJ’s womanizing, but she asked it in such a nice way that it wasn’t hurtful. I think Jann has that ability.”

Carl admits that of all the celebrity interviews she has conducted during her first several months on the job, the most satisfying was the most newsy: a sit-down with O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden. Perhaps it wasn’t as exciting as flying to Rome to interview Sylvester Stallone, she said, but it meant the most.

“That’s probably the news person in me and I’m glad I have the opportunity to do that kind of thing here as well, but I still don’t think it’s bad to entertain people like we do,” Carl said.

“I think after eight years of telling mostly bad news, it’s kind of a nice switch for me to sit down and tell the world something funny and entertaining.”

The hardest part of her new life palling around with celebrities, however, is the one thing she never had to do in news: dig for the gossip, or as she puts it, “ask the questions that Betty Sue watching in Moline, Ill., would want to know, even when that means asking Burt [Reynolds] about Loni [Anderson] or Chris [Darden] about Marcia [Clark].”

But even if she sometimes feels a tad embarrassed prying into such personal matters, she insisted she has no reason to apologize and no problems looking her former journalism professors, news directors or co-anchors straight in the eye.

“I feel comfortable with any of my serious news friends, and you know why? The night the story broke with Hugh Grant, KTLA’s respected, serious ‘News at 10’ led with it. The line between hard news and other programs is so diffuse now that I feel perfectly comfortable with this. When Hal Fishman led with Hugh Grant and a prostitute named Divine, I said I can do anything. Things are not the same as they were 15 years ago in this business. It’s all changed.”