At stations in Philadelphia and then New York, he relaxed the tone of news delivery, using two anchors, a diverse team of reporters and dollops of banter.
Al Primo, a television station executive who transformed local newscasts into fast-paced “Eyewitness News” programs by putting rarely-seen reporters on the air — as witnesses to the events they covered — and having anchors banter about the day’s events, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 87.
His daughter Valerie Primo Lack said the cause was lung cancer.
In a format that he developed in Philadelphia, brought to New York City and then helped spread nationwide, Mr. Primo strove to make his news teams seem like on-air families that viewers could relate to at 6 and 11 o’clock. He did away with the staid, usually white anchorman delivering the news and switched to two anchors, often a man and a woman.
He sent reporters into the field (after learning that he did not have to pay them extra if they left their newsroom desks) and assigned them to beats, as newspapers do.
After completing their on-site reports, the reporters went into the studio and engaged in on-air discussions about their stories with the anchors. Those conversations and the chitchat between the anchors, intended to highlight their personalities, drew criticism as “happy talk.”
“He is the creator of local news as it exists today,” Geraldo Rivera, who was hired by Mr. Primo at WABC-TV in New York in 1970, said in a phone interview. “He wanted to see someone other than a mannequin deliver the news. He humanized and democratized local news.”
Mr. Primo wanted the people delivering the news to more closely resemble their audience. At WABC, he brought in women like Rose Ann Scamardella and Melba Tolliver, who is Black; the reporters John Johnson, who is Black, and Mr. Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican heritage. Mr. Rivera was working as a lawyer until Mr. Primo sponsored him in a summer program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and hired him.
“We weren’t going to just preach the news to people,” Mr. Primo said in an interview for a forthcoming documentary, “TV News Primo: Al Primo’s Eyewitness News Revolution,” directed by Brian Calfano, a journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati who is also writing a biography of him. “We wanted to go out and talk to the people because people can tell their stories better than we can write them.”
Eyewitness News went on the air on WABC in November 1968. By 1970, its ratings had catapulted from last to first among New York City newscasts. And it made stars of its anchors, Roger Grimsby, who was known for his wry and acerbic on-air comments, and the steady, dapper Bill Beutel.
Reviewing the newscast for The New York Times in 1972, John O’Connor described it as “the freshest, brightest and liveliest example of local news coverage on commercial TV.”
Perhaps the most important report on WABC’s Eyewitness News in those early years was Mr. Rivera’s exposé in 1972 of the hellish living conditions at the Willowbrook State School, on Staten Island, for people with intellectual disabilities. It earned him a Peabody Award.
Mr. Primo didn’t stop there: Over the next decades he seeded the Eyewitness News format at dozens of stations around the country, spreading the idea that a relatable, diverse group of broadcast journalists could form a winning team and generate high ratings.
Robert J. Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said that Eyewitness News became a brand that changed the industry.
“Al Primo didn’t invent local reporters going out and doing stand-ups or two people anchoring together — Huntley and Brinkley did it — but he institutionalized that and turned them into a formula that became a blueprint, a set of industrial standards, like a hamburger place,” Mr. Thomson said. “He took a bunch of things that were floating around and accelerated their evolution.”
Albert Thomas Primo Jr. was born on July 3, 1935, in Pittsburgh. His mother, Jeanette (Rovitto) Primo, was a homemaker. Albert Sr., an Italian immigrant, was a laborer who worked on railroad construction and dug graves, sometimes with his son’s help.
While attending the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Primo worked as mail clerk at WDTV, a local station, and later as an assistant to the general manager. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1958 and became the assistant news director of the station, by then called KDKA-TV, before leaving for stations in Cleveland and Philadelphia.
It was at KYW-TV in Philadelphia, as its news director, that he distilled what he had learned about local news into the Eyewitness News format, at first for a half-hour afternoon broadcast in 1965. (He borrowed the Eyewitness News name, but not the format, from a station in Cleveland.)
He dispatched reporters into the city and created the anchor team of Tom Snyder, who later hosted NBC’s late-night “Tomorrow” show, and Marciarose Shestack, who became one of the first women to anchor a prime time local newscast in a major market. He also hired Trudy Haynes to be Philadelphia’s first Black television reporter. KYW rose to the No. 1-ranked newscast in the city.
It was when Mr. Primo took his format to New York City in 1968 that it began to encounter the criticism that its anchor-reporter chatting amounted to “happy talk.”
“If you look at what he was trying to do,” Dr. Calfano said in an interview, “it was a chat between the anchor and reporter that was germane to the story. It wasn’t inane banter with an annoying laugh track. But if people on the set liked each other, then he’s guilty of happy talk.”
By the time Mr. Primo left WABC in 1972 to become the head of the ABC network’s owned and operated stations, some of them, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, had converted to the Eyewitness News format with his help. After a couple of years, he left to become the executive producer of “The Reasoner Report,” a news feature and commentary program anchored by Harry Reasoner that ran from 1973 to 1975.
Afterward Mr. Primo was a consultant, much of it spent turning dozens of local newsrooms into Eyewitness News outposts.
As the years went by, Eyewitness News stations increasingly focused on crime and violence. According to studies cited last year in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 40 percent of all television news stories about those subjects from 1987 to 1990 were on Mr. Primo’s client stations, and that those reported on crime and violence five times more frequently than stations that had not hired him.
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.”
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