He's live in L.A.

By Greg Braxton and Maria Elena Fernandez

March 14, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

The hour was late, the rock music was blaring and the Friday night festivities were at full steam at Pinot Hollywood as the guest of honor, newly arrived from the Midwest, made the rounds. As new KCBS anchor Paul Magers mingled with dozens of his colleagues who had gathered, Laura Diaz -- the night’s host and Magers’ co-anchor -- approached her new partner to see how he was doing.

“He had this big smile on his face and he said, ‘The Doors are playing, and I’m in Los Angeles,’ ” Diaz recalled of that January night. “He said, ‘It doesn’t get better than this.’ ”

If the party was loud, Magers’ entry into L.A. was not. On Jan. 5, he quietly slipped behind the anchor desk and began putting his imprint on KCBS Channel 2’s 5 and 11 p.m. newscasts. With an authoritative demeanor, deep and resonant voice and off-the-cuff sense of humor, Magers is the station’s $2-million-plus gamble.

In a landscape that stretches from Hal Fishman’s professorial sensibility to Paul Moyer’s polished-casual style to Marc Brown’s personable approach, Magers has been tough to pigeonhole.

Just two months into the job, the 49-year-old Magers already seems at ease with his co-anchor. But the TV news veteran is still feeling his way and hasn’t yet had the opportunity to show many of the qualities that made him the star KCBS chose to build its future around. Once he hits his stride, though, the station is counting on him to work the kind of ratings magic that he did in Minneapolis, where he helped turn KARE into the city’s top-rated station and was dubbed the “anchor god” by C.J., a Minneapolis Star Tribune gossip columnist who featured his name frequently.

He has his work cut out for him in L.A.’s highly competitive local news scene, where seven English-language stations offer news and where winning a few ratings points can translate into millions of advertising dollars. In the critical 11 p.m. spot, which remains the most lucrative slot for news, KCBS is No. 3, averaging more than 221,490 households -- far less than No. 1-ranked KNBC with 388,958 households.

Magers’ hire is part of a larger strategy by CBS’ corporate parent, Viacom Inc., which is on a spending spree to beef up the local news operations at its affiliates around the country. Although CBS is the country’s most-watched network in prime time and during the day, its local news affiliates in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- the top three TV markets -- have generally trailed their competitors in the ratings. And “Late Show with David Letterman’s” camp has made no secret that it wants better lead-ins. During the past year and a half, in addition to Los Angeles, new anchor teams have been set up at Viacom-owned stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami and Denver.

Battle-tested

In Minneapolis, Magers was a popular anchor who drew mostly good notices during his 20-year run, excelling at two very distinct skills: handling breaking news coverage and making people laugh. He made his name in the Twin Cities for the first time in 1985, when a tornado hit and Magers anchored the newscast, said Jeff Passolt, an anchor at Fox affiliate KMSP who worked with Magers at KARE from 1983 to 1994. That day the station’s helicopter happened to be testing a new gyroscope lens.

“The chopper decided to stay in the air and Paul was out there live on the set voicing over the pictures and talking to the pilot,” Passolt said. “It was the kind of TV that everybody was talking about the next day and beyond. That’s where Paul really shines: the live TV stuff, election night and live on the scene.”

In 2002, Magers earned national praise when he moderated the political debate on CNN between Walter Mondale and Norm Coleman in the Senate race to replace the late Paul Wellstone. “He kept it moving and lively and just did a terrific job,” said Diana Pierce, who co-anchored the news during Magers’ tenure at KARE. “He loves politics and elections coverage. He eats, breathes and sleeps it.”

Meanwhile, his penchant for colorful, stylish suits, his $1.8-million estate in the city’s Lake of Isles neighborhood (made famous by the opening sequence in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”), and his wife, Kathryn, who was active on the charity circuit, helped make him a regular feature in the Twin Cities’ newspapers.

Over the years, Magers occasionally filled in as news anchor on NBC’s “Weekend Today.” He doesn’t appear to be on the CBS News anchor track, which historically has required extensive reporting experience, according to sources at the network. Still, Magers has characteristics that have already established him as one of CBS’ top local anchors, said Dennis Swanson, chief operating officer of Viacom’s Television Stations Group.

“Paul is a broadcaster who exudes stature and credibility, which are the qualities an anchor needs to have in order to be successful, especially in a market like Los Angeles,” Swanson said. “And then there are the things that viewers don’t see that are also critically important.... He has a natural gift for being a morale booster.”

KCBS has never recovered from the departure of anchor Jerry Dunphy in the mid-1970s or the final decline of the once-dominant “Big News” block of afternoon and early evening news programs in the late ‘60s. Poor ratings and a revolving door of general managers, news directors and news anchors have plagued the station since then.

For the last three decades, KCBS tried numerous anchor combinations and news approaches to win back viewers. In 1986 there was a disastrous experiment with a so-called news wheel, where every 20 minutes a new topic and new anchor appeared.

More recently, in 1999, “Women2Women News” was a failed attempt at a 4 p.m. newscast aimed at wives and mothers. Occasional short-lived ratings bursts aside, nothing has had a dramatic impact.

With audience viewing habits changing slowly in news -- especially when compared to prime-time entertainment -- it’s unlikely a turnaround will come quickly. So it was not unexpected in the just-completed February sweeps, where the performance of local stations comes under close scrutiny, that KCBS continued to trail its competitors. KABC retained its dominance in the early morning and afternoon news blocks, while KNBC won its 29th consecutive sweeps at 11 p.m.

KCBS president and general manager Don Corsini, confident that the station’s downward trend will reverse, has adopted a strategy of patience, saying the station will stick with this team long enough for it to take root. Harold Greene, who previously anchored the 5 and 11 p.m. newscasts, has moved to 4 and 6 p.m. For his part, Magers is accepting the ratings-challenged station’s fate -- at least for now.

“February doesn’t matter to me,” Magers said. “The May sweeps don’t matter. Where we rank right now and in the near future is not a final verdict on what we’re doing here. What matters is the journey, how we are really rebuilding this station one day at a time. KCBS has gone through 25 years of being beat up, and patience is key to bringing the station to where it should be.”

Still, there is pressure on Magers to make a difference. His paycheck, estimated at $2.2 million per year for an unspecified term, puts him among the top 10 highest-paid local news anchors in the country. But he’s still behind KNBC’s Paul Moyer, who earns $2.8 million, and Chuck Scarborough in New York, who anchors WNBC and reportedly earns $3 million, according to a prominent headhunter in the business. (Diaz reportedly makes $1.5 million.)

Magers won’t discuss the financial aspects of his anchoring career. Instead, he says he’s learning the city and getting used to L.A.’s emphasis on entertainment news. “It just seems to be what is out here. Where I came from, it’s all about agriculture and soybean deals.”

Magers begins his day working through a stack of newspapers and catching some TV newscasts: “It depends on what my wife has on. She’s all over the map -- CNN, Fox. Sometimes it’s the Weather Channel.” He arrives at the station around 2:15 p.m. and goes through the news wires, consulting with the executive producer on key stories they’ll be featuring that night. Sometimes he will see Diaz several minutes before the show, but there are times when they don’t see each other until they go on the air. He spends most of his time before and between newscasts in the main newsroom and seldom uses his private office.

There’s another daily ritual -- Magers goes through his closet to select what to wear on the air. His preference runs to suits with stripes, many of which he brought with him from the Midwest. He wore a brown-checkered jacket one recent night and a pinstripe number on another, but he has yet to pull out what columnist C.J. years ago dubbed his “pimpalicious” suits. In a lengthy farewell interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in December, Magers admitted he would leave his “vibrant suits” in his Beverly Hills closet, and was doubling his white-shirt order because “I just don’t want to drive people away right off the bat.”

The anchorman soon learned a conservative wardrobe was not enough to keep him under the radar for long. A lead item in The Times’ “Hot Property” column in January reported that Magers had purchased a 6,700-square-foot, Mediterranean-style villa in Beverly Hills for $6.5 million. Magers, who was angered by the item, said some parts were wrong, although he wouldn’t elaborate.

That indefinable quality

Ten years ago, Magers and a rival, Don Shelby, who has anchored the news at WCCO in Minneapolis for 25 years, were featured on the cover of Minnesota Monthly magazine as “The Kings of 10 O’Clock.” Although KARE and WCCO maintain similar overall ratings, KARE was always dominant in the advertising-critical female demographic because of Magers, Shelby admitted.

“He was clearly the No. 1 anchor, which is very difficult for me to say,” Shelby said. “He often doubled our numbers. It was an extremely tough contest to go up against him every night at 10.... Paul Magers, with his terrific charm, high wit, intelligence and incredible looks, was a magical formula for them.”

Shelby credits his former rival’s news credentials but also notes he always scored well in surveys of news anchor likability. It remains to be seen if that quality comes through in Los Angeles too, with its geographic and industrial sprawl and its multicultural population of just under 10 million people.

Evidence indicates neither the experience as a news anchor nor the stylish clothes will matter much, at least in terms of getting audiences to accept him into their homes every night. The most successful anchors possess an elusive quality that makes viewers feel they are being talked to personally and specifically, said Jeffrey McCall, professor of communication at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.

“You’ll hear audience members refer to anchors by first name,” McCall said. “The ability of an anchor to reach through the TV screen and connect in a para-social way with the audience cannot be diminished. I know that sounds crazy, but a TV station that can get good ratings by paying him $2 million will find it worth it.”

Moyer defends the high salaries he and other anchors earn, saying the value of news anchors should be determined by their delivery, honesty, trust, reporting skill and viewers’ level of comfort.

“If an anchor has all of those things, how do you put a monetary value on that?” said Moyer, who gives generally positive marks to Magers. “Viewers want to feel comfortable hearing the news. It’s also become much more important and valuable to have an anchor that has a following in the marketplace.”

Though they have only been working together a few weeks, Magers and Diaz display what appears to be a natural chemistry. “We’re different,” Diaz said. “I tend to be more reserved, while Paul is a lot more outward. But we have a balance, and that’s the making of a good partnership. We have a yin and yang.”

Off camera, Magers is remembered by colleagues in Minneapolis for being a prankster and a self-deprecating raconteur who knows the words to most television show theme songs and isn’t afraid to sing them. He is a student of pop culture: “You don’t want to play Trivial Pursuit against him because he will clean your clock,” former co-anchor Pierce said.

He’s also the kind of guy who gets enthusiastic about everything from family to, well, soup. During a recent lunch at a San Fernando Valley deli with Diaz and others, he spoke warmly of his wife and two daughters between sips of split-pea soup. (“I’ve always loved split-pea soup. When I was in Amsterdam on business several years ago, a friend told me that the soup is only good when the wooden spoon stands up straight in the wooden bowl.”)

Born in Santa Maria, Calif., Magers grew up in Toppenish and Ellensburg, Wash., where he ran track and played basketball in high school.

That Magers is a news anchor at all has much to do with his older brother, Ron, a star anchor at ABC-owned WLS in Chicago. “He’s always been my inspiration, my sounding board, the one I’ve looked up to ever since I was a kid,” Magers said. “He was working at a radio station when I was young. Visiting him in the newsroom was the first time I discovered that the newsroom can be a very dynamic place.”

Magers officially began his career in 1979 as a reporter for KATU in Portland, Ore. Two years later, he moved to San Diego, where he worked as a reporter-anchor at KGTV. In 1983, he moved to Minneapolis and KARE.

The papers there marked his departure with coverage that rivaled a royal abdication. More than one noted that as he got ready to leave he broke down in tears on camera a couple of times.

Then it was on to L.A. with a fresh set of expectations. Magers is settling in to a bigger job and the pressure is on.

“Do I have a lot to learn?” he asks, rhetorically. “Yes. But this is a marvelous team, and we have the greatest people working here. The morale is still good, and this is a dynamic newsroom. We are going to make this work.”

There have been some initial jitters and nervous flubs as Magers gets used to a new set and a new city. He once held up his hand to Diaz to show her how much it was shaking. “It was like Don Knotts in ‘The Shakiest Gun in the West,’ ” he said with a chuckle. “I said, ‘See how calm I am.’ She just laughed.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Anchor teams for the competition

KNBC

Lead anchor team: Paul Moyer and Colleen Williams

Newscasts: 5 and 11 p.m.

Team since: 1993

Worth noting: Top-rated 11 p.m. news team since taking over that newscast in 1997.

KTLA

Lead anchor team: Hal Fishman and Lynette Romero

Newscast: 10 p.m.

Team since: 2000

Worth noting: Fishman is the only local anchor to do regular commentaries.