“I was in Wisconsin for the world cheese championship,” says Mike Leonard, feature correspondent for NBC’s Today show. “I went because I heard that there were no other reporters there. And I thought, God, it’s the Super Bowl of cheese! And not one national reporter is there?”
Big Noise from Winnetka. NBC Today correspondent Mike Leonard puts the finishing touches on a video from his home office.
Apparently, unlike Leonard, they couldn’t see the forest for the cheese.
In his 20-plus years with Today, Leonard has created wryly observant video feature stories on the often-overlooked aspects of everyday life. So instead of just judging the Jarlsberg at the cheese competition, Leonard also seized the opportunity to poke fun at the media for shunning a perfectly good event they dismissed as too ordinary to cover.
Leonard’s talent for sniffing out the smaller, more obscure stories is what makes his work so much fun. “I’ll usually tend to do something nobody’s ever done or will do,” he says.
For instance, sitting around his office one day, Leonard commented to a colleague, “Any Joe Blow could do that.” “So I thought, there’s got to be somebody out there named Joe Blow,” he explains. “I did a search and found this man in Texas, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow and the four Blow boys. I called him up and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Blow, this is Mike Leonard. I’d like to do a story on you.’ And he said ‘Why? I’m just an ordinary guy.’ Well, I know! He’s a Joe Blow!”
From Home Movies to Features
Leonard got his broadcasting break in Phoenix 25 years ago after friends encouraged him to show some of his home movies to a TV producer. “I just didn’t think I was a TV type,” he says. “I wasn’t a public speaker, I wasn’t a top student, I wasn’t any of those things you’d consider. I didn’t have perfect hair or anything like that.”
“Two different unions were involved. The editor would come in and take over a whole hotel room and set the stuff up, and he’d have 25 cases.”
What Leonard did have, as the producer recognized, was keen insight into human nature, a sense of humor and a genuine talent for storytelling. The local PBS station hired him, then the CBS affiliate made him a sports anchor. A little over a year later, he was discovered by an NBC executive and hired to write and produce four video features a month for the Today show.
Over the years, Leonard gained more control over his stories as the technology for video production became more cost-efficient and streamlined. But when he first started working for NBC, he had to travel with a bureau editor because correspondents weren’t allowed to touch the editing equipment.
“Two different unions were involved,” he says. “The editor would come in and take over a whole hotel room and set the stuff up, and he’d have 25 cases.”
Taking Control of the Editing
In the late 1980s, Leonard made a deal with NBC to allow him to edit his own work. He secured a loan, buying $300,000 worth of equipment, squeezing it all into one room in his home in Winnetka, Illinois. “They were just big machines, data machines, recorder machines, switchers, all kinds of stuff. Big rack-mounted things,” he says.
About eight years ago he switched to non-linear editing, using a Power Macintosh running Avid. But Leonard says the most significant change happened in late 2001 after he acquired a mini-DV camcorder, a PowerBook and Final Cut Pro.
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