Q+A with Jason DeRusha

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.