E-Mail This Article to a Friend Forever Young Broadcast veteran Robin Young reflects on decades spent in local and national media BY TAMARA WIEDER

BOSTONIANS MAY NOT have realized it at the time, but nearly 30 years ago, a local television show was making broadcasting history. When WBZ-TV’s Evening Magazine hit the airwaves in 1977, it was one of the country’s first television magazine programs. Of course, these days such shows are a ubiquitous — and oft-maligned — TV presence. But a few decades ago, Evening Magazine was cutting-edge television — and co-host Robin Young was one of its driving forces.

Fast-forward to 2004. Young now calls award-winning public radio station WBUR home — and a happy home, at that. After years spent in broadcasting, working everywhere from the Discovery Channel to the Today show, the Peabody Award–winning journalist couldn’t be more pleased by where she’s landed: as co-host of NPR’s noon news magazine, Here and Now.

Q: Take me back to the beginning. How’d you end up in broadcasting — was it a career path you’d planned on?

A: I always wanted to do something with the arts, and something with education. I was a governess right after college, and I was watching this brand-new show, Sesame Street, and I thought, I’m going to do some sort of educational television, that’s it. I’m from New York, but I’d ended up in Colorado as a governess, and I said, this is it, I’m going to Boston to work with these geniuses on Sesame Street, and I got in the car and drove straight to Boston and presented myself at the door of Channel 2. Because growing up in New York, Boston was where everything smart and fine and educated came from. So I assumed that’s where Sesame Street came from. I was not yet the reporter that I am today! So I literally got out of the car at WGBH and presented myself: "I am here to work on Sesame Street; aren’t you all so lucky?" And [the employee] said, and I’ll never forget it: "Aw, honey. They don’t make that here; they make that in New York!"

Q: You started out in television before cable. How different a world was it?

A: It’s phenomenal. I feel like, oh, dust me off and I’ll tell you. But to me it feels like the recent past. It’s amazing how quickly things have changed. First of all, we [Evening Magazine] were one of the first shows in the 7:30 time slot. Yeah, we did a lot of entertainment, we did a lot of lifestyle pieces, but we lived and died for our serious public-affairs pieces, and we had this sort of obligation to the audience to do the first story on teenage pregnancy, and the first time women talked about mastectomies on the air. There was no avenue for those kinds of stories. Which sounds incredible now. Because of the success of the Evening Magazine franchise in the 7:30 time slot, there was just this nuclear bomb of suddenly what I think was a misinterpretation of the public’s hunger for stories that were close to them. At that time, I think we did them with a lot more respect, but now it’s sort of like, "Get me the latest heartfelt story about ...!" Now they’ve been exploited, and now you can’t tell one from the other. You’ve been so bombarded with them I think they’ve lost their power.

Q: So how do you think Evening Magazine changed the course of television?

A: Well, unfortunately, in ways that it was exploited, it wasn’t our intent. But it did wonderful things. Every single day I will be told by someone, whether it’s someone sending an e-mail or I meet somebody in a restaurant or something, every single day I’m told by someone, "I loved that show." And I’m very proud of that. I’m so proud of that deep connection with the community and with sort of the human spirit. It sounds so cheesy, it sounds so arcane to say that, but I’m so proud of that. And yet, I do think that it was a force that got away from the originators, no question. We’d all, everyone who worked on those shows, we’d sort of nurse a story and bring it along, and we just would adore these stories and this entrée we had into people’s lives. And now I don’t know of very many places left where you can do that. It’s sort of, oh, a minute and a half on someone’s child who died. Chronicle, of course, is there, and CBS Sunday Morning is there, but there are very few places where you can tell that kind of a story.

Q: How has broadcasting changed for women since you started out?

A: When I was at TV 38 — which I loved, and I will forever thank them — but it’s also true that there weren’t very many women who worked there, and those of us who did, who were in any kind of assistant role, had to also spot the receptionist on our lunch break. So they had fired my boss, who was the production manager, and made me the production coordinator, with no increase in pay, and so I’m handling renting out all these huge trucks and everything, and having to spot the receptionist for her lunch one day a week. So people would call: "I want to talk to the production manager, I want to rent a truck," and I’d say, "Hold on please," and I’d come back on in a deeper voice, "Hi, this is the production manager." And I’d be sitting there like Lucille Ball, trying to answer the phones while I’m renting the trucks.

I hope that doesn’t happen today. I think there are tremendous opportunities for women. I think the playing field is pretty even, except in management, which is reflected everywhere. I think everyone’s frustrated in broadcast media, which is again why I’m so grateful to be here; we have Jane Christo, who’s a very powerful woman who runs the station. We have women at NPR who are complete equals to men. It’s not an issue that comes up, at least in the place where I work, which is on-air. There’s women everywhere. In other parts of the landscape, in television in particular, I’m a little disappointed that it’s so much more style over substance. I mean, I wonder if — it’s what everyone says — would a Natalie [Jacobson] be able to start today? I’m not sure. She’s a beautiful woman, I hasten to add. But she doesn’t care about that. I mean, I’m not knocking the women who are out there, because I know everyone’s working very hard. But I think that’s the direction that everyone’s been forced in.

Q: Is that one of the biggest ways radio is different than television?

A: Oh, my God! If you could see me now! I love it so much. I’ve always had this unruly hair; I could be doing the most unbelievable, ultimately award-winning report and somebody would write, "But her hair." A great TV hair story: I have very wavy hair, which I would have to set and straighten, and when I was anchoring at Channel 7 for a while, I’d be going out and doing stories. That should be the important thing, that I was going out and doing all this reporting. And so I’d get caught in the rain, I’d be coming back to the anchor desk, and my hair was wavy, and so I started wearing my hair wavy, and oh my gosh, it was just a big deal. I guess it was a little messy, now that I think about it. But I’ll never forget, my long-time hair guy, who’s also a dear friend, calling me — the [Boston] Herald had, like, a page-two article about how I’d had a bad perm, but this was my hair — and Vince calls me and says, "Robin, please!" And I thought, oh great, a call of support. And he said, "No, no, no — you’ve got to tell them I would never do a perm that bad! That’s your hair!" So do I love that [radio is] about what you say and what you write? Yes. I love that.

I have dear friends, Susan Wornick and Liz [Walker] and Natalie [Jacobson], who do terrific work. There are wonderful pockets. I just don’t think anything comes close to what I get to do here. And they tell me that. They call and say, "Oh, we’re so jealous." I get calls all the time. "You’re so lucky, you get to do this and this." I mean, you do it at public-radio salary, and you do it with an incredibly small and wonderful staff. You don’t get limos to interviews and stuff, which they do at the network, things like that. But gosh. I can’t tell you how many people I have saying that. We get to cover things that really move us, and we feel are important. Even the slightest thing that we do, even the fun moments, have some sort of human truth about them. And I will never have to spend 10 hours following the every move of Robert Blake.

I’m not going to dis television, because there are people out there who respect the written word, who are smart, and hang in. But overall I’m sort of disappointed. But you know what? I’m disappointed in men in television, too. Very few people in television are using their power. Why aren’t more high-powered, highly paid hosts and anchors on a national level, in particular, demanding an hour of air time to do a serious subject? They could! Why aren’t they? So that’s one of my disappointments.

Q: Tell me about Here and Now.

A: Oh, Here and Now is terrific. Let me back up. Well, I don’t have to back up past that: Here and Now is terrific. What I love about it for me personally is that it’s been very hard to find a place where you can be all the different parts of yourself. I mean, I’m fierce about news and fairness and looking for the gray areas and being able to tell a story without the current sort of black-and-white approach to it, and I love that. But the show doesn’t limit me to that kind of coverage. We can do authors and the arts and music and the quirky elements. It’s so satisfying for me personally because I get to do all those different things. As I say on my résumé, I am the only person, I’m sure, with a Peabody Award who also hosted a cooking game show. It’s very hard to try to cut off a part of myself and fit into some wedge somewhere. So I love that. The people are ferocious in the morning, tracking down the biggest news stories and getting the latest news on by noon. What makes us different from other NPR programs is our placement. Being that we’re on at noon, we don’t have any reporter packages, because it’s a pretty swiftly moving information and news stream. If we prepared a package, by 11 o’clock it would be old. So that I think makes it a terrifically timely show, but what it does for us is that we do far more interviews every day than most people.

Q: It must be exhausting.

A: Oh, it is, and sometimes you’re like, "Excuse me, your country is which?" It’s head-spinning at times. But my job isn’t to know everything; it’s to find out everything, so that’s a lot easier. And then our afternoons are spent doing the pieces that need more production. So we don’t take lunch; we turn around right after the show and start taping those longer, more complicated production pieces. And then at night you go home and read. So it’s a bear.

Q: But a good bear.

A: It’s my bear. It’s a likable bear.

Q: Is anything off limits on Here and Now?

A: Nothing. I tell you unequivocally, I have never, ever been told by anyone, we can’t cover that, we can’t say that, we can’t do that. And what happens on our show is, first thing in the morning the whole staff comes in, and it’s a bloodbath. People fight for what they want to see on the show. So it’s a group effort and a group consensus. One person isn’t dictating it by any means. So we’re able to put out everything [at the morning meeting], and then there’s usually a few that just scream out, and we try to get in as much as we can in an hour’s time. But it’s a group effort; nobody from management ever comes and says, "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." They might walk by and say, "Oh, did you hear this?" and they try to help us, but there is absolutely no agenda here. In fact, it would probably be a fireable offense if you had some sort of personal or political agenda.

Q: As somebody who’s worked in television, how do you feel about the whole reality-TV craze?

A: It saddens me when television does any kind of trend producing. You know, suddenly they’re all doing newsmagazines, and suddenly they’re all going to do this. Because we lose, because there’s no variety, and there’s one note for as long as that note lasts. As to the shows themselves, some of it is not that far from cinéma vérité, which is my favorite kind of documentary filmmaking. So some of it, if done tastefully, some of it is insightful to how someone else is living their lives, and that’s the kind of storytelling I’ve devoted my life to. But it’s like the Supreme Court said — you can’t really define it, but you know it when you see it: there’s something that’s exploitive, that’s almost hateful of the human condition, and something that’s reverential about it. And I’m sorry; most of these reality shows fall in the first category. They’re exploitive, they couldn’t care less, they’re making fun, and I don’t think they add anything to the world.

Q: In 2004, what are the biggest challenges facing public radio?

A: Keeping up with the growing demand from listeners for news. We are just growing and growing. The growth of public radio is amazing. People still have this perception — and I think people purposely put out this perception — that NPR is this earnest little group of people. Well, we are earnest, but we’re not little. I think the difference between us and a commercial enterprise is, when a commercial enterprise gets this big, they say, oh great, let’s just raise our ad rates, and let’s raise everybody’s salaries and hire more people and buy more stuff. It doesn’t work that way in public radio. We have to continue to meet this hunger for real news, which is not just both sides of every issue, but the nine sides of every issue. So we have to incorporate more people, more coverage, ask more questions, for more people, with not a lot of money. And I also think we have a job to continue to keep our heads down and do what we always do, which is doggedly look for every single aspect of every story. Because the drumbeat from other media is just relentless, and much of it is agenda-driven. So we have to just hew to our own and hold on to our belt buckle, because we’re growing.

Q: How much do you hate fund drives?

A: What? I can’t hear you. There’s something wrong with the phone! I can’t hear you!

I’m going to say something so NPR: I don’t hate. What would be upsetting to me is if listeners don’t like fund drives. So I see it as my job to try and make it as painless as possible. And believe it or not, we have a lot of listeners who love supporting the station because they do see it as sort of a refuge, and so we hear that as well. But who am I kidding? I just have to constantly tell myself it’s because there are so many people now listening that we need their help. I’ve often said this to my friends, how would you like it? Let’s say you, Tamara, you’re writing your column, and you have to push back from your desk for a second and go stand on a street corner and say, "Hello! Could I please have some money here to continue my job?"

Q: I would imagine it’s as frustrating to you as it is to your listeners.

A: This is potentially what’s frustrating about we NPR people — there’s never just one side. We do hear from people who don’t mind it, and we do know the other truth, which is it constantly means we are not indebted to anybody else. The portion we get from the government is so small, despite what everybody says. So we’re not indebted to some mega-corporation who would tell me what to say on the air. So this is what I have to do. This is what we have to do, but the reasons why we have to do it are good ones.

Q: You know that game where someone says a word or phrase and you say the first thing that pops into your head? Can we play that?

A: Oh sure, but given that this is me, I’ll probably get in so much trouble! Have you noticed I tend to say the first thing that pops into my head?

Q: Tabloid television.

A: Don’t watch it. Don’t know that much about it anymore.

Q: Janet Jackson.

A: Justin Timberlake. I think what’s lost in all of that is it wasn’t an image of a woman exposing her breast; it was an image of a man ripping off a woman’s clothing. That’s a far more pitiful example for kids than just a woman exposing her breast, the violence of it.

Q: NPR.

A: Love. Love. Love. Respect. Admiration. Can’t believe I’m at one of the stations. Scott Simon. When you say NPR, I say Scott Simon, and may I live long enough to be half the host he is.

Q: Boston.

A: Love affair. Smart. No-nonsense. I grew up here.

Q: Howard Dean.

A: Judy Dean. I won’t say anything political, but I absolutely understand that whole sense of putting somebody up on a pedestal just to push them off or help them fall off or whatever.

Q: Here and Now.

A: Grateful. Everything you need to know at noon.

Q: What was your worst day in broadcasting?

A: It was the first time on the Today show where I was sitting in for Jane Pauley. It was a last-minute thing, and I’d been doing pieces for the show, yet because Evening was a field show, I hadn’t done a lot of anchor-desk work; in fact, hmm, none. I came in early in the morning and wrote — back in that day, the hosts wrote the newscasts, and it was then Tom Brokaw, so he wrote half and I wrote half. And I was so pleased; I love to write. And that’s the other thing that has been so wonderful about Here and Now; the word means more when there’s no picture, and I love that.

I was so pleased with what I’d written, and I’d never worked with a teleprompter before, so I was sort of saying it by memory, which I’d learned to do on Evening. So I’m speaking back my newscast, and kind of going ahead of the prompter, because I was sort of making up half of it, which is actually a phenomenal skill, but unfortunately I didn’t get credit for it because what happened was, the teleprompter sort of went by, because the teleprompter guy couldn’t figure out where I was. I finished my thing and I suddenly realized I’m looking at the camera with this sort of, "Wasn’t that great; aren’t I good?", and realized I had no idea where I was going. And now I’m staring at this blank teleprompter, because it had already gone by. It was the moment I learned the number-one lesson, which is, always know where you’re going. The floor director was trying to tell me what to say, and he was saying, "What," and I kept saying, "What? What?" And I’m saying this live on national television. Well, unbeknownst to me, in the corner of the screen is this little square with then–secretary of the interior James Watt. And [the floor director is] trying to tell me James Watt, and I’m going, "What?" And then everyone realized, oh my God, she’s just flaming out, and the floor director came right up within a foot of me and said, "This is Today on NBC," and I just said, "This is Today on NBC." I never made that mistake again.

Q: When it comes to the media and entertainment, do you have any guilty pleasures?

A: Oh, yeah, one tonight! Friends. Oh, I have a ton. I’m human! I have tons of guilty pleasures. I do have others. Sometimes it’s hard for me to think. I couldn’t even tell you what was on the show today, because we have so much information thrown at us. And that’s why I have guilty pleasures. I could tell you about Canada’s health system, which I just did [a piece on], but I could not tell you what was on the show [today]. Oh, I like Scrubs. And there’s no guilt about this: I just love any of the English-people-in-the-countryside Masterpiece Theatre things. Do not call me when those things are on. I guess Friends and Scrubs. But I don’t feel guilty about it. There’s no shame!

Q: Well, it’s not like you’re saying Average Joe or My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé.

A: You know, they just don’t click for me. They just don’t. I am not an elitist; in fact, I’m pretty much a populist. I saw a little of the Donald Trump thing [The Apprentice]. Part of it is, I don’t have time. But I make time for Friends.

Q: What are three words your friends and family would use to describe you?

A: Aunt — fabulous aunt. Loyal. And tired.

Q: What about your colleagues?

A: Aunt. Demanding. And apologetic.

Q: What three words would you use to describe yourself?

A: Not good enough. I want to grow more. And worried. You know, I worry a lot about what other people think; I worry a lot that people around me are comfortable. And yet I make demands on them, so then I have to apologize. And I have to go back over that; I’m demanding of myself, too. We are just so conscious that we want to hit a really high standard every day. So I’m surrounded by people who demand a lot of themselves. I don’t know about myself; that’s so hard.

Q: Well, you could just leave it at "not good enough." That is three words.

A: It is. Except when it comes to being an aunt. Sorry. Nobody even comes close.

Here and Now airs on weekdays at noon on WBUR-FM. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com