Who is Jason DeRusha and why is he suddenly everywhere?

“I’m real big in the clown community,” Jason DeRusha says after exchanging hellos with Yo-Yo, a middle-aged man on an orange moped wearing a purple wig, chalk white makeup, and a red ball wedged onto his nose. “We did a Good Question on clowns once: ‘Why are clowns so creepy?’ Yo-Yo was the only one who would meet with me. Very brave.”

We’re on Robert Street in West St. Paul for the West St. Paul Days Parade. DeRusha was named the grand marshal this year (KARE 11’s Eric Perkins did it last year, evidently.), and a couple of people have already approached WCCO’s “Good Question Guy” to shake his hand or heckle him. (He hears “Hey, Jason, I have a good question!” several times a day.) 

DeRusha rubs elbows with the West St. Paul town elders on the way to the back of the late-model Trans Am on which he will ride out the parade. Everybody loves a television reporter here. A woman presents him with his grand marshal sash, which he slips over his sky-blue Channel 4 polo shirt and dutifully models so that I can send an embarrassing iPhone candid out on Twitter (later, he’ll use the same shot to make fun of himself on Facebook). He’s worried that maybe he didn’t bring enough candy—he stopped and bought a giant bag at Costco in Maple Grove on the way over—but when he clambers onto the back of the Trans Am, he notices the driver has brought an extra five or six bags. By the end of the route, we’ll have thrown it all to spectators. 

DeRusha, 35, says that he does about four to six public appearances a month. “I tell my wife, Alyssa, that I do four,” he says. “But it’s probably closer to six.” 

In the last week he emceed a fundraiser for the Edina YMCA and cracked a few jokes onstage at the Pantages Theatre during the MinnRoast fundraiser for the online news site minnpost.com. He says he “wants to be out there” as much as he can, and he doesn’t even sound that defensive when he gives me his reasons: He loves the spotlight and loves performing for people. He says there are practical concerns, too: He wants to maintain the popularity of WCCO-TV’s Good Question segment, and he swears he gets stories out of it. “Part of journalism is just knowing people,” he says. “Some day, when I am not doing Good Question, maybe I’m doing investigation or anchoring or whatever, I should be able to have the phone number of anybody I need to have the phone number to.” 

For that matter, DeRusha’s not even 100 percent sure that television news is his ultimate trajectory. This spring, he started writing a suburban dining column and blogging about food for Minnesota Monthly. “Andrew Zimmern told me to go ahead and give it a shot. He said, ‘You never know when the next fun gig will become the next great career.’ ” 

DeRusha is known as the Internet savant of local television news. This is repeated enough that it’s sort of annoying—just because he blogs in multiple venues, participates in the comment sections on other local blogs, and has a webcam set up at his desk, he’s the Internet Guy? He senses my annoyance. 

“I feel like [my colleagues] think of me as some kind of reporter from 2050,” he says. And while this has helped him in some ways, it’s a brand most of his peers aren’t comfortable with. 

“The media is afraid of interacting with the public in a way that everybody else is already doing,” DeRusha says. In the staid world of local television news, the notion of openly, brazenly bringing yourself and your opinions to the public—believed to only have the potential to cost you credibility and viewers—well, it’s different. And as we all know, different is Minnesotan for disdained

DeRusha grew up the oldest of four in a Catholic family in Des Plaines, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. “I subscribe to birth order theory, and I have a lot of classic oldest child stuff going on,” he says. For instance, he admits to having “a healthy ego.” He was a momma’s boy by default: His mom stayed at home while his father worked, and although she taught him to read by the time he was three (“let’s not throw Mom under the bus here”), the two also watched a lot of daytime television together. “I loved game shows,” DeRusha says. He can remember each one of the shows and their plastic father-figure hosts: $ale of the Century with Jim Perry, The Price Is Right with Bob Barker, Super Password with Bert Convy, Press Your Luck with Peter Tomarken. “And then we got cable, so there were all the Canadian game shows on the USA Network,” he says. “I could watch Jackpot, I could watch Bumper Stumpers. Man, some of these were terrible shows!” 

But he liked two things about them: the fact that every once in a while a regular shlub would win, and that a subversive funnyman was in charge of the proceedings. “The good game show hosts weren’t total phonies,” he says. “Like Bill Cullen—a great game show host. He had this wry sarcasm to him. He did Hot Potato and he also did Joker’s Wild. And people would give a dumb answer and he would give a little look, you know, a little wink, a little sarcastic impression. He let you know he was in on the gag—that he knew that this is an artificial construct and he’s right there with you.” 

From a very young age, DeRusha felt the urge to perform. “I always knew I would work somewhere in the public forum,” he says. When he was little, his parents bought him a Mr. Microphone. “Mr. Microphone was a working microphone with a big antenna that came out of the bottom. You tuned your radio to 87.9 and then you could hear yourself through the radio.” He burned several of them out by the fourth grade. “I used to bring the microphone to school and during recess do live coverage.” 

Later it was glee club, as well as “every school play we ever did,” though his drama teacher discouraged him from using his game show host voice while narrating Our Town. (He credits this as a seminal lesson in broadcasting.) He started watching the real news in junior high, becoming fascinated with the Tiananmen Square uprising and a Nightline reporter who was on the scene describing what was happening via telephone. 

The only teen angst DeRusha dealt with away from TV land was his struggle with his weight—he was a fat kid. “I hid my weight pretty well, but I was probably 40 pounds heavier than I am now,” he remembers. “I always wore extra large. Always. I can remember wondering who got to wear small and medium.” And while most of his neighborhood friends were girls when he was little, by the time he reached high school, they were verboten. He was so self-conscious about his size and afraid of rejection that he refused to ask a girl out. “Later some of them told me, ‘I would have totally dated you!’ Well, thanks.” 

He consoled himself with straight As and then left Chicago to study broadcasting at Marquette University in Milwaukee. “They had an amazing college television station,” he recalls. And most importantly, he met his future wife, Alyssa, in a theology class. (“Evidently we weren’t paying attention in theology class.”) He met her as a virgin, and now they’ve been married 11 years and are parents of two boys, a five-year-old and a two-year-old. Alyssa graduated second in her class at Marquette (“She was offered big jobs in Chicago”) but has sacrificed her career for DeRusha’s, following him from TV jobs in Davenport to Milwaukee to Maple Grove. All this, despite the fact that DeRusha is certain she long ago grew weary of his shtick. 

Although DeRusha was never an athlete, he worked as an umpire while putting himself through his first internship as a television reporter. “I would file a story in Davenport just in time to leave the station early and drive back to Des Plaines to work as an umpire in an adult softball league just so I could afford the work clothes and the gas.” After a stint covering fires and chasing ambulances in Milwaukee, he’s been at WCCO for the last seven years, the last two as the Good Question reporter, taking over for Ben Tracy, another Marquette alum who left ’CCO to go to CBS in 2007. 

Scott Libin’s first major decision as news director was to choose Tracy’s replacement. He considered Good Question an important franchise because at 10:15, after the 15-minute blast of hard news, his viewers aren’t really deciding on where to flip, they’re deciding between off and on. “The biggest competition at that point is sleep,” Libin says. “So we need something that is promotable and differentiating. Something that you haven’t seen before.” Libin picked DeRusha, even though he was less of a writer and more of a personality than Tracy. DeRusha has made Good Question his own. 

In a format where the I-Team is ancient history and most news stories are 30 seconds or less, Good Question can be either substantial or entertaining, and often both. I did a ride-along with DeRusha and his colleague, photographer Joe Berglove, when the two were putting together a story on the Arizona immigration bill. Here’s what you can do with a story when you have three entire minutes to fill: DeRusha actually printed out the law at his desk, read it, then went to a downtown Minneapolis immigration lawyer to talk about its implications. It turned out to be a clever way to cut through the O’Reilly vs. Olbermann dynamic that has been epidemic in coverage of the new law. But then they did something even stranger for TV news, something you might see in a segment on The Daily Show: They interviewed a couple with a stroller on Nicollet Mall and asked for their newborn baby’s “papers.” This mix of high and low, of sticking to the facts while simultaneously indulging a penchant for comedy, can still confuse orthodox news viewers. 

Despite the fact that his heroes are more Letterman and Barker than Cronkite and Murrow, DeRusha does have a background in news—he covered the 35W bridge collapse before Good Question. But there does seem to be a persistent perception that he’s the goofball. He’s sensitive to it. In fact, he hears “your questions are silly” enough that he periodically checks the last 20 stories he’s done. “Let’s go look,” he says. “And I would, and out of the last 10 stories that I did, usually eight were fairly substantial—arcane policy stuff. Wonky by television news standards. But two were silly and they would remember the silly ones.” He curls his lip and shrugs. “I’m not upset about it—I don’t want people to think that I want to be a more serious guy. But the reality is that I do way more serious stuff than not.” 

But what do his self-kept metrics mean when that DeRusha insouciance slips so easily into a story on immigration? There was bona fide hand-wringing in Libin’s office when he was contemplating giving DeRusha the job. “Frankly, we were worried that he was too much of a ham,” Libin says. Berglove, who conceptualized Good Question with Tracy, says that “Jason is really into being Jason.” Before working with DeRusha, Tracy and Berglove had a mantra: “The question wouldn’t get overwhelmed by shtick.” But Berglove has come around to DeRusha’s style—“we’re like an old couple now,” he says. (The only thing that really comes between them is the amount of time DeRusha dotes on his iPhone; Berglove complains that they “never talk anymore.”) “I have to say, working with Jason, he’s a good human being. There’s a lot of shticky guys out there who are assholes. But with Jason, once you get past all the bullshit, he’s a good man.” If you’re going to discuss solipsism inside the ’CCO newsroom, you’re obliged to tap Don Shelby. Before flicking my tape recorder on, Shelby playfully accused DeRusha of being given too many column inches in a recent magazine piece on Shelby. In fact, he playfully mentioned this so many times I pledged Shelby an entire paragraph in DeRusha’s story. Here it is: 

According to The Don, the traditional path to success (and real money) in the news business is to graduate to the anchor desk. And despite DeRusha’s moony face, thinning hair, and suburban dad mien, Shelby believes that DeRusha could actually become a good anchor. “He’s already a good anchor,” Shelby says. 

In good faith, Shelby offers DeRusha “communication techniques” in the same way that Dave Moore once advised Shelby. For instance, he recently suggested that DeRusha relax his eyes when at the anchor desk. “You want to look friendly up there,” Shelby says, motioning around his eyes. His only concern is DeRusha’s gravitas, specifically his lack thereof. “He’s going to have to make a choice,” Shelby says. “He may need to calm down the caricature of Jason DeRusha the ‘Good Question Guy,’ and this may be a terrible loss.” Shelby wonders if the landscape is changing, though—if in the Anderson Cooper/John Stewart era, there’s maybe a middle passage. “Maybe he’ll become the anchor who can finally navigate between fun and serious, but that’s asking a lot from the audience,” Shelby warns. In Shelby’s estimation, the only thing that makes DeRusha a safe bet is that he’s a genuinely good person. “A bad person cannot succeed in this business—that camera will find you out.” 

As anybody who spends any time on the Internet knows, the scrutiny of the camera has intensified: There are a lot of haters out there, whether it’s on mnspeak.com or in CJ’s column. The membrane between media and media consumer is thinner than it’s ever been, and despite the easy grin and constant banter, DeRusha clearly feels it. In some part, I think that’s why he developed the “I’m kind of a big deal around here” shtick in the first place—personality guilt. (He was raised Catholic, after all.) 

He may be a real egotist, but it’s framed by the self-deprecation of a guilty egotist—you’re not supposed to bring so much attention to yourself up here. This becomes sort of a feedback loop—he talks about himself, feels guilty about it, and then makes fun of himself for talking about himself. In fact, DeRusha seems to have worked out his own neat little cosmology, his own code, to help him make sense of this cycle: “I get a little defensive when people think that I’m a raging egotistical beast,” he says. “I don’t think that’s a fair description of who I am. Do I have a strong ego? . . . Yes. Is it bad to have a strong ego? . . . I don’t think so. Is it bad to be a jerk because you have a strong ego? Absolutely. Am I jerk? I don’t think so.”