The Voice of Washington Traffic
By: Kytja Weir
Examiner Staff Writer
September 6, 2009
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| (ANDREW HARNIK/EXAMINER) |
Lisa Baden takes to the airwaves every morning to guide thousands of commuters through highway snarls, providing news, sympathy and entertainment
A crashed fuel tanker, a dead deer on a roadway, weed whacking along another, a water main break, and a fatal wreck during the morning commute: None of it fazes Lisa Baden.
For the voice of Washington traffic, it's a calm day in a region known for having the second-worst delays in the country, behind Los Angeles.
"You'll be swell, you'll be great," she sang at the start of one segment before ticking off myriad tie-ups.
Fueled by Diet Pepsi, Baden answers two traffic tipster hot lines, clicks through screens of traffic from roadside cameras, pulls up intersections on Google maps, listens to producers in her earpiece, and then broadcasts her reports every 10 minutes "on the eights" for WTOP radio from 5 a.m. until 11 a.m. On top of that, she does 16 televised reports for ABC affiliate WJLA (Channel 7).
She has covered the morning commute for the past 18 years for Metro Networks, a subsidiary of Westwood One that supplies traffic reports to radio and television stations across the country. She delivers her bulletins in an instantly recognizable style that has made her a celebrity among both motorists and listeners at home.
"Smiles, song, schmaltz. She is the person on our air that people either love or they either hate," WTOP news director Mike McMearty said. "Or they love to hate her."
For WTOP, that makes Baden a key ingredient in the traffic-and-weather formula that helps the news station dominate the market.
"She's all that's good about radio," McMearty said. "She comes through the dial into your car. She's personable. She's a one-person public relations team."
Baden, 51, readily accepts the accolades. "I really don't consider myself a traffic reporter," she said. "I consider myself a radio personality."
She knew she wanted to be on the airwaves when she was a third-grader and took her turn leading the Pledge of Allegiance on the school's public address system.
But broadcasting executives were skeptical that she had on-air talent. When Bob Holmcrans came to WPGC as a morning producer in 1987, he told Baden that her voice did not sound good on radio and stuck her in a marketing job.
"I'll tell you she certainly proved me wrong," Holmcrans said.
In 1991, she moved to Westwood One's traffic network to get on the air. But John Frawley, who now runs the network as executive vice president, told her she was just a worker bee who didn't deserve the high pay of traffic reporting stars. Baden was devastated.
Today, small bumblebee tchotchkes decorate her tidy desk as a reminder of when she stopped being a worker bee and let her personality shine through.
Frawley now considers Baden the queen bee of traffic reporters.
"She's as good as it gets. She's on the number one station on the morning drive," he said. "She's probably in the top two or three in the United States, and I have 1,000 people who work for me."
Baden dominates the hive of buzzing activity at the Metro Networks branch in Silver Spring that provides reports for news outlets across the Washington area and even for stations in Baltimore and Raleigh, N.C. She multitasks with the best of them, answering up to 300 phone calls in a six-hour shift and typing notes in a special shorthand -- # means accident, * is a road closure.
But she doesn't do it alone. A Cessna and a helicopter circle the skies, while a mobile road unit cruises the roads in areas under restricted airspace. Other reporters in the Silver Spring office monitor police scanners, eyeing images from dozens of traffic cameras, telephoning sources and gleaning tips from commuters on the scene. They share their tidbits, sometimes yelling them across the room.
Then Baden reels off her report, improvising as she goes. She treats each one as though it is the first -- and only -- traffic news commuters may hear that day. She talks with her hands, bobbing her head, looking like she's on stage even though most of her audience only hears her voice. She has a box of props for her TV spots, including tiara-shaped sunglasses, a stop sign, and diva gloves.
Her theatricality was an instant hit on WTOP. After she filled in for another reporter for two days, Frawley said, WTOP asked that she be permanently assigned to the station.
Aside from her hyper enunciation and chirpy intonation, Baden works hard to provide useful information.
She made a handwritten chart of the Beltway and the major arteries, listing the exit numbers and names as a handy cheat sheet. Now, she said, the Metro Networks reporters who work for other news outlets have copies as well.
At home, she brainstorms lists of songs, themes, and catch phrases to keep her reports fresh.
She also still takes weekly voice-over coaching lessons.
"I think it's pretty hard to work with me," she said. "I set such high standards for myself."
Even as she strives to be an entertainer, Baden knows that the roots of traffic congestion are often human tragedies: An overturned van full of children or a car that slams into another, prompting "accident documentation," which means a death in law enforcement lingo.
"It's a delicate dance to report people's lives changing because, really, how do you report an accident and be entertaining?" she said. "You have to have empathy and compassion and sensitivity. People are dying, literally."
One experience that shaped her life was her stepfather's battle with Legionnaire's disease when she was a teenager. He suffered from complications of the bacteria-caused pneumonia for 19 years. She would come home each day after finishing her college classes and take care of him, fixing him lunch, telling him jokes and singing songs.
"We would travel the world on the Travel Channel," she said. "I'd ask him 'Where are we going today, Pop?' "
That experience shaped her life profoundly, she said. "I think people have choices on how they are going to accept, react or respond when it happens to you in life."
It taught her to paint pictures with her words, throwing in details such as the woman in a miniskirt who was causing traffic backups as she bent over a car's engine on the side of a road. It also taught her that people rely on her for more than news of highway snarls.
So she listens when callers dial in to the WTOP hot line even when they aren't talking about traffic. One man who cannot drive because of a health problem has called her every day for the past five years. "He calls because he wants me to cheer him up," she said. "Sometimes it's tiring and exhausting because it requires a lot of you."
But as she is jotting notes, applying lipstick and gloss before her next TV segment, she talks to him. "I also look at it as a reminder," she said. "It brings you back to earth."
Then it's back to the broadcast. She returns to helping people avoid the delays but throws in some antics to help them make the best of what they are stuck with, which is usually just another traffic jam.
"I try to work life into what's happening," she said. "It's not related to traffic at all. It's life."
