Millions of viewers in Philadelphia have watched Jim Gardner deliver the news weeknights at 6 and 11 on Action News on WPVI over the past 45 years. If you do the math, that’s about 11,000 hours that Gardner has spent in their living rooms. Maybe that’s why many viewers think of Jim Gardner as, well, family.
Millions of viewers in Philadelphia have watched Jim Gardner deliver the news weeknights at 6 and 11 on Action News on WPVI, the ABC O&O, over the past 45 years.
If you do the math, that’s about 11,000 hours Jim Gardner has spent in their living rooms over the years. Not many people spend that much time at home with anyone other than family.
Maybe that’s why many viewers think of Jim Gardner as well, family.
Gardner will finish his 45-year run at WPVI, the longest tenure of any on-air personality in Philadelphia, on Dec. 21.
When Gardner made the announcement back in January, he dialed back his anchoring duties for the 11 p.m. newscast, but has continued anchoring Action News at 6 p.m.
Brain Taff will succeed Gardner as the 6 p.m. anchor, while Rick Williams took over at 11 p.m. back in January.
When Gardner made the announcement on Jan. 11, I contacted the station to see if Gardner would answer a few questions, one of which was about his favorite promos on WPVI.
Gardner says there’s been “many superb promos over the years. The news van on the surface of Mars will always be my favorite.”
Mike Monsell, WPVI’s VP of marketing says, “Jim understands the value of marketing and he was always a true champion of the work we do. That said, he was never comfortable with anything being ‘about him’. One story few know about Jim comes from the promo we did in the 2000’s when we debuted our new chopper (the commercial setting was a dinner party with a bunch of Action News anchors). It was actually HIS idea for him and Gary Papa to be playing video games. The original script had them hanging out in the kitchen, but he thought it would be more fun if they were playing video games. He was right.”
Another question I asked of Gardner was about his beginning.
Market Share: As a young man, what attracted you to local TV news? What did you see that inspired you to want to be part of that?
Gardner: My first experience with broadcast journalism came as an undergraduate at Columbia. Columbia was the East Coast locus of student activism, as Berkeley was on the West Coast, and when hundreds of students occupied a half dozen buildings on the Columbia campus, it effectively shut the university down. There were several local issues being protested by the “radicals” but in fact, it was all about 1968, we just didn’t have the perspective at the time to truly understand what was happening.
Of course, the Vietnam War was a point of protest, but even more fundamentally, the activist segment of the campus was acting out against the government and virtually all forms of conventional authority. Those of us who worked for the college radio station, WKCR, immediately became student journalists, to provide accounts of what turned out to be historic events. The university finally called in the NYPD to clear hundreds of students from the buildings, and that resulted in the arrests of hundreds of Columbia students, with substantial numbers being injured during the police action. We student journalists documented the events, minute by minute, and in the subsequent hours, tried to tell a story of our campus, our home, being violated (or so we thought at the time) by outside law enforcement.
The Columbia campus continued to be the center of student activism for decades, but for the rest of our time there, the politics of the 1960s were an omnipresent fact of life. My experience as a student journalist, both during the chaos of violent protest, and the calmer but perhaps more important effort to understand what was really happening, set me on a path that excited me, challenged me, and made me feel like I was doing something that really mattered.
Market Share: In your first years at Action News in Philly, did you see yourself being here for a long time?
Gardner: Philadelphia area was a place that offered everything I could want in a place to call home. I loved the fact that it was a passionate sports scene, and almost immediately spent my money on season tickets to the Eagles, Phillies and Sixers. It wasn’t necessarily obvious to me at the time that investing in the tickets was, in fact, my first effort at digging some roots. I guess it’s safe to say they took hold!
Market Share: Today, what keeps you inspired and exciting about local news?
Gardner: I have always found the tristate area to be an extraordinary news market so that virtually every day is “a good news day.” But the past two-and-a-half years has been perhaps the most compelling opportunity for journalism during my time here because of the pandemic. The story has engaged every element of the human, societal and political experience, and there hasn’t been a newscast since we learned of the coronavirus where I haven’t felt that we were helping our viewers cope with their anxieties or make good decisions by giving them the tools to do what they thought was best for them and their families.
NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I grew up in the Philly area watching WPVI. In 1987, I worked for a local film production company that was shooting a promo with Gardner at the Vietnam Memorial in a park in Wilmington, Del. That day, my wife was in the hospital in the early stages of delivering our second child. During the shoot, I collected some change and tried to find a phone booth to call her without success.
When Gardner got wind of it, he insisted I use his car phone. Almost no one had a car phone back then.
Gardner started up his car, turned on the air conditioning and showed me how to make the call. When I got my wife on the phone, I told her I was calling her from the driver’s seat of Jim Gardner’s car, using his personal car phone.
Here we were, having a baby and all we could talk about was how tickled we were about talking on Gardner’s car phone.
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