The Man Who Plays Pat Kiernan on TV

Every weekday morning at 7:42, the NY1 newsman Pat Kiernan does an eight-minute segment called “In the Papers” in which he summarizes important articles from that day’s newspapers. It is this portion of the newscast—not “Weather on the 1’s,” not “The Rail and Road Report,” not the breaking news from the station’s far-flung (in the five boroughs, at least) reporters—that has endeared Mr. Kiernan, who is 39 years old and has been with the station since 1997, to thousands of culturally literate New Yorkers who, it is safe to say, do not watch any other local newscasts. But ask them, and they’ll cop to a certain degree of sincere admiration, bordering on obsession for some, of Mr. Kiernan and his deadpan delivery, his boyish face, and his slight Canadian accent. (He is from Calgary originally, and moved here with his wife, Dawn, in March 1996.)

“I think a lot of the people who watch me and react that way are supposed to be part of the generation who supposedly stopped watching TV news,” Mr. Kiernan told The Observer the other day from the green room in NY1’s studio in Chelsea Market. He wore a light blue shirt, light brown suit, blue tie and black shoes; he does his pancake makeup himself, as per NY1’s non-union, DIY ethos. (Reporters, who start at around $40,000 a year, generally take their cameras with them on assignments and set them up on a tripod; the station’s budget in 2006 was a mere $25 million.) He has a break every morning around 8:15, after “In the Papers” is finished (it is shown again at 8:42 and 9:42), and he records voice-overs for upcoming segments.

“I think the presentation of TV news is as much the problem as the technological changes,” he continued. “People like a more honest presentation of the news. I don’t shy away from that honesty and presentation of analysis in the news. I hope people have the sense that I understand the stories I’m talking about. I’ve personally edited scripts on my computer.” Indeed, in an age in which broadcast news audiences have been atrophying at an alarming rate, Mr. Kiernan seems to have maintained his morning viewers over the past few years: Weekdays from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., about 73,000 people tune in; the station says this number is larger than it was five years ago.

“Pat brings a lot of depth to the job that you don’t always see with morning news anchors,” said Bob Hardt, political director for NY1. “He has a real love for the stories surrounding the city. That’s what ‘In the Papers’ is all about. In the ’40s or ’50s, he would’ve been one of the newspaper guys you’d see in a black-and-white movie saying, ‘Hey, kid, what’s the story?’”

“We have a no-nonsense attitude that you want to turn on the TV, you want to get the news,” said Mr. Kiernan. “You want to show up to work and you want to be reasonably informed when you get there. You don’t want to sit down for an extra half-hour with a bunch of cooking segments. You just want to get out the door and have a clue of what’s going on.”

For “In the Papers,” Mr. Kiernan starts with The New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post, which he calls the “core of the segment.” Then comes The Sun, which Mr. Kiernan says “clearly in the past few months ousted Newsday as the fourth-most-cited newspaper. That’s as much about The Sun as that what Newsday is doing is dishonest. They slap something about New York City on the front page—they’ve really given up… They do some good Albany reporting and things like that, so I won’t ignore it, but it’s tough to hold up the front page with some story from far out on Long Island. I look at The Observer and The Voice on Wednesday and make a decision based on what else I have and whether there’s time for a particular story.

“I get AM New York and sometimes Metro, but there’s a high percentage of wire stuff that’s available elsewhere,” he continued. “I think the viewer’s time is better spent with one of the other papers and I’d prefer to steer them in that direction. There’s sort of a subtext of wanting to encourage the employment of journalists in the city, you know? I think a paper should be rewarded for doing original reporting.”

The day before The Observer met Mr. Kiernan, he had selected a story from Keith Kelly’s column in the Post about how Star editor at large Julia Allison’s contract with the magazine had not been renewed. “I felt like her profile was high enough, between her print background and her blogging background, that that would be a juicy little water cooler thing for a certain percentage of New Yorkers,” he said. “Probably 95 percent of the audience the name means nothing to, but the 5 percent of the audience it means something to would have a fun time talking about that.

“And, you know, same thing with some of the Wall Street stories,” Mr. Kiernan continued. “It’s such an important machine to the economy. We want those people watching. You want them to feel like the segment is their way of kind of cheating, getting ready for the day. You know, like, Pat’s looking out for me.”

And so fans like 27-year-old Blair Blanchard, a freelance writer who lives in Greenpoint, has made T-shirts that say “I ❤ Pat Kiernan,” which he has given out to friends. “My friend Lindsay and I are obsessed with him,” he said. “We watch it every morning. She texts me every time he says something funny or weird. He’s very random. It’s kind of like he’s talking to himself. It’s like he woke up in the morning and he’s like, I’m going to go have a good time with myself.”