View to the Future

Channel 40's new general manager, Chris Westerkamp, brings an intriguing background in both broadcasting and business to Springfield. He wants to take lessons from both experiences to enhance the many forms of customer service at 40 and, overall, make the station "more relevant."

Chris Westerkamp grew up watching his father, a local television news anchor, report the events of the turbulent '60s from such hot spots as Washington and Detroit.

Often, he watched not from in front of a television set, but from behind the scenes at the studio. He quickly became enthralled with the pace and variety of work in television, and knew early on that he wanted to be a part of it. His ultimate goal was to be a station general manager, and he knew that to get there he would have to understand every nuance of the business and perform just about every task - from production assistant to sales. And he did.

Westerkamp worked in sales for a number of stations, and eventually became GM of KERO in Bakersfield, Calif. His career took a sharp turn a few years later, however, when he got involved in several Internet startups, all involved in education.

Life as an entrepreneur was intriguing but challenging, as he observed firsthand the collapse of the tech sector - not to mention the heavy demands of venture capitalists.

"When you're working for an Internet startup, you have nothing ... you have to come up with a concept and make it happen," he said. "So you have to be agile and resourceful. And you have to be willing to look at your business on a regular basis to see what it is relative to what you thought it was two months before."

Today, Westerkamp, 56, is applying lessons from his many career stops at WGGB, Channel 40, where he succeeds longtime general manager Kevin Leroux. He told BusinessWest that there are many things on his to-do list, starting with work to make the station more visible in the community and its brand more recognizable. Later this month, for example, he will roll out a new logo that links the station with ABC, something that hasn't been done sufficiently in years past, in his view.

"ABC is a strong brand ... it's a good network with many popular shows," he said. "We should be taking better advantage of that brand, and we will in the future."

Meanwhile, Westerkamp wants to improve the station's focus on customer service, knowing that this category includes a number of constituencies, from viewers to advertisers to the community as a whole.

"I want to make this station more relevant," he said, referring to everything from its news content to involvement in the Greater Springfield area. "Our goal is to be indispensable to the local community and figure out what is interesting to them; Springfield has some great things about it, but it has some issues, too."

Strong Signals

When asked to elaborate on that thought, Westerkamp started talking about demographics.

"Every 7.7 seconds, someone in this country turns 50," he said. "The population is getting older, and I think we need to pay more attention to that segment of society and its needs."

Besides an aging populace, Springfield has other issues, he noted, including education, crime, and the plight of its young people - and he wants the station to play a role in finding solutions by bringing these issues to the forefront.

Springfield will pose a different brand of broadcasting challenge for Westerkamp, who has spent the bulk of his career in top10 markets - Springfield is number 106.

After graduating from Michigan State University, where he was involved in broadcasting on a number of levels doing everything from production to color commenting on the school's football games - he went into television sales, starting at WBBM (CBS) in Chicago. He later worked for the ABC Television Stations Division, with stops in Detroit, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

He then took several sales management positions between 1980 and 1993, with stops at WFAA in Dallas, KITN in Minneapolis, KPIX in San Francisco, and KMGH in Denver, before becoming general manager of KERO in Bakersfield. He spent four years there before he left broadcasting for the thenburgeoning dot.com field.

He was involved in two startups, the first called Third Age Media, what he termed a Web-centric company that started out as an online community for seniors and Baby Boomers.

While at KPIX in San Francisco, Westerkamp had some experience working with Dr. Ken Dychtwald, author of Age Wave, a book that examines the aging of America and the impact on society when Boomers near retirement age. He became fascinated by the subject and helped the station create a series of "Third Age Minutes," short news segments devoted to issues outlined in Dychtwald's book.

Later, when Third Age Media was created, its principals approached Westerkamp about becoming its vice president of sales. The inquiry came as KERO's parent, McGraw-Hill, was preparing to sell all its stations. "The timing was right," he said. "Our station was for sale, and this sounded exciting. I was an early adaptor of technology and the Internet, and I liked the publishing aspect of this venture, so I took a shot at it."

Two years later, he took the lead sales position at another Internet venture, Lightspan.com, a company that worked to organize the Internet so that teachers, students, and parents could use it for education. "It was an interesting concept, but ultimately, teachers didn't know what to do with it," he said.

Westerkamp said his experiences in the dot.com world provided some important lessons, even if neither business was ultimately very successful - lessons that can be readily applied to broadcasting and virtually every other type of business.

"I learned a lot about business outside of broadcasting, and that experience helped me understand, at a deeper level, what's going on in the world of business," he said. "It was also a real experience as far as the Internet is concerned; every other month, you'd find out your company was really about something other than what you thought it was about two months ago."

Westerkamp eventually went into consulting for companies interested in distance learning, but desired something more permanent, and preferably in broadcasting. He sent a global Email of sorts asking friends and colleagues to be on the lookout for broadcast management positions that would bring him closer to his 12-year-old son living in Connecticut.

A friend soon E-mailed back about a job opening at a small ABC affiliate in Springfield.

"This is a great situation here, because I get to apply all the skills that I've learned over the years in television - and in business - to this job," he said. "This is a good fit for me."

Tuning In

Since arriving at 40 in September, Westerkamp has been familiarizing himself with the region, its demographics, and its business community. Meanwhile, he has set about the task of strengthening the station's brand and developing a strategy for improving sales and viewership.

This will be a multi-pronged initiative that includes everything from renovating the station's studios on Liberty Street, which have had the essentially the same look for decades, to lining up new programming; Westerkamp recently won a minor bidding war with Channel 22 for the rights to broadcast Jane Pauley's new syndicated show, which will take the 4-to-5 p.m. slot starting next fall.

"This station has been doing all right," he said, when asked to give an assessment of the business he took over. "But there is plenty of work to be done to improve things. With me coming in as a newcomer, that gives us a great opportunity to evaluate and assess everything and figure out how we can do a better job, how we can look better on the air, and how we can be more relevant to the community."

He said a general manager at any-sized station is essentially charged with giving departments and individual employees the tools they need to get their jobs done, and that's what he's set out to do.

In the studio and newsroom, for example, the station is set to convert to digital master control, while also converting all news-gathering and editing equipment to digital technology - as part of the process to switching to HDTV - which will enhance productivity and save the company money in the long run.

"This will give more us capability in our building and in our news trucks," he said, "and the quality of the product will be better, and the pictures will be better."

Meanwhile, the station will undergo significant renovations in the months ahead in an effort to give it a more modem look while creating a more friendly, professional environment for guests, clients, and staff.

As for branding, Westerkamp said the station needs to ramp up its efforts to promote itself within the community. "There is still some confusion out there ... some people still think we're WHYN," he said, referring to the station's old call letters. "Meanwhile, in none of our promotions and very tittle of our on-the-air work do we associate ourselves with ABC, and I think we're missing a great opportunity there.

"We need to focus on what our brand distinction is," he continued. "Everyone in the building has to have an idea of what our brand attributes are, because ours are going to be different than the guy across the street. What goes on the air in terms of local news really depends on everyone having the same idea, and understanding what our brand is and what we're trying to do."

While working on branding and programming, Westerkamp wants the station to become more involved in the community and the issues affecting it. He listed the Cherish Every Child initiative launched by the Davis Foundation and the issues it has identified as an example of something that might shape news content - and that the station can get involved with.

"They've identified a lot of things that we should not only be aware of, but in some ways be advocates for," he said. "We can be helping them to pinpoint the problems and point out where there are opportunities.

"Everything is about focus," he continued, "and we have the opportunity to help people focus on things; it's a matter of what we choose. It's an old dilemma: you can give people the news they want, or you can give them the news they need to know about and that maybe they didn't think they wanted."

That's a Wrap

For now, Westerkamp is focused on making his station more visible and more relevant.

To do that, he will borrow on all his experience - in broadcasting, the Internet, and with understanding the aging of America and what that phenomenon will mean for society.

He's looking forward to the challenge of getting his station and the community - to focus on the big picture.