Maria Reitan, a renowned PR executive and founder of Topsail Strategies, joins Mary, Alex, and Mark to discuss her previous role leading TV newsrooms in major markets. She shares how the pressure to win in the ratings shapes the stories that make it to air, offering a behind-the-scenes look at broadcast journalism.

If you can’t listen, here is the recap!

Mary: Well, Maria is a longtime friend and a former journalism news manager. We’re excited to introduce her now. Maria, we are so honored to have you on our podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Maria: Oh my gosh, I’m so thrilled to be on with these ladies today. And of course, Mark. It’s good to be back on a podcast. I had my own podcast for 15 years, so it’s a little weird being on this side of the mic, I’ll be honest. But yes, Mary, you already mentioned my background a bit. I spent 15 years in television news, running newsrooms all over the country. You can probably hear a southern accent, I’m from North Carolina, and I was at stations in both Carolinas. Then I went to Miami, then Chicago, and from there I went to Louisville, Kentucky as a news director, before ending my career in news at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, St. Paul.

I made the leap into PR and advertising with a national firm here in the Twin Cities, where I stayed for a decade, which felt like eons compared to TV news, where you move every two to four years to grow your career. I know you’re familiar with that, Mary. It was at WCCO that I made the brilliant choice of hiring you, and I’ve never regretted it. After 10 years at Carmichael Lynch, I went to a boutique firm as president and chief strategy officer, and I realized, “I could do this myself.” So I launched Topsail Strategies nine years ago, and we’ll be celebrating 10 years next year. I focus on public relations, but also work in the paid, owned, shared, and earned spaces, meaning I help clients with social media and advertising. That’s the quick version.

Mary: Wow.

Alexane: Maria, can I ask what drove you to PR? Going from news is quite a big change.

Maria: Oh, Alex, great question. So, I didn’t want to be an alcoholic and divorced before 40. I gave myself until age 40 to get the heck out of it because I’d seen so many career news directors become chained to their careers. You make a certain amount of money and feel like you can’t do anything else. You have no idea what else you could possibly do but be in news. And you’re forced to move every two to four years from city to city. It’s a very nomadic lifestyle, very hard on relationships, and it’s difficult to have a family. I’ve always planned my career thoughtfully. When I was in Louisville as a news director, I told my husband, after moving him, I think, five times by then, that I didn’t want to keep moving once our daughter, who was 18 months old at the time, got to elementary school. I didn’t want her constantly readjusting. So I said we had one more move left, and it needed to be near family, because we’d never lived near family. That could have been Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta, or the Twin Cities. The job in the Twin Cities opened up first, and it’s a fabulous place to raise kids. It has one of the best public school systems in the U.S. and a very outdoorsy, healthy community. So I took the job and promised my husband I wouldn’t move him again, and that I’d get out of news within five years, because I didn’t want to end up an alcoholic or divorced. And I’m not joking—it’s the truth!

And it took me a year, Alex, to decide what I wanted to do. If I could do anything after news, I talked to 200 people across that year and determined that an agency would be the best fit for me because it’s fast-paced, and news is extremely fast-paced. I did not want to be bored, and I felt like I could make an immediate impact with the skills I already had. So that’s why I made the choice. I have since developed a coaching business called Jump Team, where I help people make career pivots and are able to see the possibilities of transferring the skills they have today into a new career—not in a year and 200 people, but in a matter of months. Anyway, long answer to your short question, but that’s the why and the how.

Mary: So I have a question for you. I happen to know about the time you spent at WCCO. You went through the wringer there. There were so many challenges and the pressures that these corporations put on newsrooms to deliver a profit. Can you tell us how that affects news decision-making and the kinds of stories that you had your reporters and producers run?

Maria: Absolutely. I think what most people don’t understand, if they’re not in news, is that news is a business. At the end of the day, you have to make a profit. And the way that profits are made is that you create your own content. If you look at the 24-hour spectrum on any given day, you have news and then you have programming, right? It’s expensive to purchase programming that’s not developed by your own network. So oftentimes, what happens is more news product is generated. What was happening is more news product was generated with not more people added to the news team to fill the hole, we called it, the news hole on any given day. And yet, you had to deliver eyeballs, people, and the 18 to 55 demographic, which was the crème de la crème people that you wanted watching your newscast. You had to have a lot of them watching day in and day out. Every day, we would get a report that showed us how many people watched every one of our newscasts. Not only how many of them watched, but when they bailed out of the newscast. You would know what content was resonating, what content was not, and then you had to develop more of the content that was resonating, right? You leaned into that content that seemed to be more sticky than the content that wasn’t.

However, you had to do it with fewer people in a larger news hole. So what that meant was you were doing what I call “if it bleeds, it leads” type of news. In order to cover the news of the day, it’s a quick in and out. You send a crew, they scattershot the story, they come back, they put it on the air. It repeats at noon, five, six, ten, maybe the following morning, right? It becomes much more of an investment to have someone come off the street, not cover news of the day, but spend two months doing investigative work that then turns around and runs instead of maybe a minute 25, like a “bleed it leads,” it runs three to five minutes. And that’s where real news happens, unfortunately, but that’s an investment of time, money, and people to do that kind of journalism. It’s expensive.

If you have fewer people to cover that larger news hole, and what you’re finding is that your viewers aren’t sticking around to watch that three to five-minute investigative piece. They’re watching what happened in the first block of the show, which is the news of the day, and then they’re out. Then what do you think is going to get covered? You’re going to do more of what I call cheap and easy coverage. The other thing that’s challenging is you’re only as good as your last newscast. When you’re getting those overnights, and that’s what they were at the time, you get up the next day, and you would see how you performed the previous day. If you didn’t perform well, you had to go in and explain to your station manager why you didn’t perform well. And then you had to try to fix that that day. You had to watch for trends in viewership to try to fix things over a certain time horizon.

There were particular months of the year that were hypercritical for you to perform well. February, May, and November are what’s called sweeps months. That’s when you’re putting on your most amazing coverage. Those three to five-minute pieces you’re promoting—they’re sexy, they’re interesting, and you hope that jump-starts your numbers. You live and die by May and November sweeps, especially. If you did not have a good sweeps month, forget it, because sales would always price their commercial time by your sweeps month. If you did not do well, they could not sell the news for as much as they wanted. If they could not sell the news for as much as they wanted, guess what? I was told I had to lay off people, or I had to fire people, or I had to find a way to make up that income. That’s the way it works, people, and it’s super stressful. You laughed before about divorced and alcoholic, but you might see where people could turn to the bottle.

Alex: I actually have a question because you could see all the viewership and you know, how well your content was doing. Do you have any experience with pet content? Do you remember if the pet content was doing really good, or did it depend on the story? But, you know, because our listeners are mostly in the pet industry, I was wondering if you had any insights on that.

Maria: Oh, Alex, yes. So I used to say if I could put people, pets, and weather in a story, it was a home run. If it were bad weather, people always tuned in for bad weather. So, you know, I would pray for the bad weather day, right? And if it were anything to do with a pet, that was always big, or animals in general. And then children, children were always big as well.

I’m going to give you a little story that I swear people in Chicago thought I was insane. I know they thought I was insane, but I was coming from Chicago. I was at WMAQ as Managing Editor, which meant that I was in charge of what the reporters covered in Chicago at that station. I had just been there a few days. And I forget who was in town, it might have been the president in town. And it was the five o’clock show. At the time on the five o’clock show, or was it the four o’clock show? I can’t remember. But mainly women were watching, okay? You had to understand who your target audience was.

I didn’t think that women gave two you-know-whats about the president being in town when there wasn’t really a lot to talk about. And yet we had a puppy mill story that was breaking. And I told them that we needed to lead with the puppy mill story because people cared more about dogs than they did the president. I think we won that show. But Chicago is a big day, big journalism town. And of course, they thought we would lead with the president. I think they hated me from that day forward. I was not popular in Chicago because I pushed back on their preconceived notion of what was news. But I really was leaning into what I thought the viewer cared about, not what we thought we should cover.

Remember, this is a business. And we would get to the president. It wasn’t like we were not following the presidency. But I just knew they were interested in that puppy mill story. So anyway, if that tells you anything about the value and the interest in pets specifically.

Mary: Yeah, and I’ve heard, so I’m based here in the Minneapolis area as well. And I had heard from some of the stations that their viewership increases by 20% when they air any kind of an animal story. So that kind of ties in. How would you suggest to animal rescues and for-profit pet companies, how would you suggest that they pitch to TV stations? Is there any kind of a, you know, some tidbits of advice you can give?

Maria: Absolutely. Well, one, I would say hire Whisker Media. That’s what I would say. You silly people. If you haven’t already become a client of Whisker Media, you should do that first. And then Mary and Alex will know exactly how to pitch your product. But should you not do that for some bizarre reason, then I’m going to say that what you need to think about is what does your product deliver? What’s the impact that it makes? What’s the end result that makes your client’s lives or their pet’s lives better, safer, more healthy? What are you doing that’s unique, different, never before seen, or affects a ton of people? That’s what news cares about. They care about the unique, the different, the new, the impact, the high number of people that it has the ability to help. And if you can prove that demonstrative difference, that is going to be key. The other thing that I always say is, it is typically a product, and that could feel very salesy, very advertising, and there’s a natural inclination not to cover that in news. So I always look for a way to tether that to a macro trend, something that is trending, that is having a moment in news that is unlocked. For example, I know July 4th just happened. There are all kinds of products out there to help calm and quiet pets who are fearful of fireworks and big noises. So if there’s a holiday or a seasonality to the product, or a trend that you can tie your product to, you have a better chance of getting coverage as well.

If you’ve got someone who’s a third-party expert, who’s very well known or very, very credible, I’m not talking about some B or C, D level celebrity, but they authentically can bring value coming alongside your product. They become an endorser of the product and they can add legitimacy just by the very nature of who they are and the expertise that they bring. And I always look for that. If you’re an NGO, you’re a non-profit rather than a product manufacturer, you know, obviously you have a mission, and you need to lean into that mission, and you need to tie that mission to that bigger story. So if you’re a cat rescue, for example, why are you in the cat rescue business? Why are there a lot of cats to rescue? Are you having a hard time finding homes? What’s your challenge? What’s your pain point? And being able to talk about that so that the station knows that there’s a problem that maybe their coverage could help solve. So, you know, you lean into your mission, you lean into your pain points, and perhaps how the listener, viewer, reader could help if they only knew about it. You know, that’s part of what a news station is there to do, to help solve problems. So those would be my recommendations.