That focus — “if it bleeds, it leads,” journalists mockingly called it — has been criticized as superficial and harmful to the communities most afflicted by crime. But it was not a pillar of the Eyewitness News format, Dr. Calfano said. A competing format, Action News, also focused heavily on crime.
“As Primo would have said,” Dr. Calfano said, “you can take the format in different directions if you’re a program director, news director or G.M.”
Mr. Primo’s other enduring creation was Teen Kids News, a weekly syndicated program that made its debut in 2003 and has teenagers reporting about news of interest to other teens.
“The 9/11 attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the explosion of Space Shuttle Columbia — the early 2000s were very scary times, especially for teens,” Mr. Primo said on the program’s website. “They needed a program that kept them informed, without traumatizing them.”
In addition to his daughter, Ms. Lack, Mr. Primo, who lived in the Old Greenwich section, is survived by another daughter, Juliet Primo; his sisters, Janet Banazak and Rose Anne Fusina; a brother, Joe; and two granddaughters. His wife, Rosina (Pregano) Primo, died in 2018, and his son, Gregg, died in 2007.
Marketing the Eyewitness News brand was, for Mr. Primo, essential.
At WABC, for example, his on-air staff wore matching blazers with the station’s logo, and reporters were urged to push their Channel 7 microphones into camera shots as often as they could. The station aired numerous promotional ads, including one in which Mr. Rivera recalled inviting Mr. Grimsby and Mr. Beutel to a Puerto Rican wedding.
“Localism and local news dominance was paramount in my mind from the beginning,” Mr. Primo said in an interview in 2018 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. “It was infused in everyone in the room — we can make it if we’re the New York station, we’re the New York people.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
