Call it the Tale of the 2 Channel 2s.

There was the Channel 2 News in the 1980s, which was so deep in third place that it was hard to imagine it ever getting close to the top of the news competition.

And there is the Channel 2 News of the last decade, which now seems poised to battle the Oprah-less Channel 4 for news supremacy in the fall.

No one seems better equipped to talk about the story of Channel 2’s recovery than Channel 2 storyteller Scott Brown, who is one of two full-time on-air staffers (Ed Kilgore is the other) who was there to see both Channel 2s, with a stint as a political spokesman in between.

I began to think about the 2 Channel 2’s because of all the awards that Brown has won recently. He has won six this year in state and national competitions, including two New York State Emmys and two prestigious national Edward R. Murrow awards.

It made me wonder how likely it would have been for Brown to win such honors in the New Jersey native’s first stint at the NBC affiliate from 1982-91.

“Zero chance,” said Brown in a telephone interview. “Back then our main concern was filling up the air time and quality was not a big part of the equation.”

Chaos was.

“It was like playing for the New York Yankees under George Steinbrenner in the 1980s when you had a manager every year,” recalled Brown. “We had four owners in seven or eight years. I left right before (one of the owners) went into bankruptcy.”

Asked to continue the baseball metaphor about working for Channel 2 News back then, Brown said “it would be playing in the minor leagues in Moose Jaw, Canada, riding on an old bus to games and eating at McDonald’s. Your equipment didn’t work and the number of teammates kept getting smaller and smaller.”

Morale was lower than Anthony Weiner’s reputation.

“It was horrible,” said Brown. “They were cutting staff, not investing in equipment and there was a revolving door of owners and managers.”

However, Brown said there was one positive.,

“We had good people,” he said. “We had horrible owners and bad managers but we had good people.”

At one time, the main anchor team was Don Postles and Allison Rosati. Kilgore was the sports anchor and Don Paul was the meteorologist.

“Can you imagine if they kept that team together for 10 or 15 years?” asked Brown.

Postles and Paul became part of Channel 4’s No.1 news team and Rosati moved to a much bigger job in Chicago.

Brown left in 1991 to first become the spokesman for Erie County Executive Dennis Gorski and then for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. He returned to news in 2001 to work behind-the-scenes at a Philadelphia station and came back to Channel 2 in 2003 to get back on the air at a station now owned by a major broadcasting and newspaper owner – Gannett.

Things couldn’t have been more different than they were in Brown’s first stint at Channel 2.

“You had committed, long-term owners,” said Brown.

He also credits former news director Ellen Crooke, who eventually moved on to Gannett’s Atlanta station, with “changing the culture in the newsroom to make it competitive, do important stories, to break news and do team coverage of big news stories.”

The big story than changed Channel 2’s image was its coverage of the County budget crisis under former County Executive Joel Giambra. “We had three reporters on that story every day,” said Brown.

Needless to say, morale improved as coverage – and ratings – improved.

Brown’s eight Emmys and three national Murrow Awards in his second stint at Channel 2 reflect the station commitment to news. The award he recently won for his coverage of the “Death of Laura Cummings” came from a story that he even thought had been too long for local TV News.

He told News Director Jeff Woodard that he realized the 13-minute piece might have to be edited before he showed a preview.

“He took a look and said ‘this is going on the air the way it is,’” recalled Brown. “That kind of thing in local TV is unheard of and reflects the commitment they have to do serious work.”

(Channel 2 is so serious about news that it even suspended its award-winning reporter earlier this year for not catching a mistake made on one of his stories by a photographer. “It was unfortunate,” is all Brown will say about that.)

The seriousness that Gannett and Channel 2 management has given its news coverage has made Brown feel like he has gone from playing for playing in the minors in Moose Jaw in the 1980s to playing for a dominant major league team in 2011.

“Now it is like playing for the (Boston) Red Sox,” said Brown. “You have committed ownership that knows what it is doing and you know the goal is to put the most quality product on the field.”

So it is no wonder than Brown agreed with my calling the story The Tale of 2 Channel 2s.

“The call letters are the same and the address is the same but pretty much everything else is different,” agreed Brown.

pergament@msn.com

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