A ham-handed practice session diverted Mike Miller from his first career choice. A lucky break introduced him to his life’s work.
Miller, who retires this week after 32 years in Milwaukee TV news, majored in mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, hoping to become a play-by-play announcer.
“I thought, ‘What a sack job that is! Travel around the country and sit and watch ball games.’ I was thinking national level.’” So the college radio station handed him a cassette recorder and told him to sit in the stands during a LaCrosse football game and record a play-by-play.
“It was god-awful bad,” Miller laughs. “There’d be a hit, and I’d go ‘oooh!!!’ I listened back to that tape and decided that’s the end of that career.”
The college major continued though, and in his last semester — when he’d filled all his major graduation requirements and was planning on a handful of kick-back classes like volleyball and music appreciation — his news writing professor and college advisor called him in with an alternative: Local TV station WKBT, Channel 8, had a non-paying internship worth 12 credits for the semester.
“I said, ‘Ahh…News? I dunno.’” But Miller took it.
“I was there Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., getting paid nothing,” he says, sipping on a Diet Coke in a Channel 12 conference room last Thursday morning. “But boy the bug bit me bad then. And by the end of that semester, I was doing everything that everybody else was — shooting film and writing and editing, back in the film days where you tore film apart and slapped it together with glue. And at the end of the semester they said, ‘Well, sheesh, we’ve got to hire this kid because he’s as good or better than the people we have.’ So they hired me right out of school, and that was 1975.”
He stayed for three years, then got hired at WITI Channel 6 in 1978, and has been working ever since. Miller is the only broadcast journalist to work at three Milwaukee TV stations; after 12 years at WITI, he moved to WTMJ Channel 4. Since 2002, he’s been at WISN Channel 12, during a period that saw the ABC affiliate succeed TMJ as the most serious TV news operation in Milwaukee while the latter opted for a more sensationalist approach.
“Someone joked I should sign a contract to work one day at Channel 58 just to make a quadruple header,” Miller says. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
The news business has changed a lot since Miller arrived at WITI with a 1970s haircut and a gap-toothed grin.
News shows are eating up more time than ever, with hours and hours more programming than when he started. Miller made the jump from Channel 6 to Channel 4 in 1990 to anchor the station’s first hour-long morning newscast. That was after a lawsuit in which he successfully overturned a broad non-compete clause in his Channel 6 contract.
“I couldn’t have sharpened pencils at any other station. The judge said that’s too broad, too vague, unenforceable.”
And technology has made it possible to begin to tell a news story faster than ever. “When I first got to Channel 6, they were just starting to change from film to videotape.” Now digital recording is coming in. In the meantime, TV reporters on the scene can send cell phone pictures back from a fire or even get on a laptop and streaming digital video to the WISN Channel 12 website. “Whew. Gizmos. Gadgets. I’m a little old school for those,” Miller says. “I joke that if I wasn’t retiring, I might have to quit.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Lori Waldon, WISN news director, interjects. Miller concedes: “No, I’d have to learn it.”
But the basic skills remain the same, he contends. “It’s still going to be, go get the facts, put the words with the pictures, and put it out there.
“As a reporter I’m still going out and talking to as many people as I can involved in the story and getting the pictures and getting the facts and putting it into a minute to 30-second [story] as interesting as I can make it.”
His most memorable stories as a weekend anchor have been big breaking news — the pope’s death, the hotel-room mass killing by a gunman at a church service several years ago and the murder of hunters up north a while back.
But when it comes to reporting, people stories are what he’s loved best. An out-of-work man in his 40s who joined the military so he could get health insurance for his wife’s cancer. A 75-year-old ex-marine running across country with his son — essentially running a marathon every day. And the story of a Holy Hill man who refused to be shown on camera when he gave an account of a weird encounter with a 7-foot beast that had rocked his truck and run off with a dead deer.
“I never mentioned Bigfoot in that story,” Miller is quick to point out. “CNN picked up the story and headlined it ‘Bigfoot in Wisconsin?’ and it got like a million hits.”
The big award, an Emmy, eluded him, though he was nominated for a three-part series he reported from Arizona on illegal immigration. The series led off with an account of Mexicans fleeing into the U.S. by “trying to walk up the river in January – in the middle of the day. One of them got hypothermia. They got a helicopter that rushed him to the hospital. He almost died.” Part two looked at Wisconsin National Guard troops building fences at the border, and part three sat down with Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner and immigrant rights activist Cristina Neumann-Ortiz to examine the issues of illegal immigration.
It’s serious broadcast journalism like that for which Channel 12 has become recognized in recent years. Miller only reluctantly weighs in to assess his former employer, Channel 4, which once enjoyed that role.
“I don’t think they’re what they used to be,” he says. “I don’t know what they’re trying to do.”
TV journalism still excels on visuals. But it’s also a lot less glamorous than it appears, and Miller makes a point of telling that to high school groups when he speaks to them.
“I tell them, ‘Have you thought about that you’re going to be working Thanksgiving and Christmas and nights and weekends, boys and girls? Have you thought about that?
“I tell them, ‘you’re guessing way high on the pay. And before you even get to that, you’re going to have to spend two or three years in LaCrosse or Rhinelander or wherever you can get that first job out of college, and that’s not easy. And most of them don’t get that first job. And then, every market you go to, whoop, you’re low on the totem poll again.”
As an Oconomowoc native, however, “I never wanted to bolt anywhere else,” Miller says. And he’s been treated well at Channel 12. So why retire now?
There was no particular wake-up call, no huge epiphany to lead Miller, 58, to retire at the end of this week. “It just feels like the right time. I don’t think I’m going to have more new experiences. Although in news, every day is a little different. But it just feels like the right time.”
His wife, Mary Anne, is retiring 10 days after he is, capping a 36-year career, mostly of teaching kindergarten. His time at WISN as a weekend anchor as well as a weekday reporter has kept the two apart more than they’d like. “My off days are Tuesday and Wednesday. And Saturday and Sunday, when she’s home, ‘Adios, I’m off to work.’”
And he’s seen mortality brush his generation a little too closely. “The best man at my wedding was in an industrial accident five, six, seven years ago. He’ll never get out of a wheelchair. I have another good friend from high school who’s in excellent shape — athlete, trim, worked out — had a stroke shoveling snow a couple of years ago. He’s OK, but… just too much of that. So I decided to enjoy life.”
There’s also another benefit, he jokes. “Now I won’t have to wear more makeup than my wife!”
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