Beyond
the standardized set of channels, and beyond the outlook of the
Wasatch Front, way up yonder in the hills of Park City, you'll find a
television station to the East that's been making a name for itself
over the past few years.
--- Park
City Television has been providing not just their city, but the state
with a line of programming focused on local sports, music and
homelife. And one of the driving forces behind the station's success
has been Ori Hoffer. Starting out as a reporter covering stories to
producing shows to taking over hosting duties on “Mountain Views”,
he's helped make the station a mainstay in the area and brought more
focus to programming featuring Utah entertainment and politics. I got
a chance to chat with Ori about his career and joining PCTV, as well
as getting a photographic tour of their studio and offices.
Ori
Hoffer
http://parkcity.tv/
Gavin:
Hey Ori! First thing, tell us a little about yourself.
Ori:
My name is Ori Hoffer and I'm the news director and producer/host of
"Mountain Views" at Park City Television. I've been at the
station for 4 years now, making it the second longest job I've ever
had. I live here in Park City with my wife, three year-old daughter
and a 7.5-year old Vizsla named Ginger.
Gavin: How did
you first take an interest in broadcasting?
Ori: I've
always been a sport fanatic. Growing up in a college town like Ann
Arbor (Univ. of Michigan), I was fed a steady diet of football and
basketball, plus I played every sport I could from a young age.
Around 5th grade, however, I looked at my stature among my
classmates and realized that life as a professional athlete would
probably not come my way, but talking about sports could be a career.
That decision led to everything I've done since.
Gavin:
You went to college at the University Of Michigan and got your degree
in History and Communications. What are your time like spent there
and what did you think of their program?
Ori: Even
though U of M was literally in my backyard (seriously, my house was
closer to campus than the place I lived in senior year), I loved
being there. Because I wasn't in an unknown environment, I did my
best to try things I hadn't done before - so I joined the crew team,
lived on a co-ed floor, joined a fraternity, worked for the campus
radio station, took road trips on a whim. The communications
department at Michigan wasn't the strongest when it came to on-air
production, choosing to focus more on the sociological aspects of
communication, so my job working at the radio station doing news &
sports features, hosting a call-in sports talk show, doing
play-by-play for football, basketball & hockey games (plus one
unfortunate foray into baseball) was my true education for what would
come later. The history degree was more serious, just in case I
needed something to fall back on.
Gavin: What
eventually persuaded you to move to Washington D.C.?
Ori:
When I graduated, I sent out resumes and demo tapes to every TV and
radio news station in the places I thought I wanted to live - not
even a nibble. I was working at the NPR station in Ann Arbor (WUOM)
filling in for the sports guy and doing occasional features when I
decided it was time to leave the place I'd called home for 22 years.
I wanted to either work for CNN in Atlanta or NPR in D.C., and really
it came down to the fact that I didn't know anyone in Atlanta and had
two friends in D.C. whose couch I could crash on while looking for a
job.
Gavin:
How did you come into getting the job with NPR, and what was that
experience like for you?
Ori: I had met "All
Things Considered" host Noah Adams at an event in Ann Arbor and
we had a nice chat about working for NPR, so when I got there, I
called him up, he remembered me and gave me a tour of the place.
While that didn't go anywhere, it only encouraged me to keep trying.
So I called the brother of an old family friend who was an
entertainment lawyer in Bethesda. I went to his office, we chatted
for a bit, then he asked me, "Where do you want to work?" I
told him NPR, he opened his Rolodex, made a call to someone he knew
there and handed me the phone. I was volunteering in the Audience
Services department the next day, and six weeks later, I had my first
"real job" sending transcripts to listeners and media
people looking for background on a story. While it wasn't my ultimate
goal of working on an NPR show, I got to do so many great things that
I will never forget that position. I helped put NPR online, first
with a site on AOL listing authors, musical guests and recipes that
had been on the show, then later on our first website. I sat in on
planning meetings with Rob Glazer, the head of RealNetworks. I spoke
on a panel at the Smithsonian on how the media could use online
tools. I played softball with Morning Edition host Bob Edwards and a
number of other NPR personalities. I was up on everything in the
news, was young and living in Clinton's D.C. - didn't get much better
than that.
Gavin: Why did you switch from NPR to go to
work for America Online?
Ori: I wasn't working on a
show, doing the editorial work that I knew I should be doing. Because
I was the one managing NPR's site on AOL, I knew a little bit about
this small startup just down the road in northern Virginia. They had
a job posting one day for an online sports editor, I sent my resume
in at 4PM, and when I got home at 6:30, they had already contacted me
for an interview. It took a few months, but I finally made the
switch, which sent me down a whole other path.
Gavin:
How was it for you producing online content in its infancy and the
challenges it presented at the time?
Ori: Those early
days in the newsroom were amazing - we had an incredible staff, many
of whom have gone on to bigger and better things (Liz Kelly writes
"Celebritology" for the Washington Post, Peter Shankman is
an international social media star, etc.). We covered everything from
17-year-cicadas to Princess Di to Bush v. Gore and we did it in a way
that traditional news outlets weren't. Every story had a photo to go
with it. Most had a sidebar or two with related info. Most important
of all, there were community links on everything so a discussion
about the news could go on. When events like Columbine or Dale
Earnhardt's death happened, AOL was able to tap into what real people
were saying in ways that TV, radio and newspapers couldn't. We also
had freedom to be creative. If we wanted to start a section "For
Men Only," we could. Best Air Guitar Moves photo gallery? Done.
SI Swimsuit Issue Trading Cards? Why not. Of course, if you look at
the stuff we produced now, the graphics were terrible, and severely
limited by the catalog of templates we could use. As systems got more
powerful, and people got faster connections, we could do more, but by
that time, we had added many more layers of middle-to-upper
management, which meant that ideas for fun stuff had to go through
channels, with everyone putting their own stamp on things.
Gavin:
What drew you to tryout for the National Skeleton Team? And how did
you do in the longrun?
Ori: As we were getting ready
for the 2002 Olympics, I came to Salt Lake for the pre-Olympics media
conference (I was AOL's Olympics producer). I talked to a couple of
skeleton athletes about their sport, and one mentioned that he was on
the World Cup circuit after first getting on a sled four years
previously. That put a bug in my ear, and so I signed up for skeleton
school at Lake Placid that January, just a month before the Games. I
did well enough at a 5-day camp (after 1 race, I was ranked 27th
in the nation) that the coach said I had a shot at making the
national team if I tried the sport full-time. I was getting tired of
yearly layoffs at AOL, had watched my stock options collapse after
the AOL-Time Warner merger, and so, after coming to Utah for the
Games, I thought that this would be a fun place to live. My fiance
was ready to leave DC as well, we came out here in July '02, bought a
house, then returned permanently in October. I came close to making
the national team that first season, but while I had the physical
skills, the mental side wasn't there and in the qualifying race I
couldn't focus and had some bad runs. More competition the next year
coupled with the need for a full-time job meant I couldn't spend as
much time at the gym, on the track as I wanted, and again I just
missed out on qualifying. At that point, I decided that being one of
the top 40 athletes in the country in any sport was still pretty good
for a guy in his mid-30s and so I slid for one more year with the
club, and then put the sled and spikes away. They're still in the
garage, though, waiting for me to get back on and race
again.
Gavin:
Why did you choose to move to Park City?
Ori: With
skeleton being the driving force for our move, the choice was Lake
Placid or Park City. I've been to Lake Placid in January and -10
degrees is not for me. My wife is a massage therapist, so moving to a
resort town meant she would have plenty of work opportunities. I
figured I had a marketable skill set that would lead to many job
opportunities - that was the only thing I was wrong about. Having
lived in D.C., we were pretty used to a diverse, cosmopolitan
atmosphere - we weren't sure we'd find that in Utah, but when we saw
a bunch of men in drag for "Pageant: The Musical" during
Park City's 4th Of July parade, we thought we'd be
okay.
Gavin: What brought you back into the fold of
broadcasting?
Ori: After working over at the outlet
mall for nine months while looking for a real job, I saw that KPCW
radio was looking for a reporter. Not having done any reporting for
ten years, I wasn't sure this was going to be the right job for me,
but I dusted off my old demo tape from college, sent it in, and the
next thing I know, I'm covering school board and city council
meetings. The irony of it taking me ten years to get the job I could
have had right out school was not lost on me. Remember, I didn't want
to do the whole small town radio ladder thing right out of school. I
wanted to go straight to the national office. Oh well. I soon left
the meeting circuit behind and was hosting a daily interview program
and producing the Park City Marketplace segment as well as other
feature packages. It was just like falling off a log doing radio
again, though with the added benefit of electronic editing tools
instead of razor blades and splicing tape. I knew that this was what
I was meant to be doing.
Gavin:
How did you get the job working for Park City Television?
Ori:
In a strange twist of fate, the host of Mountain Views had left PCTV,
and I wasn't feeling much love from KPCW management, so they called
me and asked if I'd like to come over and do TV instead. After some
soul-searching (I'd never done TV after all, always thought I had a
face for radio), I said yes. It always made me smile that eventually
the radio station hired two people to do what I was doing by myself,
but no, I'm not bitter.
Gavin: During your first few
years there what kind of work did you create and produce for
them?
Ori: The first thing I did when I got to PCTV was
actually go out and start finding stories to cover. The station had
previously done maybe 3-4 features a month - I started trying to find
local personalities and businesses that would have an interesting
story to tell. I did stories on a local falconer, cool businesses
like Skullcandy, Backcountry.com and ProBar, exhibits at the Utah
Museum of Fine Arts. I had the sense that people only thought of PCTV
as a station for wild ski videos - I wanted to make it a place for
the things that locals and visitors like to experience.
Gavin:
What was it like for you winning a couple or regional Emmy
awards?
Ori: It's great to be recognized for your work
- and it was a really fun piece to make as we followed a band that
was big in the '90s, Blessid Union of Souls, on a couple of western
dates. If you've ever wondered "where are they now?" this
was it - full of humor, sadness and some pretty good music to boot.
We win lots of awards here at the station, but honestly, it's not
like I'm always introduced as "Emmy Award Winner Ori Hoffer"
like Academy Award Winner Meryl Streep or Sir Anthony Hopkins. Still,
the trophy does look cool on the mantel.
Gavin: How did
the opportunity come about to host the show Mountain Views?
Ori:
Mountain Views was already in existence, having been developed by
Randy Barton years before I got there. My job was to take it to
another level, which I think I've done by expanding the reach of the
show to include authors, politicians, and bands from beyond the Park
City borders.
Gavin:
What's the process like for you behind planning a show and choosing
your guests?
Ori: Producing the show is one of my
favorite parts. The way I look at it, if it's a subject that I'm
interested in, there's a good chance someone else is interested as
well. So I've had scientists come on to talk about their research,
fiction and non-fiction authors, documentary filmmakers, local
artists, government officials and athletes as guests because I want
to keep people coming back to find out what's on.
Gavin:
Was it a difficulty putting local music into the show, or was it
something PCTV was open to?
Ori: Local music has always
been a part of the show. The previous host was the founder of Park
City's Mountain Town Stages, so he was really tied into the local
music scene - but he kept the focus on Park City bands, which I
thought was limiting. Because PCTV broadcasts to Salt Lake, Provo and
Ogden - and because there's so much great music coming from those
places - I wanted to reach out to bands across the region. Now, I'd
say that Mountain Views is the premier music destination for bands -
we have 2-3 bands on each week in every genre from rock to country to
jazz to experimental to hip-hop, and they get to play three full
songs. Most other TV stations, if they have music at all, will let a
band play maybe one minute of a song going into commercial. We're the
alternative for that. If anyone out there is in a band and wants to
be on the show, send me a note with a link to some music and we'll go
from there!
Gavin:
Who are some of your favorite guests or most memorable parts of the
show for you since starting it?
Ori: I'm a huge trivia
buff, so having Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings on was a real treat. I
did an off-site interview with Jungle Jack Hannah that involved a
lemur climbing on my head which made me feel just like David
Letterman. Colin Hay (from Men at Work) said that being on the show
reminded him of MTV in the early days (I think that was a
compliment), then he performed "Overkill" and blew me away.
And of course there's all the amazing guests we've had on during
Sundance - Robert Townsend, Patton Oswalt, Bobcat Goldthwait, Wim
Wenders, Sara Bareilles, Lenka.
Gavin: Do you have any
future plans for the show or sticking with the format you have
now?
Ori: For now, we don't have any major changes
planned. I'd like to add some "viral videos" to our
Pictures Of The Day segment, but since the whole show is run by one
person - directing, moving cameras, cuing tapes, etc. there isn't a
whole lot more we could do without some cloning.
Gavin:
A little state-wide. What's your take on broadcast reporting in Utah,
both good and bad?
Ori: This is an issue I have with
the entire local news industry nationwide, it's no different here. Do
people really care that much about car accidents/house
fires/robberies? How many people does a crash on I-80 affect besides
the ones involved? Sports coverage consists of the big teams with
only the rare mention of all the activities people in Utah
participate in. That's why PCTV's mission is to be an alternative to
that. Look for stories about things that actually interest people
beyond a prurient factor. Show people places and things that they
might not have known about, spend time talking about how national and
international issues affect people on a local level.
Gavin:
Are there any aspects you wish you could change or improve?
Ori:
If I was King of Local Broadcasting, I would issue an edict (printed
on a large scroll and read by the town crier of course) declaring
that all stories should have a larger message beyond "this
happened." Tell me why it happened, how it could have been
avoided, what kept it from being much worse, what lesson we should
all learn from it.
Gavin:
What do you think of our current art scene in Utah and how its
changed in recent years?
Ori: Utah may not have a whole
avant-garde scene, but anytime you have a place that has a dominant
culture, there is bound to be some counter-balancing reaction to
that, and I think you see a lot of that in local art. I admit I'm not
too tied into the avant-garde/underground scene, but there is
wonderful stuff being produced all over. Guys like Ben Wiemeyer and
his graffiti art would fit in just fine in NYC or LA, Leia Bell and
her wonderful printmaking (and Signed & Numbered gallery) make
art affordable for everyone, and that's always a good thing.
Gavin:
Along the same lines, what are your thoughts on the music scene and
the bands coming out?
Ori: We have amazing musical
talent here in Utah - it's a shame that so many of them haven't been
discovered yet by the rest of the world - though that is certainly
changing. Band Of Annuals & The Brobecks are getting lots of
recognition. The Gorgeous Hussies are a really fun group of guys, and
now that they're dedicating themselves to music full-time, you might
hear more about them. Something I find really encouraging is the
support that young musicians get when they're just starting out -
whether it's in School of Rock or over at SpyHop, with their new
record label and Open Mic sessions, kids are getting a good
foundation to help get them to the next level.
Gavin:
Also on the local filmmaking community, what do you think of the
local films being produced from both students and amatures these
days?
Ori: The stuff that is coming out of BYU's
animation program is amazing - no wonder they win student Oscars
every year. The last couple of years have seen locals get their short
films into Sundance, and just the other day, I had two local
filmmakers who've had their feature-length docs showcased at places
like SXSW, AFI-Fest and Silverdocs. We all know Utah is a great place
to film, with wonderful talent on both sides of the camera, so I'm
sure there will be something big coming from the Beehive in the
future.
Gavin: For entertainment as a whole, do you see
SLC or Utah in general becoming a hotspot down the road?
Ori:
SLC has all the potential to be another Seattle/Austin/Montreal - we
have all the facilities, plenty of job opportunities and people who
like to be entertained - but there needs to be a bigger cultural
shift to be open to dramatic change before the masses will start
flooding our area. I don't see that happening any time soon, and
honestly, I'm not sure that would be a good thing anyway. How much do
we hear about the "Seattle sound" anymore? I think it'd be
better to have a consistently good scene than becoming a flash in the
pan.
Gavin:
What can we expect from both the show and yourself the rest of the
year?
Ori: It's pretty much steady as she goes on the
good ship Mountain Views. I'm still having fun finding interesting
people to talk to and cool bands to listen to, so I'm in no rush to
fix things. Personally, I might be getting a new hairstyle in the
coming weeks - I've had this 'do for seven years now, it's time for a
tweak.
Gavin: Aside from the obvious, if there anything
you'd like to plug or promote?
Ori: Just watch our show
- Monday through Thursday at 6 & 11PM (if you don't have Comcast
Digital Cable, you can watch online at http://parkcity.tv).
We also have our weekend show, “Unplugged” that runs Friday,
Saturday & Sunday where we go outside the studio to showcase
what's going on in Utah. If you have an interesting story to tell, a
cool event to promote, a new CD coming out, whatever - drop me a note
at ori@parkcity.tv,
I'd love to hear from you.