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Starring Off Camera
By Kevin Kipp
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Lynn
Beall
President and General Manager
of Gannett-owned KSDK-TV
Lynn Beall, president and general manager of Gannett-owned KSDK-TV,
says she has enjoyed “a zigzaggy kind of career.”
Zigzaggy, perhaps. But also straight up, and sharply focussed
on television broadcasting.
Anchorwoman-like-they-ought-to-be Karen Foss has known eight general
managers in her 21 years at Channel 5. She says, “Lynn’s done
about everything, which tells me she may have envisioned herself
as a general manager at a station, and may well have her sights
set on a higher goal in Gannett.”
Au contraire Beall says. Opportunities simply became available.
“It was never a grand master plan,” she says, “It was just the
next, most interesting thing.”
Before Gannett Company Inc., Beall began her career in Topeka,
Kans., in news production and editing. From there, she moved to
Washington, D.C., to accept a position as an account exec at WDCA-TV.
She accepted an offer as national sales manager over at D.C.’s
CBS-affiliate W*USA-TV in 1988. She has been with Gannett ever
since.
She was director of marketing and programming at KPNX in Phoenix
from 1992 to ’94. She was a general executive from ’94 to ’97,
working on all manner of programming, sales and marketing projects:
“You don’t think cable retransmission in Cleveland just—just happens,
do you?”
In ’97 she came to St. Louis as a broadcast vice president, getting
the nod as number one at Channel 5 in March 1998.
Her experience and her style combine to make her a nearly ideal
GM, Foss says. She and Beall have been in some “tense and difficult
situations. I’ve been very impressed with how she keeps her cool.”
Beall is “very deliberate about decisions. She gathers a lot of
information, doesn’t tip her hand, takes it all in and comes back
with her decision,” Foss says.
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The
Nielsen May 2000
rating book placed
KSDK’s 10 p.m. news
broadcast number one
in the country based on the
proportion of the
25- to 54-year-old
viewers in the market.
“The morning show,
Today in St. Louis, was
also number one
nationally,” Beall beamed.
“These are really big
wins, not just for
Channel 5 but for the
whole St. Louis area.”
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“She seems
to have her arms around the whole product instead of just one
department,” Foss adds.
Beall
evinced her embrace when drawing an important but often blurred
distinction between sales and marketing. She points out that the
latter concerns itself with “more strategic planning and big picture
questions: ‘What’s the station going to be famous for?’”
The NBC affiliate’s moniker offers a hint about the answer here
in St. Louis: KSDK-NewsChannel 5.
“Our brand and focus is completely where the news comes first,”
Beall says. “We pride ourselves on taking the high road.”
Asked about any KSDK secondary niche, Beall says, there is none.
And by the way her newsies strive for detail, and the station’s
mantra is local, local, local.
Coincidentally, Foss’ first interview for a job in TV news was
with Beall’s father, then General Manager at WDAF, the NBC affiliate
in Kansas City. Foss says, “He said I had to finish college first.”
Mr. Beall’s influence on his own daughter had less to do with
television, though she grants he had the most impact on her career.
“I didn’t learn that much about the business from him,” she says,
“because I knew him primarily as my dad. But he taught me to focus
on solutions, to be respectful of people, and not to worry about
things you can’t control. Nothing to do with TV—just those lessons.”
Lessons pay dividends. “We understand she represents the ownership,”
Foss says, “but she treats people with such regard that you feel
she values you as a person as well as an employee.”
The other man in Beall’s life is Paul Trelstad, a Gannett sales
and advertising executive with responsibilities at all 22 Gannett
television stations. They met in New York City attending a Taft
Broadcasting training program.
Despite their corresponding careers, pillow talk is rarely shop
talk. “Mostly it’s what other people talk about,” Beall says,
“Our kids [boy, girl, boy; 9, 6, 4] and family.”
Moreover, Beall and Trelstad’s extracurriculars are the same as
their kids’: “When I’m not working, I’m with family,” she says.
“My personal life is baseball games and dance recitals.”
Looking to the future in her industry, Beall says the most interesting
emerging trend is the number of sources for information and the
ways to access it.
“That’s going to accelerate like crazy for the next two-to-five
years,” she says. “It’s wonderful for consumers because they’ll
go where they can get information they trust. It puts an even
higher responsibility on outlets like NewsChannel 5 to make sure
that we’re getting them information they can use.”
Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services
and community relations firm in St. Charles.
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