6 JUNE 27-JULY 3, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | his hair.” And then there’s Boebert, who claimed during another 2021 KNUS show that she didn’t want Clark’s name “to come out of my mouth” before describing him as “disgusting.” Next With Kyle Clark, which airs week- nights at 6 p.m., consistently generates both insults and adulation, and that’s one of the best things about it. From its August 2016 bow, Next aspired to break out of what Clark refers to as “the litany of tragedy model: ‘Let me tell you the ten worst things that happened in Colorado,’ then weather and sports and goodnight.” The idea was to take an original angle on big stories, tackle others whose complexities tended to scare off the average reporter, and present them in a manner that was pointed and personal. At the time, this approach seemed so radi- cal and unsustainable that plenty of pundits expected Next to explode shortly after take- off, and Clark concedes “that was the smart bet. But from the start, the viewer feedback was like nothing we had seen before. Not to say they all liked it: Some passionately dis- liked it. But it no longer washed over people like waves on the beach. They were engaged with it, and we wanted them to be engaged.” Maintaining this connection night after night is among Clark’s biggest challenges. Kyle Clark’s day starts early In addition to hosting Next, Clark co- anchors the 9 and 10 p.m. roundups for 9News — and even after returning to the home he shares with his wife and two young daughters, he fi nds it hard to unplug. Mal- lory Harris, the producer of Next, says she often wakes up to emails Clark sent at 11:30 p.m. or later fi lled with concepts sparked by his perusal of viewer comments on various social media feeds. He’s a master of Facebook and X, and improving on Instagram. On June 12, his quest starts early. As usual. He’s already working at 7:30 a.m., sifting through pitches with Harris via Microsoft Teams. The two most promising prospects hail from reporters Marshall Zelinger and Kelly Reinke. The day before, a fatal accident occurred on Highway 285 near Shaffers Cross- ing; given that it was the fi fth crash in the vicin- ity this year, Zelinger wonders if the 2024 total is anomalous or typical, and why a concrete barrier hasn’t been constructed to prevent future smashups. For her part, Reinke plans to look into why pricey Firehawk helicopters obtained by the state aren’t being used to fi ght the Interlaken fi re near Twin Lakes, which had already consumed a couple hundred acres. An hour of back-and-forths later, Clark shifts to getting his girls ready for the morn- ing while responding to viewers on email and social media. (He ultimately combines these tasks by way of an X post featuring a photo of his hair festooned with barrettes snapped into place by his daughters in an attempt at beauty enhancement.) He also spends part of this block fi nalizing questions for an interview that afternoon with CD4 hopeful Holtorf. Clark extended invitations for one-on-one, no-time-limit interviews to all six of those seeking the seat, and four accepted; the ex- ceptions were Sonnenberg and, yep, Boebert. By 10:30 a.m., Clark is on his stationary bike looking through nominations and ap- plications for “Word of Thanks,” a regular Wednesday segment that exemplifi es his commitment to Colorado even as it under- scores the profound impact of Next. “Best part of my day,” he stresses. The micro-giving effort “started during the lockdown period of the pandemic, June 2020,” Clark says. “We knew nonprofi ts were struggling, but I also struggle myself with the traditional way of highlighting nonprofi ts on local TV: You get a three-minute sob story about what the organization does, and at the end, it says, ‘For more information, go to 9news.com.’ You make people go through all these hoops, so I thought, ‘Let’s try to make the process as simple as possible.’” The result was “Word of Thanks,” which Clark calls “a nimble, frictionless way to get involved in philanthropy. I asked people if they would give fi ve bucks and said I would match the fi rst fi fty people who did.” The amount of cash raised beyond Clark’s personal weekly donation of $250 thrills him. A spreadsheet that he updates documents do- nations to more than 200 separate campaigns, with amounts ranging from $20,000 on the low end to more than $2.7 million for the Boulder County Wildlife Fund after the devastating Marshall fi re. The overall “Word of Thanks” total as of June 12 is over $12.6 million. By noon, Clark is at his standing desk in the 9News newsroom, directly across from Harris’s cubicle, and the two work- shop questions for Holtorf. He’s searching for a way to bring up his dismissive com- ments about women — the state rep has said Boebert dresses like a prostitute and referred to Flora as “Little Debbie” — and seemingly contradictory personal anecdotes about abortion in ways that won’t allow the politician to defl ect. Clark has a theory that Boebert is virtually guaranteed to win both the GOP primary — and the election, since CD4 may be the safest Republican district in the state — because her opponents will split the remaining vote. The trick will be getting Holtorf to address it. Over the next hour or so, more Next contributors drift in — among them Marilyn Moore, Next’s digital producer (and occa- sional substitute for Harris), and Marissa Solomon, Moore’s predecessor as digital producer, who recently shifted into a special- projects role — and join the conversation. Also making a pit stop is Zelinger, who is renowned among his colleagues for his abil- ity to turn around in a day a report that would take most reporters two or three. For this piece, he needs data from the Colorado State Patrol about Highway 285 crashes — such stats are rarely made available quickly — and to convince a Colorado Department of Transportation spokesperson to talk about probably unfl attering numbers on camera. Not that every topic is so serious. A viewer comment about Clark’s weight gain during the pandemic, when he was anchoring from home in close proximity to his refrigerator, prompts the proposal to juxtapose photos of him then and now before divulging that he gained an impressive 23 pounds over this period. The nickname his co-workers take delight in repeating? “Chunky Kyle.” There’s as much joking as pontifi cation among members of the Next team, which is notably tight-knit, unlike the lumpy circular rug around which their desks are arrayed. The fl oor covering is the fi nal remnant of a time when Next staffers occupied a space set apart from the main newsroom, and it looks as if it was last vacuumed during the Hoover administration. People occasionally trip over it, but no one’s had to be hospitalized. Clark began his broadcasting career young A native of tiny Lyons, New York, Clark was something of a broadcasting prodigy; he began co-hosting high school basketball games on a tiny station dubbed WACK-AM when he was fi fteen. But when he was study- ing journalism at Ithaca College, a professor said there were more jobs covering news than sports, and he made the change. The switch paid off. Thanks to gigs at stations in Rochester and Binghamton, Clark caught the eye of Ellen Crooke — now an executive with TEGNA, 9News’s owner, but then the news director at a Buffalo station owned by Gannett. In 2007, Crooke asked the 23-year-old Clark where he wanted to work. After he said the location wasn’t as important as the opportunity to partner with the best photojournalists in the country, Crooke sug- gested 9News, another Gannett property, and put him in touch with Patti Dennis, the outlet’s news director. Dennis was impressed by Clark, and so was Mark Cornetta, the station’s president and general manager — positions he still holds under TEGNA, which acquired 9News in 2015 after Gannett separated its publishing and broadcasting assets. “When I met Kyle, I couldn’t help notic- ing how smart he was — how curious, how thoughtful,” Cornetta The Next Big Thing continued from page 5 continued on page 8 Kyle Clark talking with colleagues Marshall Zelinger and Mallory Harris in the 9News newsroom to plan the day’s edition of Next. MICHAEL ROBERTS
