In A Shifting Medium, John Lippman Has Shown Remarkable Staying Power As Kiro-TV News Director

John Lippman is walking the dog. This gives him a chance to yank two chains at once.

One encircles the neck of his Great Dane, Tucker.

The other, figurative one wraps around his interviewer, trying to keep pace and take notes as Channel 7's news director strides down a long, gray tongue of sidewalk.

The huge canine strains at the leash like a black speedboat pulling a reluctant water skier.

As for chain No. 2, one could also wonder who is leading whom.

When Lippman adopted the Great Dane after it appeared on KIRO's noon news as the animal-shelter pet of the month, at least one cynic in the KIRO-TV newsroom questioned why. Was Lippman acting out of pity or cunning? Did he feel for the abandoned animal? Or did he figure that a public display of tenderness would help his image?

"Oh, my," says Lippman. "Wheels within wheels within wheels. You'll have to ask Tucker."

Either Lippman is the most Machiavellian figure in local TV news, or the most misunderstood. Certainly, he is one of the most complicated.

He has been called "slithery," "duplicitous," "the Prince of Darkness." He also has been described as uncomfortably shy, darkly funny, a caring husband and father.

On several points there appears to be no disagreement: The man is blazingly intelligent, fiercely competitive. And he has staying power.

His position carries the same degree of job security as, say, a major league baseball manager. The average news director lasts 2 1/2 years; Lippman hasn't budged from KIRO after almost 12.

He managed in that time to transform a news department from also-ran to market leader, with a flagship 5 p.m. newscast that for most of the 1980s attracted more viewers than the competition.

The battle among Seattle stations for news viewers is so intense that a fundamental rule historically has applied: given time, every winner will someday be forced to fight back to the top all over again. Now it's KIRO's turn. In the November and February ratings "sweeps," quarterly periods where viewership figures help local stations set their ad rates, Channel 7 finished third in the majority of news time periods.

As the ratings bottomed out, an internal KIRO survey crystallized criticism of Lippman's management style. Autocratic, uncommunicative and untrustworthy summed up the way a significant number of reporters, photographers, editors and producers felt about their boss.

Some of the best drama to come out of a television newsroom never makes the 5 o'clock report. Such was the staff meeting after February's dismal sweeps results, where Lippman faced his accusers. Among the group were journalists who felt that Lippman had toyed with them for years - when negotiating contracts, assigning work shifts, approving vacations.

KIRO hired a management consultant to work with Lippman, who admitted to the group that if they wanted to repeat Channel 7's former successes, he would need to mend his ways.

"It was like the Cultural Revolution," recalled KIRO reporter Mark Sauter, one of more than two dozen Lippman associates interviewed. "These Maoist criticism sessions. Imagine standing up in front of all these people. He took the heat. He took the embarrassment."

"I want to be the premier news director in the country," Lippman explains. "In 12 years I guess I've moved from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. I care about the people I work with, the community. I want to do the best I can. One by one, I want to win people over to that point of view. Not by selling, but by showing."

It may be the most daunting challenge in a remarkable career.

And it raises several questions: How much can a 41-year-old person remake himself? Would the most hard-bitten critics in a roomful of paid skeptics even appreciate the change? And why should anyone who doesn't have to work for Lippman care?

To answer the last question first: because TV news not only provides a local station with its primary source of revenue, but also provides most people with their primary source of information. And the quality of that information can be directly related to the temperament of the TV news director.

"Character does begin to reflect in what people (in the newsroom) feel about what they do, and how hard they will strive to do their job well," said one KIRO veteran.

"One problem at KIRO is virtually no one has been willing to push in an effort to do it well. I think that's directly related to John and the way he has treated people from A to Z. I think that absolutely caught up to him."

In a dozen years, the face of local TV news has changed far more than that of the still-boyish Lippman.

Videotape, minicams, portable microwave transmitters - Lippman turned KIRO News around, in part, by deploying the first wave of high-tech hardware. KOMO and KING had little choice but to follow KIRO into the age of electronic news gathering (ENG).

Lippman also knew how to direct his staff to use the new tools to mold a newscast that viewers would find appealing.

"In the Northwest he was the first news director of his type," said Kevin Baird, a former KIRO reporter who now works for KING-TV. "He was the first to look at stories, sidebars - a whole greater than the individual parts. He was viewer-friendly."

Too, there was Lippman's unabashed, almost P.T. Barnum-like sense of showmanship when it came to promoting KIRO News.

KIRO bought the first TV news helicopter in Seattle in 1980, and talked up "Chopper 7" so effectively that it seemed to acquire a personality of its own. Lippman's office resembles a shrine to the whirlybird: a framed photo of Chopper 7 hangs behind his desk; several local newspaper cartoons featuring the copter adorn another wall; a wire helicopter sculpture perches on an end table landing pad.

There have also been some not-so-glorious excesses under Lippman. The leased Lear jet that gave the KIRO air force a new weapon in 1984 but, it turned out, little practical advantage (the station grounded it after only one mission). The $100,000 cash reward offer the same year for any tip that would lead to the conviction of the Green River Killer. The 1986 story on a "person of interest" in the case, with a script hastily rewritten by Lippman to punch up the drama, that helped land KIRO in a defamation lawsuit the station settled out of court for $10,000.

When Lippman took over as KIRO news director at age 29, he managed a small staff and often doubled as a reporter. He even lugged an old Bell and Howell film camera in his car trunk for years, just in case.

The newsroom expanded to nearly 100 people, including an executive producer to exercise day-to-day control over all the newscasts. Lippman's suits became darker, his tasks more managerial: approving budgets, meeting with other department heads and board members, attending civic functions.

Lippman still might swoop down as deadline approached, though, and shake up individual stories or entire shows.

Inside the KIRO newsroom they had a name for it: wind shear.

And a name for him: the Prince of Darkness.

"It was just one of those little behind-your-back kind of things," recalls one staff member. "It wasn't meant as anything satanic. When he came in it was described as a pall falling over the newsroom."

About the same time, the newsroom installed its Newstar computer system. Someone programmed it so that when Lippman came into view, a few keystrokes could send the same message flashing on each screen: PADRONE ALERT, with a skull and crossbones.

Lippman tries to keep his hands in his pockets more these days, though he still likes to relax by pounding out some copy, or editing tape.

"It's like candy," Lippman says.

He is a news junkie and a workaholic, dictating reams of memos from behind the wheel of his Audi 5000 or, sometimes, in the middle of the night from his Broadmoor home. He watches TV news when vacationing overseas. When he travels domestically, he makes a point of visiting the local CBS affiliate and trolling for new ideas to apply in his own newsroom. He sets annual goals for himself at work and in his marriage.

When asked for a list of his closest friends, Lippman falters. There is his family, he says: wife Julie Neff, who directs the Center for Writing and Learning at the University of Puget Sound; her daughter, 19, and son, 16, by another marriage; and Lippman's daughter, 13, by his previous marriage. Others: a news director in San Diego; a neighbor, a KIRO producer.

"It amazed me how good he was with his family but not with other people in his office," said one associate who saw both sides of Lippman. "He wasn't comfortable being a compassionate person with many people very often."

Nor is Lippman socially gregarious. He sends follow-up notes to power brokers he meets at CityClub lunches with the zealous attention of an MBA student. But at a wedding he might hover near one familiar face rather than mingle with strangers. At his own wedding, he asked his boss, KIRO president Ken Hatch, to stand as best man.

Journalism may be one of last professions where bosses-to-be enter the field with no particular interest in managing people. So it was with Lippman.

In the affluent Chicago suburb of Glencoe where he grew up, the son of a metal fabricating company owner, Lippman twisted dials at his high school's 10-watt radio station, and covered school board meetings for a nearby commercial station.

He enrolled at Dartmouth College largely because of the Ivy League school's impressive radio station.

Lippman in his senior year ran the news department and created and hosted a daily call-in talk show.

"He was doing that when there really wasn't much in the way of talk radio," recalls the station's general manager, classmate John Marshall, now an environmental and utilities lawyer in Vermont. "He was innovative. He loved the business. John wasn't someone to organize a team and say, `OK, you do that and I'll do this.' He did things on his own."

The experience paid off when King Broadcasting offered Lippman a job as a radio reporter. He picked up his diploma on a Saturday in the early summer of 1971, drove west and started work in Seattle on Monday.

About a year later, Lippman made the transition from telling to showing.

His actions as a reporter on two stories at KING-TV have followed him to this day. Colleagues who question Lippman's honesty will still dredge them up - and often embellish them with apocryphal detail - in the same way psychobiographers might dwell on a despot's childhood.

One incident: an interview with Richard Nixon's brother. Another Channel 5 reporter tracked down the brother, who was living in Everett, and interviewed him as the threat of impeachment was about to drag the president out of the White House.

NBC wanted the interview for its national newscast, but the reporter balked at re-editing the piece. Lippman stepped in after the reporter left for the day, cut the story and re-recorded the narration - in his own voice - and shipped it to NBC.

Lippman says it was "something that's done a lot." Several KING colleagues remain incredulous.

"You could do a lot of things to get a story," said Andy Reynolds, a former KING reporter now with the city parks department. "But to take someone else's story was considered the height of immorality."

Incident No. 2: The disappearance of a 4-year-old Seattle girl, Heidi Peterson, riveted the attention of the city in 1974. The case drew in clairvoyants, a group of 50 local mothers, and the FBI.

Searchers eventually discovered the girl's body on a nearby embankment. During the search, Lippman and a cameraman visited the Peterson home to update the story. The girl's mother recalls returning to the room to find Lippman looking at personal belongings on the family's roll-top desk; the mother, incensed, wrote a letter to KING's owner, demanding that Lippman never again be sent to the house.

"I wouldn't . . . I mean I . . . she . . . I'm inarticulate about it," stammers Lippman when the story is recounted to him. "No one's ever mentioned that to me. I don't recall doing it. 1974 is now 18 years ago. I'm an aggressive reporter, but there is a line . . . and I don't believe I've ever . . ."

He pauses to consider why these two stories, and others that appear to have far fewer factual roots, survive.

"Some people will never see anything but painting me as a villain for whatever personal reason that they have. I'm sorry they need that for their belief system."

Lippman left KING in 1976 and landed at Channel 11, where he built a news department from scratch. As a reporter he would always have been someone else's puppet; he wanted to pull the strings.

"I learned some good things," he recalls. "Like never fire a guy at lunch before the salad."

When Channel 11 fired Lippman in 1979 - Lippman says he got sacked because of disagreements over decisions being made by the station's new general manager - KIRO gave him a new chance.

Pre-Lippman, KIRO's afternoon newscast regularly lost to "Leave It to Beaver" reruns, one staffer recalls. Lippman sent Channel 7 surging and became one of the hottest news directors around, turning down prospective suitors that included the CBS-owned-and-operated affiliate in Chicago, he says.

KING and KOMO "were very smug," recalled Lippman, who helped turn Seattle into one of the most closely contested news markets in the country, which it remains. "They sniffed at us for covering garbage fires at Wendy's. We did cover a garbage fire at Wendy's. Live. It wasn't a big deal, but people wanted to see it."

From trash fires to the eruption of Mount St. Helens, KIRO became more aggressive, more immediate.

Meanwhile, Lippman seemed to savor the juice of competition. His tactics of choice included some moves plotted to help KIRO by weakening or pestering the competition: hiring anchor Aaron Brown from KING in 1986; raising legal objections at the eleventh hour last fall when KING resumed using the "Top Story" slogan; offering a $5 bounty for rumors about KOMO and KING during last February's sweeps, an offer Lippman insists was made tongue-in-cheek.

Feature reporter Greg Palmer, then at KING, almost won a local Emmy for his piece on the $5 reward offer.

"I thought that was very funny," says Lippman's stepson, padding into the family kitchen mid-interview in T-shirt and shorts. The dog walk completed, Lippman jabs a fork at a salad as his wife fixes bean dip for a party they will host the next night for the newsroom staff.

"Yeah, but who had the last laugh?" retorts a grinning Lippman, who hired Palmer earlier this year, after KING fired him. "Who's working for whom?"

"I think people misunderstand John," says his wife. "But I have my own work life. I'm not hanging on whether someone hates John. It'd make me crazy."

The Palmer hire was just one of many moves to reposition Channel 7 for its run on KING-TV, which is now the market's overall news ratings leader. Since February, Lippman has spent an additional $1.6 million above the planned capital budget to buy a satellite truck and other gear that brought KIRO's hardware back up to par with that of KING and KOMO. Channel 7 built a new set, designed new graphics, composed new theme music.

The station also is emphasizing its revived special-assignment team, an investigative unit led by Sauter, formerly KIRO's defense reporter, whose early reports included an examination of the difficulty of removing incompetent public school teachers, and the existence of a local "sex club." New TV ads promise KIRO will deliver stories that viewers won't find on the competition's newscasts. The changes, Lippman acknowledges, are relatively subtle.

"I wake up worrying . . . Is there no more quick fix?" Lippman says. "A lot of the changes in 1979 and '80 were incremental. I think there are a lot of new changes to be made. I may not have figured out what they are."

He appears to be on the right track, though. In the recently completed May sweeps, KIRO improved its ratings relative to the competition at both 5 and 11 p.m. Morale also looks to be on the upswing.

Lippman is meddling less, insiders say, making himself more available for drop-in chats in his office, more often keeping his hands off vacation schedules and videotape editing machines.

The most resolute cynics, predictably, raise the question of the old dog and new tricks.

"I want people to like me, but some people don't," Lippman says. "What I want to eliminate are the times my behavior, or the organization's behavior, has contributed to that.

"I want to be unpopular on my merits."