Olesker: Loss of Veteran TV Reporter Is Bad News for Baltimore

The news just got a little worse around here for the business of covering the news. Suzanne Collins has left WJZ-TV’s Eyewitness News in Baltimore after a 32-year career characterized by her flinty integrity, her energy and her tenacious digging.

Collins becomes the new chief of staff this week for Nancy Jacobs, the Republican state senator for Harford and Cecil counties.

Or, as one slightly envious WJZ reporter put it when the news broke, “Suzanne made it over the wall.”

These are tough and uncertain days in the news business. Everybody talks about the decline of newspapers, but TV’s going through its own convulsions. A Baltimore Sun story several months back summed it up: Over the past year, every station in town saw its late-night news ratings drop by more than 50 percent from the previous year’s numbers.

Who needs to watch the 11 o’clock news when they’ve been checking their iPads and their Blackberries and smart phones all day long?

But Collins’ retirement is a real body blow to local television journalism. She spent five years at WBAL-TV and 27 more at WJZ as a serious reporter. In television news, that’s sometimes a contradiction in terms. This is a medium that, more and more, thinks viewers are impressed watching the station’s helicopter flying over the Beltway to show us fender-benders while they ignore all news that isn’t visually dramatic.

Collins was never that kind of reporter.

In the WJZ newsroom, you’d find her combing through real estate records, police blotters, court records, campaign finance reports.

Management’s unfortunate reaction in recent years: Who needs it?

Management felt there was nothing visual about the police blotter—they needed the wounded teenager lying in the street. There’s nothing visual about numbers on a page—they needed the burning building to grab the eye of those at home distracted between the TV screen and the dinner table or folding the laundry or hollering at the kids or whatever else.

Collins wanted to know why things happened the way they did. She wanted to do journalism for grownups. She wasn’t satisfied with a politician’s glib on-camera answer—she wanted to check his remarks against the record.

She was pretty fearless right from the start. When she was still an intern over at WBAL-TV, the station sent her up to Three Mile Island after the nuclear power plant there broke down and President Jimmy Carter arrived, amid great security, to hold a press conference.

Collins walked in lacking any kind of White House credentials. She bluffed her way past the Secret Service, and she got the story. WBAL loved her moxie. They gave her a job producing investigative reports. In other words, she did the legwork, she combed through the records that led to on-air stories for reporters who stood in front of the camera as though they’d done the work themselves.

WJZ hired her away in 1984, when the station was still riding high with anchors Jerry Turner and Al Sanders. They also stole Dick Gelfman away. Not a bad investigative duo, Gelfman and Collins. Now they’re both gone from the airwaves, leaving WBAL’s Jayne Miller and her little gang as the rare serious reporters left in local TV.

For a lot of years, Collins covered the General Assembly. In announcing her hiring, Senator Jacobs issued a formal statement declaring, “Suzanne’s understanding of public policy, the legislative process, and her compassion for people make her a wonderful addition to our staff.”

Collins has made all the correct diplomatic remarks about her TV departure. Looking forward to new challenges after all these years, that sort of thing. But it’s an open secret at WJZ that she’d grown frustrated over the years with the station’s increased dependence on visuals, and its disinterest in any serious digging. Collins isn’t the only one there who’s upset.

At Baltimore’s Mt. Washington Tavern the other night, there was a little gathering of the station’s newsroom personnel. They were there to bid farewell to Collins, as friend and colleague. And to say goodbye, too, to memories of a more serious era in TV news.

--

Michael Olesker spent 19 years as a nightly commentator at WJZ-TV. He is the author of Tonight at 6: A Daily Show Masquerading as Local TV News, published by Apprentice House.