For 25 years, Howard Reig introduced the broadcast live each night, through the anchorships of John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw. Reig retired two years ago, but "Nightly News" had been using tapes of his voice ever since.
"I appealed to Michael's sense of romance and sentimentality and his love of the industry," [Brian] Williams said Tuesday. "I called him and said, `On top of all you've done as an actor, producer and Academy Award winner, this will mean a small slice of immortality in our industry. It also means wherever you are on Earth, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, you'll know your voice is on the air.'"
Yeah, a very small slice compared to the overall "immortality" he's already achieved via his acting career. But this particular relative slice will inevitably last only as long as Brian Williams (and a handful of fill-ins or successors) does. Unless you count the archived recordings (somewhere) of these news intro announcer bits, but honestly who cares?
My reaction to this is a small shoulder shrug. (Well, that and this blog post.) I can't understand why this should matter to anyone. Is there any good reason why they can't simply have the news anchor person come on and say something like...?
Good Evening, I'm [generic-but-competent-newsreader-drone] and welcome to NBC Nightly News for [current date]...
And yes, I realize that the big network news anchors typically do a lot more behind the scenes in addition to their—on the face of it—"simple" anchor duties, but by using the term "drone" I intend for the deliberate understatement to stress my "Who cares?" point all the more. By the time the news goes on the air all I really care about is that the content should be significantly relevant to a sizable segment of the viewing audience, if not me personally. It also should appear to be accurate and—dare I say it?—fair and balanced insofar as it can be within the scope of any particular story.
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