Q+A with Jason DeRusha

At this point, every office is familiar with “Twitter Guy.” You know, the dude who looks weird when his grill isn’t reflecting the pale blue glow of his overheated 3G. Well, somehow, local news correspondent Jason DeRusha has built a bona fide career on being Twitter Guy. He has a blog on WCCO.com, and his nightly two-minute segment at ten o’clock, “Good Question,” actually takes this bottom-up, hive mind, social media stuff seriously.

In fact, DeRusha believes the main reason people like “Good Question” is because it’s an alternative to the traditional, authoritarian, know-it-all model of network news handed down by our forefathers (i.e., Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel). “TV news always starts with the answers,” DeRusha says. But Jason is the Twitter Guy, which means he starts with a question and tries to figure it out by asking all his friends. Look, I know some of you don’t really know what “twitter” is, and may think it sounds vaguely perverse, maybe even threatening to the general welfare. But trust me, here’s the thing with people who are really into social media: Like Jason, they’re usually nice.

They have to be, right? Basically, they’re trying to connect to people all the time. Bottom line, Jason DeRusha just wants to be liked—that’s why he asks people to send him good questions, and that’s why he returns seventy-five e-mails a day.

A thirty-four-year-old Maple Groveite with a wife and two kids, he grew up a good Catholic, the oldest of four, in another suburb, Des Plaines, Illinois. He was a baby-faced boy of eight when his dad bought him his first computer, a Texas Instruments 99-4A. “My neighbor across the street had a Commodore 64,” he remembers. “If I wanted to play Frogger, I had to go across the street to Irene Erickson’s house.”

Thank God the owner of that Commodore 64 was a girl.
Yes. All my friends were girls growing up. In my neighborhood, they were all girls, so they were all my friends. And sadly, this has been the paradigm for the rest of my life as a young man. I was a good friend.

Jeez. When did you lose your virginity?
I lost it to my wife.

What?!
Yeah. I know. How about that.

To your wife? How old were you?
I’m not sure. Twenty-one or twenty-two.

You were in college?
We were engaged. So I was out of college. I’m a year older than her.

Wow. I guess that overshare was kind of my fault. Uh, so is "Good Question" the most rewarding gig you’ve had in your career?
Yeah.

And you’ve been doing it for how long?
Since January 2008. Ben Tracy was doing it before me. When Ben started doing "Good Question", his goal was to get to the network, and he did it.

Do you have a goal?
What I want to do doesn’t exist on local TV right now.

What do you mean?
I haven’t totally figured out exactly what I want to do.

Is it on the penumbra of your consciousness?
I think about it a lot. To me, the biggest problem we have with television news is that we’re a linear broadcast. There’s a whole generation of people who use RSS feeds and blogs and Facebook. You build your own thing! On the local news, if you want to see my story at ten minutes after ten, you have to sit through ten minutes that you might not care about.

I haven’t watched local TV news since . . . maybe since Colleen Needles was in her prime?
You didn’t watch at all on the day the bridge collapsed? C’mon.

Nope. I followed it all online.
Wow.

I do read your blog, bro.
Well, we are of a generation that expects important news stories to come to us. That’s a problem when you do a nightly half-hour of two people sitting at a desk telling you what the news is. We are pretty good on TV at getting our viewers to go to the web—we’re not very good at getting people on the web to come to the TV. And I’m not clear on how to complete the loop. I’ve been experimenting with posting my good questions on my blog and inviting people to answer them, to share their thoughts and help me tell the story before it goes on TV. The old model is to put stuff up after it was on TV and get comments on it. But to me, that’s no good—I need people’s help before I do the story on the air.

I asked for “good questions for Jason DeRusha” on my Twitter account, and the best these people could come up with was “boxers or briefs?” Thanks, social media.
(Laughs.) That’s amazing. The whole concept of "Good Question" is that the questions come from the viewers. Why shouldn’t the answers come from the viewers? How arrogant to believe that, in an eight-hour day, I can find the best answers alone. I can’t. So we’ve been throwing it out there. And I believe that despite all of the change and the growth of the Internet, people still like to see themselves on the news.

Right. That’s the only time I tune in to the local news—when I’m on.
Exactly. Nothing gets the Internet or the blog world going nuts like seeing themselves on the news! So I thought, alright, if I can get people to contribute to my stories online—whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or my blog—and if I start putting those people in my stories, you can get them to answer the questions, and then you put them on TV helping you answer the question, that’s going to complete the loop. That was the idea when they came up with it. They said, "Look, we know we’re going to give up some of the daily news events, we’re going to lose some of that in exchange for saying, 'every night we’re going to do a story that nobody else in town will touch.'" We did a story on whether Barack Obama really is the first black president. Is he black? The biracial black thing. Which was pretty interesting. I joked that it was the most diverse story that WCCO ever put on the air. We talked to three different women of color, two were bi-racial, and one was African American. And we got three different opinions; it was a fascinating piece on race.

Where did you find them—Nicollet Mall?
I’ve tried very hard—with no disrespect to network news reporter Ben Tracy—to get "Good Question" off the Mall a little bit. I will say that it’s hard to crank out five stories a week that you start from scratch every day. I think that as a general news reporter, which I was before, I did five stories a week. Which was no problem. Three of those five days, you’re sent out to something that’s happening. It’s not that hard to show up somewhere, find out what’s going on—we have a fire, we have a killing—and try to find a different look at it. You have a starting point, you know? With this, every day you’re starting from scratch. You have nothing but the seventy-five e-mails I get every day with questions from people.

Was that exciting showing up at a crime scene and figuring that out? Or did it become rote?
I liked what I was doing. Yeah, I mean, I did it for almost ten years across three markets. My first market was Davenport, Iowa. When I was in college, I was a summer intern in Rockford, Illinois. I had some crazy internships. I interned at ABC in New York. I had two internships—classic overachiever—I interned at Prime Time Live and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings at the same time. Which was great. But then I went from an intern at the highest echelon of news to Rockford, Illinois, where we were sharing computers in a tiny newsroom. I loved both places. When I went to New York, I thought I was going to be with the best and brightest minds of my generation, but instead, I was interning alongside the daughter of the executive producer and all her sorority sisters. Fantastic. But it was pretty cool to see news at the network level and the care they took with every shot they put in a story, knowing that it was going out to the entire nation. And to follow that up in a show where after two days as an intern, they put me on the air doing the lead story at six! It was great. They sent me out on my third day and said, “Well, if you think that this is worth doing, we should run it as a full story.” It was like, you could be sending me out to cover paint dry, and it’s going to be a full story. So I don’t usually count Rockford as a stop, but that is where I got my start.

Exactly how long have you been wasting all this time on the Internet at work?
The other day I found a comment I made on mnspeak in 2005. So I’ve been wasting time on mnspeak for upwards of three years. But how is it that no other local television reporter, anchor, or weatherperson has started doing this? No one! It blows my mind. It’s because people are scared to even remotely express an opinion about anything—even something as inane as their favorite restaurant. They think they’re going to get in trouble; I don’t care if I get in trouble. As long as you do good work, you can do that stuff.

Aren’t we supposed to be making trouble? Provoking thought? Being interesting?
I didn’t even think, "I better clear this with the boss." I’m home in the morning. I work in the night. This seems funny. I’ll join in this conversation. I mean, I don’t take a smoke break during my day. Now, I was lucky that my managers at the time, when they found out, they were cool with it.

What did they say?
At first, no one said anything. When I started blogging, they were making fun of it. Like we’d be in a news meeting, and someone would say something funny, and they’d say, “What, are you going to put that on your blog?! HAR, HAR, HAR.” I would be like, "These guys really don’t get it."

So scared, right?
Absolutely. They were very afraid. To me, I spend my day calling other people and asking them to stop their entire existence and talk to me. And I’m going to ask them questions that might make them uncomfortable.

It’s a great gig.
But then if some one asks me a question, I’m supposed to be like, “Well, you have to go to the P.R. department.” Screw that. I’m going to answer your question. I treat other media the same way I treat the viewers—if you ask me a question, I’m going to answer it. Unless I really can’t—and then I’m going to tell you specifically why I can’t. This is why I end up quoted in articles. It’s because I’ll answer your question. I don’t care.

You got this Q&A because Kerri Miller was on vacation.
I know. I’m about a D-List celebrity here. I went to the local magazine awards, and I told the crowd, “I’m here for one reason: It is to get on the cover of one of your magazines.” I’ll be on the cover of Corn & Soybean Digest because I love corn and soybeans. I would love to be on the cover of Drink Magazine. Did you know there’s a Drink Magazine? A Beef Magazine? Hey, I like beef.

Do you think an actual good question can be answered in two minutes?
No. My goal is to get people two or three nuggets of concrete information where they can feel like they learned something. If I really hit it on the head, I’ll provoke them to talk about it with their spouse or co-worker or whatever. Maybe even Wiki it, Google it, or YouTube it.

TV will always have a depth problem. But hypothetically, the Internet doesn’t have either a time or a space problem.
I don’t know that anyone pays attention to this, but if you were to read my web script for my "Good Question" segment, seven times out of ten, the web script has waaay more information and depth and voices and sources than my television story does. Not a lot of my colleagues are doing this yet—most people are just transcribing their TV story. But I find out so much more information in the course of producing two minutes that I put it on the web. The issue is time—because we’re cutting back staff, because advertisers aren’t paying as much. But to me, the future is this: We don’t need four television stations putting essentially the same program at the same time with different anchor people. It’s ridiculous. What it tells you is that people are making a lot of money. So any whining you hear about television news falling apart and being a disaster, the push back is, “Why don’t you put sumpin’ else on at ten o’clock?” Nobody’s doing that. In fact FOX is adding content. Which tells you it’s cheap to produce, and people still watch it. And advertisers want to be by it because it’s safe, and they get it.

Here’s my good question for Jason DeRusha: when does self-deprecation cross over into self-loathing?
(laughs) I’m somebody who can be silly, mysterious, funny, and introspective. Like almost everyone I know. So why is TV news like [adopts stentorian anchor voice], “We are so serious, and we know everything about everything.”

It’s the daddy model from the '50s.
That’s exactly what it is. The truth is, we don’t know everything about everything. The truth is that a reporter has not been on the scene all day following the story.

So at this point, everybody, or at least the Facebook generation, suspects you’re bullshitting them.
Yes! No one believes us anymore! To me, our newsroom is a pretty interesting place. You’ve got Pat Kessler, who’s one of the smartest guys about politics that I’ve ever met. He’s one of the smartest guys, period. You have Esme Murphy.

Esme is my girl.
She was all over Petters, all over Jenkins. So you wouldn’t watch a show where Kessler and Esme are telling you the straight deal?

If they were giving Kessler twenty minutes and Esme twenty minutes and you three minutes . . . I might tune in.
A couple years ago, I proposed redoing the ten o’clock news by starting off with four minutes of quick "this is what happened today, here’s the weather, and then, getting into it." Something more in-depth, more interesting, more provocative. I think there’s gotta be some hybrid of what Keith Obermann is doing with The Daily Show with the local news. I only have control over my little two minutes, but last night, we did a story on digital television, we interviewed a guy named Don Johnson ,and we stopped the story in the middle of it to play the theme from Miami Vice. Because how do you do a story with Don Johnson and not make that joke?

Sometimes you can’t avoid making the most obvious joke possible.
So you deliver it. The people deserve it.

Are you a frustrated standup? Why are you trying to make us laugh?
Because TV news is so serious. And life isn’t that serious. Everyone thinks that we are like cardboard cutouts of ourselves. People get it. Viewers get it. They are fine with you being funny when it’s time to be funny. And they also expect that when it’s time to be serious, you can be serious. And I think if you can have fun with this stuff, the same way people do at a bar when they’re talking about stories on the news, I think people will respect us more. I know it sounds counterintuitive.

No, I agree with you.
Fox News Channel has been very successful with this idea that Roger Aisles talked about a long time ago. Which is, “We take the news seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously.” I think people relate to that.

You sound like Obama talking about Reagan now.
I don’t want to hold up Roger Aisles as My Guy, but that’s what I do every day. In the middle of a story, I can stop and tell a Don Johnson joke. Or if I’m doing a story on mosquitos and a mosquito lands on my interview subject’s head and I smack it, it goes in the story. It’s like all this interesting stuff that we usually edit out because it’s not “part of the story.” But I have a couple extra seconds compared to a regular story, and I use it.

This seems to play into people’s thirst for “authenticity.” Like how they made the guac in front of us just now. Or even if it’s forced authenticity—like hearing computer created scratchy record sounds on a hip-hop CD.
There’s something interesting about fake authenticity. But you know what? For TV news, fake authenticity is a step in the right direction! Faking it is at least getting close to being there. If you watch my stuff on TV and then you meet me in real life, it’s pretty much the same bit, without the swearing.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About DeRusha Only television news reporter in history to lose fifty pounds and not do a sweeps week story on it. Avid collector of local glass sculpture, including a Dale Chihuly original. One of ten students in his class to earn a full academic scholarship to Marquette. Used to referee high school basketball games in Illinois. “I’m really fast at running backwards,” he says. “So I have that going for me.” Insanely obsessed with game shows. His childhood dream was to host The Price is Right.