{image2}He's one of the most creative and funny guys on local television news, and he's still in the formative years of his young career. He's a new dad, a passionate Milwaukeean and that product testing guy that you know and love on WTMJ-TV. He's Vince Vitrano, and he's our latest Milwaukee Talks subject.
OMC: Give us the brief "Vince Vitrano Story."
Vince Vitrano: Sure. I was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Wauwatosa. We moved there when I was about 2 years old, and I spent the remainder of my formative years in Tosa. I went to Wilson Elementary and McKinley Elementary, Longfellow, Tosa East (class of 1992), and then from there to college at St. Norbert.
OMC: Do you come from a big family?
VV: My brother (Nick) is four years younger than me, he also went to Tosa East, also went to St. Norbert.
And he is now in radio in Green Bay, does an AM sports talk show and stuff (WNFL 1440). And then my sister (Emily), she's 10 years younger than me, so she is going to be a senior at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and she wants to be an actress.
I did some sports radio up in Green Bay also when I was working in TV, it was kind of like a part-time thing with another guy at the TV station. I produced his show and was a little bit of a sidekick ... and we needed a call screener so, I asked my brother, who was in college then. When I moved on from the show he took my spot, so (basically) he owes me everything.
OMC: Did you know what you wanted to do when you were in high school or even when you graduated college? Did you have a pretty good idea of what field you wanted to get into?
VV: In high school I wanted to be an astronaut, and I'm totally serious. I went to space camp, I saved money from my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route for a number of years and paid to go to Space Academy Level 2 in Huntsville, Ala. For 10 days they teach you how to fly the space shuttle, essentially. I was there, I was going to do that, I was going to shoot for it but I just was terrible at math and I hated it. You can't go to Purdue and major in aerospace engineering if you can't do math. I was struggling to get Bs and Cs in math and I was sleepwalking through advanced English so it made me think that some people are made to be astronauts and some not ... and I was not.
So I knew when I left high school I wanted to do something with writing and communications. By the time I left college I knew I wanted to be in TV news.
OMC: What advice would you give a college student who wants to be on-air someday?
VV: Absolutely get an internship. Get two, get three, get as many internships as you can because it's not even as important that you major in journalism or you major in communications or whatever. You could be a political science major and learn all the TV stuff you need to learn in your internships. And I've also told interns at our station, because we're a bigger market, obviously the biggest in the state, intern at a big station to see how it works, to see how the big city operates and all that -- but also try to intern at a smaller station.
I interned in Green Bay where I eventually started and there you just get to touch more stuff, you get to do -- you get to edit stories, you get to write stories, it's just a lot more hands-on because they need the help.
OMC: So, Green Bay was your first job in TV?
VV: WFRV, which is the CBS up in Green Bay. I got an internship for my senior year, and two months into it they offered me a job as a weekend producer. When they hired me for the internship the guy who hired me said, "Now, just so you know, Green Bay's a medium size market, and we don't hire people with no experience for jobs. So just in fairness to you, probably when your internship is over you're going to have to go out and look for a job in Wausau or Eau Claire or someplace smaller."
And then two months later I was producing the weekends. And then my news director told me, "Now just so you know, if one of our other producing jobs opens up we don't hire (interns), so don't feel bad but you may get overlooked for that." And right before I graduated they gave me the 10 o'clock producing job.
OMC: Is that the progression in the news business -- going from a smaller market to a larger market, to an even larger market?
VV: Some people reach a point where they like where they are. And many people started smaller than Green Bay, so if Green Bay's your third stop and not your first, you're maybe predisposed to staying there, anyway.
But it depends a lot on what your personal situation is and if you are the main anchor, the number one guy in Green Bay, those people make great money, and they have great jobs, and it's a great city. So maybe your journey is over. I know many people who are here in Milwaukee, and it's a stepping-stone, and they know it when they come.
OMC: And was your preference to get back to Milwaukee?
VV: Absolutely. From the day I started working in television, as much as I love Green Bay and I had a great time, I really enjoyed working there, but I knew that some day I wanted to come back here, and I knew that specifically I wanted to work for channel 4. That's what we watched when I was a kid. So that's what I wanted to do, I knew that.
OMC: When you started at channel 4, do you have the ability to come up with your own stories? What is your typical day like now?
VV: When I started I actually took a part-time job in the spring of 2000, and the news director whom I had talked with over the course of two years basically banging on his door saying "Let me in," said "All right, I can guarantee you three days a week of work and maybe some filming."
I'm like, "All right we'll take it, we'll take it ... all right, bye." That guy must've been thinking, "Oh my God, he took it?" At that point I would do like whatever, sure, but from day one they've always sought and valued input from everyone. Your day starts every day with a news meeting involving managers and reporters and producers, and you sit at the table and you get your turn to pitch your stories.
You don't always do them because there are a number of things that we already know are happening and only so many people but if you come in with a story that you're passionate about and you can sell it to the news management, then you'll get an opportunity to go out and do that, if you can sell it.
They may very well disagree (with your idea) and then you just go off to your car accident or fire or whatever story it is that day.
OMC: It seems (in local TV news) that everyone just reports what everyone else is doing? Does that make sense?
VV: I think it depends on how you use the information. Absolutely you should monitor, whatever business you're in, (you should monitor what) your competitors are doing. And we have the ability, it's such a public product, that in the instant our 5 o'clock news is on so is 6's and so is 12's and everybody else, so you absolutely should see what they're doing. (We want to know), did we miss anything? Do we have an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back because we had something they didn't? Let's see where we stand in relation to everyone.
I think the danger is then we still need to chart our own course, and we need to have our own values and our own beliefs about what news in Milwaukee needs to be and to the extent that we let other organizations push us in different directions -- I don't think that's healthy nor is it for them. We all have our own identities and stations and they're attractive to people for different reasons. No one's ever going to watch just one station.
OMC: Do you think there's enough room for five local news stations in the market?
VV: There's obviously room because they're still there. And they're not there if they're not making some money or at least serving some purpose. So there are a lot of people who live here, and people have diverging ideas and opinions about what they want in their news. So as long as they can sustain themselves there's obviously room.
OMC: How has media and local TV changed just in the five years that you've been in it?
VV: There is more news more often in more places, and that changes how we work, how we operate and how we cover everything. With 24-hour news on all the cable stations now there's our desire on a local end, you see a lot of our stations trying to be more 24 hour. So if there's a breaking news event at 2 in the afternoon very often at least three of our stations will be carrying it live because we got to have it now. Because if we don't have it now, well, they might and then you'll turn to them to see the updates.
OMC: What do you like doing the most at your current position?
VV: I do like being funny, really. I like the comedic aspects of my job most, and I think there's room for that in local news. You don't want to lead with a Vinnie goof off story. However, there is room as we've seen with the product tests or features from Summerfest or lighter moments and I've really enjoyed presenting those.
{image1}OMC: Tell us about the product segments.
VV: I like making people laugh. That's kind of the genesis behind the product tests, which are consumer stories, (but) at the end I hope you've learned something about a product and maybe have decided "I will buy that or I won't." However, it's a vehicle to entertain and to kind of make fun of the infomercials and slice and dice and do all of that.
I actually get a lot of the ideas from infomercials. For whatever reason I've always enjoyed watching them, and you find yourself getting sucked in on a Saturday morning, you're like, "My God, how do I not have this? How have I lived 30-plus years of my life without this blender?" And so it's really a desire in me to say, "Let's see if that thing works."
OMC: Any huge disappointments that you can recall? A product you were super excited about was just bombed?
VV: Just recently we tested the Magic Bullet, which is an infomercial that's still running, I think. It's that sort of jet shaped tiny blender and they have those two-bit actors sitting around in someone's kitchen ... and they're blending up salsa and then they're making margaritas and then they're (saying) "look at this Alfredo sauce, boom, pop it in the microwave it's there."
So we tested that and I was very disappointed. It didn't chop evenly, it didn't do much more than a regular old blender would, very disappointing. I still have people come up to me and say like I can't believe that didn't work. You didn't test it right. I say, "I know. Hey, I'm with you, I wanted it to work. They had me at hello and it didn't work."
OMC: What else do you want to do locally? And what do you want to be doing in 10, 20 years?
VV: Up until really the last couple of years, I had a career path really well mapped out, I wanted to start in Green Bay and I wanted to get a job on the air and I wanted to anchor in Green Bay and then I wanted to come here to develop.
Now I'm at a point where it could really go in so many different directions. I'm at the end, toward the end, of a second contract with TMJ, and I'll just say I have no desire to leave Milwaukee. I'm not sitting here thinking like I got to get out of here and get on to the next big market.
I'm open to so many ideas but really ... I really want to stay here. And maybe we'll just leave it at that.
OMC: Speaking of Milwaukee, what do you see as the best and worst about our city?
VV: Best and worst? I think the people are every bit as great as we say we are. You hear that from visitors all the time. I know it warms our hearts because you're like, "Yeah see we are cool, we're good people, but we work hard and we play hard, and we do everything." We really give 100 percent to everything, and I think that is to me, that's the fiber of what this city is and I'm just very proud always of us as people. So that's best -- it has to be.
Worst -- is the people. Man, we hurt ourselves more than anyone else could. I think sometimes we don't dare to dream in this city. I think sometimes we won't take chances, we think everything's going to fail before it even gets off the ground. And I think that holds us back. We hold ourselves back. We have too many blue ribbon commissions, we have too many studies, we have too many consultants.
What we need is more action, we need to just do stuff. And when we do great things happen, the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum happens, the ballpark happens -- not Downtown where it should be, but let's not pick that stack today. We have it in us to do great things, we just don't often enough, I wish we would.
OMC: You have a magic Milwaukee wand with three wishes. What are they?
VV: I have to say we have the three-tier platform. We need to hold the line on property taxes. I know that sounds political but as a homeowner it's not political for me. We need to continue to make strides in our public education system and we need to increase development both Downtown, and more things near the lakefront. I don't want to see condos on Bradford Beach but more things, more public/private partnerships like we're sitting in right now (like Alterra at the Lake). This place is so popular it shows people are starved for things to do down here.
We can't drive people out, young people like us, because we can't afford to pay taxes on our houses. You can't leave them when they have children who reach 4 years old with a tough decision that they have now which is do I want to put my child into MPS. We're a public school family so our kids are going to be public school kids. So we'll see when it comes to that point. And then finally you got to give people more. Not necessarily more things to do but more ways to enjoy what's here. We need to take chances in development and grow this city. I think sometimes our attitude of "it's good enough how it is, just leave it;" that is not an effective growth strategy for cities. Good enough is not effective when you're trying to grow your city.
OMC: Speaking of kids, congrats on your new baby. How you sleeping these days?
VV: That's the number one question people always ask, "So how you sleeping?" Most of them are parents themselves so they're waiting for me to say not at all and then they laugh. I don't know why that's funny to people, it's not funny.
Parenting is every bit as difficult and challenging as I had anticipated it would be. Nobody does well on no sleep, and my wife's getting less sleep than me while managing another human life, something not to be taken lightly.
So even if I'm not holding the baby when she's crying or anything like that, even as we sit here now that's on your mind that there's another person out there that I'm responsible for. So it's every bit as challenging and difficult as I imagined but more rewarding in ways that I'd never imagined. To be able to just look at your child and be like that's my child; it fills you with a joy that I couldn't have anticipated knowing what I knew before.
OMC: Where did you meet your wife, Nicole?
VV: We met at Student Council Leadership Camp in Stevens Point. We were both Student Council people and there's a summer camp workshop kind of thing that we were both involved in, WASC, Wisconsin Association of School Councils. A lot of schools in our area are very involved in it and it was teaching leadership skills, how to meet people, how to deal with things, it was a great experience. And the fourth year that I was at that camp she and I met as counselors actually. She grew up in Cedarburg. Bulldogs.
OMC: Do you watch TV? Do you have favorite shows?
VV: I'm not one of those people who is a news junkie, I don't go home and watch CNN and MSNBC and all of that 24 hours a day and I think the healthiest way to approach my job is to be as normal as possible.
So, if I go home and do things like everyone else does that's where I generate my better story ideas, that's where I generate a healthy perspective on the news of the day.
I make a conscious decision not to overindulge myself in news channels. And I do watch TV. I have two kind of can't-miss shows: "West Wing" and "CSI Miami." The rest is kind of, well ... I hate reality TV. Every time I turn it on I'm like, "Why do I care about you or you?" Hope you like it because you're going to get a lot more of it.
OMC: Are you a big music fan?
VV: Yeah, I have my music. I don't go to a ton of concerts but we just went to see the Black Crowes and Tom Petty. I didn't see Kate Hudson there, though. And I kind of wish I hadn't seen her husband (lead singer Chris Robinson) because I didn't care for the show. I'd been waiting since college to see the Black Crowes, and I was disappointed. I would rather have listened to a number of my CDs on the patio.
OMC: Who has been your biggest mentor?
VV: Wow. In the career there've been just amazing people. I'm surprised how often there are people, important people, who want to shape journalists.
One of the guys who was most influential in my career was Tim Blatz. He anchored here and worked at TMJ for a number of years and was the main anchor at WFRV in Green Bay where I started. This is a guy who would get off the set at 10:30 p.m. and say to me as a young reporter, "Let's go pull your story." And he would sit there for a half-hour and just workshop with me. The guy was incredible, just really patient and a mentor in the business. But beyond that I've been really fortunate to have a lot of people; my family's all from here and I've remained close to them.
My mom and dad taught me everything I needed to know about how to get along with people and some of the most valuable things my mom taught me were manners. I find myself meeting people and in places where maybe someone of my modest background doesn't belong. I've interviewed the vice president of the United States. So at least my parents taught me a thing or two about class ... So got to give it up to the parents.
OMC: Who would you like to have a cup of coffee with or a beer with, who would it be and why?
VV: I would have the cup of coffee with whoever the sitting president of the United States is, you have the opportunity to espouse your ideas or find out what's going on in that head of whoever that very powerful person is at the time. I'll take that, and it should be a coffee meeting, not an alcohol meeting.
But I would like to share a beer with -- all right this is going to be corny -- but Daniel Webster Hoan, former mayor of Milwaukee.
I want to know all of it. I want to know what it was like from the '20s to the '40s when that guy was mayor and how he got so much done and how he kept Milwaukee, I don't want to say out of the Great Depression, but it could've been a lot worse. I think because of his policies, he helped a lot of people. And I don't necessarily agree with him on all of his politics, I'm not a socialist, but it worked for him, it worked for Milwaukee at the time and I'm fascinated by that guy and by the people around him in that era.
OMC: How do you define success?
VV: It's changed a lot over the years. And I guess a lot of people would say that but when I first got into the TV business I thought "how can you not want to get to New York, how can you not want to be Tom Brokaw or whoever?"
How can that not be your final goal and I would meet people who were like "no, I'm good here in Green Bay, I'm doing what I like, I have a family and a home and a whatever," and I used to think that those people were nuts.
But, that definition for me has changed because I think for me success will be continued growth, continued new opportunities, but at the same time a satisfaction with my place in life, where all things kind of work in harmony; family, career, and other leisure activities, just everything working together. And I think if you go too far in one extreme that's not success, sure you could be the president of some company but if your family life's falling apart, well, are you successful? I'd like to be successful from a holistic standpoint so it all has to work together.
OMC: Whom in the market do you really admire and expect?
VV: In the market, number one is (Mike) Gousha. He is the king, he will always be the king and I hope that we all realize how fortunate we are to have a guy like that anchoring our 10 o'clock news. I'm not saying that because he's on my station, I hope people don't think that. Mike is, on a personal level, every bit the great guy that you'd hope he is.
It's clear he could be wherever he wanted to be and we're fortunate that he wants to be here. So I always look to him and I look to, honestly, Mike Jacobs and to Ted Perry (at WITI) as very good writers and I take that really seriously in my work; How I construct a story and weaving sound bytes in and out and things like that and I look to those guys as just terrific storytellers and great writers.
Nationally, there's a guy by the name of Steve Hartman who works for CBS News. What's sad is I don't know that a lot of people know him but he's a feature reporter for the network and he is as good of a storyteller as I've ever seen and heard. And there's also a guy who's very similar to him, he's not on the national scene, he works at KARE 11 in Minneapolis. He used to be here, a guy by the name of Boyd Hooper, worked for channel 6 for a number of years.
I'd rather watch a hit reel from Boyd Hooper than my favorite TV shows. I could watch that stuff for hours. I think a lot of people could, it's not just because I like news, this guy is really cool.
OMC: Anything else you want to cover?
VV: I love your Web site. I do, and I'll give you a plug.
OMC: Sorry, but we must ask this. You took Chopper 4 with "Power Zoom" to a softball game. How cool is that? If we had a Chopper OMC, we'd be flying it all over town.
VV: My boss didn't think it was cool. His boss didn't think it was cool, and his boss' boss didn't think it was cool.
OMC: What are your thoughts on Packers coverage and weather coverage as it relates to local news?
VV: What you do in news on a local level is try to reach the interests of the most people most often. And I think that's why you see the proliferation of both Packers coverage and weather coverage. What affects the most people most often and let's give it to them as much as we can. The Packers coverage (is there) because we want it and we want to know everything; the health of Brett Favre's thumb is more interesting (maybe) to some people than is a car accident that happened three counties away or whatever. I think when you see a lot of Packers coverage it is because that's what people are interested in. That's what you want.
And weather; it really is hard to argue with, it does affect everyone. That said, I think when people say they want weather coverage -- I think they want to know for sure right now is there anything that's going to destroy my house in the next half-hour, like severe weather coverage, you can't mess with it, you got to do it. It saves people's lives.
But beyond that; is it going to rain tomorrow, is it going to snow tomorrow? I don't know that they necessarily need to see three stories in a row on a half an inch of snow. Sometimes I guess we overdo it.
As a journalist, you just try to have fun with it and don't BS people, if it's not the blizzard of the century then just tell them, "Hey, it's not the blizzard of the century but there's a couple inches." It might take you longer to get home and show how it impacts people. And if it doesn't impact them then show that. Hey we thought it was going to be big snow and it turned out not so much. Oh well.
A life-long and passionate community leader and Milwaukeean, Jeff Sherman is a co-founder of OnMilwaukee.
He grew up in Wauwatosa and graduated from Marquette University, as a Warrior. He holds an MBA from Cardinal Stritch University, and is the founding president of Young Professionals of Milwaukee (YPM)/Fuel Milwaukee.
Early in his career, Sherman was one of youngest members of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, and currently is involved in numerous civic and community groups - including board positions at The Wisconsin Center District, Wisconsin Club and Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. He's honored to have been named to The Business Journal's "30 under 30" and Milwaukee Magazine's "35 under 35" lists.
He owns a condo in Downtown and lives in greater Milwaukee with his wife Stephanie, his son, Jake, and daughter Pierce. He's a political, music, sports and news junkie and thinks, for what it's worth, that all new movies should be released in theaters, on demand, online and on DVD simultaneously.
He also thinks you should read OnMilwaukee each and every day.
