For morning TV’s ‘bookers,’ a constant race to secure ratings-grabbing guests

A tornado tears across southwestern Missouri, visiting devastation on the small town of Joplin. The dramatic news breaks in network TV newsrooms in New York in the early evening hours of May 22. What next? ¶ If you’re a booker for one of the networks’ morning programs, the first rule is this: Get there. Fast. Being first on the scene often means getting “the get” — securing interviews with the most newsworthy and compelling people. ¶ Bookers, or, more formally, “segment producers,” don’t shoot video or pictures or collect facts that correspondents report. Their job is to persuade a suddenly famous nobody to share his or her story on air with millions of strangers, preferably from a couch in a New York studio. Live television demands a constant flow of talking heads; bookers are the people who wrangle, cajole, sweet-talk — and often pay for — those heads to speak. ¶ Speed is the biggest advantage for the small army of people who produce morning television, the most competitive part of the 24-7 news cycle. In the elbow-throwing TV booking business, being first can mean nailing an exclusive that denies competitors the same interviews. In other words, the “Today” show’s gain is a loss for “Good Morning America,” CBS’s “Early Show” and the cable networks. And vice versa.

“If we aren’t knocking on your door, we’ll be calling. If we haven’t called, we’ll be at your door,” said Marc Victor, a senior producer who oversees booking for NBC’s “Today Show,” which scrambled freelance and staff bookers to Joplin. “It’s really the first person there who gets the exclusive, and that’s the prize. Either you’re aggressive and on top of it 24 hours a day, or you lose.”

Rival bookers sometimes collaborate, “sharing” a suddenly besieged individual who otherwise might be reluctant to commit to just one program. When all else fails, however, they do it the old-fashioned way: They steal each other’s “gets.”

Remember Ted Williams, the golden-voiced homeless man whose down-on-his-luck story briefly captivated the nation earlier this year? “Today” thought it had him locked up for an exclusive interview in January. “Good Morning America” thought otherwise.

When Williams stepped out of NBC’s studios for a smoke, a “GMA” booker pounced, spiriting him away to a waiting car.

“We basically kidnapped him,” Santina Leuci, “GMA’s” senior editorial producer, said in a recent magazine interview.

The bookers’ first-on-the-spot credo makes them the advance guard of any media circus. They’re the unseen presence at every trial of the century, natural disaster, school shooting or tabloid-quality “human-interest” story, from “Octomom” Nadya Suleman to Casey Anthony, the Florida woman acquitted in the death of her toddler daughter, Caylee.

The Joplin tornado left some bookers in a pickle. Because direct flights to the area from New York and Washington — the two most booker-centric cities — had stopped by early evening, the networks’ reps had to find other ways in.

One network booker made it to Joplin from New York by 5 p.m. the next day only to discover that her rivals were already combing the countryside. By nightfall, she found herself driving through a dark and disordered landscape, guided only by the lights of TV crews who were interviewing survivors.