After 51 Years At WDTN-TV, Bob "Scoop" Phillips Retires
DAYTON, OH (January 9, 2008) – Photojournalist Bob "Scoop" Phillips, who was the subject of a News Photographer magazine cover story in February 2008 for his 50 years of chasing news on the streets of Dayton and Central Ohio, retired at the beginning of this after after 51 years with Channel 2.
Nicknamed "Scoop," Phillips is 75 years old and was the longest working active television news photographer in Ohio (if not the industry).
He told The Dayton Daily News, "This has been so much more than a job to me. This has been my life."
"Bob is someone you just can't replace," news director Steve Diorio said.
When the photojournalist celebrated his 50th anniversary with the station, writer Julie Washington wrote about Phillips for News Photographer magazine. Here's the story that was published in News Photographer almost a year ago:
Still Chasing Daily News After 50 Years
By Julie E. Washington
Photographs by Skip Peterson
DAYTON, OH – The January day was drizzly, cloudy, and cold. It was a day for everyone in Dayton to stay indoors under a blanket – even the criminals. Bob “Scoop” Phillips, ace reporter/videographer for WDTN-TV Channel 2, the NBC affiliate in Dayton, OH, hadn’t found a news tip to chase all morning.
Then a 911 call came over his car police scanner. Police were chasing two bank robbers in nearby Trotwood. Phillips got there in time to videotape one alleged thief being hauled to a police car.
“Why’d you rob that bank?” Phillips demanded, camera rolling. When a live van and reporter arrived on the scene, Phillips handed over his tape and told the reporter what to look for. Channel 2 viewers saw it all that night.
“Spot news is what I like best,” Phillips said. He celebrates 50 years at WDTN-TV in February 2007.
During that time, Phillips has built an impeccable reputation as a trustworthy and dedicated newsman. He mostly works alone, prowling Dayton’s downtown to cover courts, cops, and city hall, and handling interviewing and shooting himself.
This hard-charging reporter is also a softy. He treats everyone with respect. His demeanor is more like a slightly off-kilter uncle than a self-important television newsman.
“Everybody loves him to death,” said Sharon Howard, station’s director of community and public relations and founding member of Dayton Area Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
“Bob is the definition of what a true professional is all about,” Lisa Barhorst, president and general manager of WDTN-TV, said in an eMail. “He’s a photographer who’s seen so much through his lens throughout his extraordinary years of service and is respected by so many people in the Miami Valley.”
Phillips just thinks he’s lucky to have spent half a century doing what he loves. “This has been more than a job. Well, it’s my life,” Scoop said.
WDTN-TV'S star reporter/videographer never comes in the newsroom. On a recent workday morning, he pulled on a red, maroon, and tan WDTN-TV windbreaker, a WDTN-TV ball cap on his balding head. He laid his video camera on the back-seat floor of a WDTN-TV unmarked black Lumina parked at his home. With his cell phone on the driver’s seat next to his hip, and the police scanner murmuring, Phillips was ready to go find news.
“I’ve preached that there’s no news in the newsroom,” he said, driving past Dayton’s skyline. “This is the news, this is our town.”
As a gray sky spit rain, Scoop parked at the Dayton-Montgomery County Courts Building. “Anything exciting?” he asked a bailiff riding in the same elevator. “Any news?”
He made his way down a hallway of bailiffs’ offices, popping his head into each one and chatting to people sitting on benches in the hall. “Got anything at all?” People grinned when he blew a kiss their way, saluted, or flashed a thumbs-up.
Courthouse gossip buzzed about the upcoming trial of a mother who killed her baby by putting it in a microwave, but only procedural hearings were scheduled. Phillips kept prowling for something better.
While thumbing through a stack of court decisions, a clerk mentioned an upcoming juicy case. “Don’t let me miss it, Don,” Phillips said. “I got ya, Bob,” the clerk reassured him.
Phillips doesn’t assume that only the bosses know what’s going on. He leans out his car window and calls out “Any news?” to policemen in squad cars or a city attorney crossing the street.
Crime is staying level or decreasing in Dayton – but the crime rate per capita was more than twice the national average according to FBI statistics in 2005. The nightly news in Dayton probably gives the impression that crime is getting worse, Phillips said. Crime is television’s bread and butter, but television news also shows the consequences of lawbreaking, Phillips said.
“If they’re shooting each other, the neighbors need to know that,” he said.
He’s persistent but never pushy. City workers don’t get in trouble for giving him information. “I don’t remember where I heard it from – I just show up,” he said.
There isn’t anyplace where he can’t go – even police headquarters. Phillips let himself in a back door by swiping a key fob to open the electronic lock.
What makes him so good? “One word – trust,” said retired common pleas court judge John Kessler. “We trust Bob and have, because he understands the system. He knows the people and we know him. His word is good.”
Kessler recalled working with Phillips during a trial that attracted regional and national media. Kessler put Phillips in charge of the electronic media, and the newsman set up pool coverage and enforced rules about when and where participants could be interviewed. “He was like a media policeman,” Kessler said.
OVER THE YEARS, Phillips has found it easier and easier to build trust with his sources. “We’re (the media) not all bad apples. We’re not the enemy. We can be friends,” he said. “We’re not out to sting you, not out to sensationalize one story. If it’s a scandal, I’ll be right up front about it.”
Phillips thought about moving to bigger cities, but never did. He fell in love with Dayton, a city of about 160,000 that he described as big enough to have news, but small enough that you can get to the stories fast.
Dayton inhabits the same southwest corner of Ohio as his native village of Camden. Saddened by the deaths of his friends in the Korean War, he enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school graduation in 1951.
The Marines trained him as a still photographer. Phillips returned to Ohio after his tour of duty in 1955 and married his high school sweetheart, Carol, and settled in Hamilton. Then he took at photography job Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
A billboard set the 21-year-old man in a new direction in 1958. It advertised a new television station coming to Dayton, WLWD-TV, which would become WDTN-TV. “I thought, aha, that’s it, that’s the cup of tea,” Phillips said. “It provided all kinds of action, life, people.”
Phillips’ arrival gave the station a three-person newsroom. The station couldn’t broadcast film, so he shot photographs of news events on transparencies that were shown on projectors during the newscasts. A broom closet doubled as a darkroom.
In 1968, Phil Donahue moved his talk show from another Dayton television station to WDTN-TV. Phillips was his designated cameraman. After a week of chasing hard news, Phillips would grab a suitcase and hop a flight to interview celebrities with Donahue. Phillips remembers drinking beer from Bob Hope’s refrigerator during those days. Looking back over the years, he can’t pick one favorite story. “My favorite story’s my next story,” he said.
HOWARD, A FORMER WDTN-TV colleague, remembers the 1970s and 1980s when Scoop and reporter Retha Phillips formed a potent partnership, breaking stories that routinely topped the newscasts. Reporters from other stations would tail them, certain that Phillips and Phillips would lead them to the big story of the day, Howard said.
“They were the one-two tandem everybody mirrored their work after,” Howard said. “Very old-school journalists. They could sniff out a story.”
Now retired and living in Florida, she remembers getting a tip, heading to the police station, and finding Scoop working on the same story. “He was more a reporter than a photographer,” Retha said. “It’s in his bones. He can feel when something is going to happen.”
He’s interviewed astronaut Neil Armstrong, who grew up 60 miles outside of Dayton, multiple times. Scoop remembers covering the 1968 natural gas explosion and fire in Indiana that damaged several downtown blocks in Richmond, and the 1974 Ohio tornado that destroyed almost half of Xenia’s buildings.
He learned to get to the scene fast and be on the right side of the yellow police tape. “Get it. Get it right. Get the facts and get it on the air,” Phillips stressed.
His philosophy of visual storytelling is simple and effective. “What is news photography? Good composition. Covering the essentials of the moment,” Phillips said. “Listen for appropriate sound. Don’t just capture flames coming out of a roof. Look for the person who has two hands over her face,” he said.
In 2003, he was in the first class inducted into the Dayton Area Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and was recognized for his efforts to have television cameras permitted in Montgomery County courtrooms.
“Bob was a natural selection because of his history and his contribution of 50 years in the business,” said the Sharon Howard said. “He broke almost every big story in two or three decades.”
Phillips feels he’s a one-man band surrounded by an excellent orchestra.
“I’m just the banner carrier for our news photographers and our station,” Phillips said. “I’m surrounded by good people. They make life easier.”
His friends at WDTN-TV stuck by him when he lost both son Philip, who died after his heart enlarged, and wife Carol, who suffered with lung cancer, in 2005. Philip often called his dad to talk over the day’s news. Even when Carol was really sick, she urged Scoop not to stay home with her, but get out there and tell stories.
Those close to him worried that Phillips might retire after such a big blow. But he rallied, buoyed by a supportive workplace, his daughters Sharon and Linda Sue, and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
If or when he retires, the hardest thing will be not going out every morning, jumping in his news car and listening to the police scanner to find out where the next story awaits.
“It’s coming up on 50 (years), and who would ever believe it?” Scoop said. “Where did the time go?”
Washington writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, OH.
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