Q+A with Jason DeRusha

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.