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Will A. Spens (born Alasdair Will Spens Thomson Jr; December 21, 1950 - April 1, 2008) was an American broadcaster on radio and television from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. His career began on AM radio in Connecticut, moved to radio and television in New York, and ended in Los Angeles. Spens was notable for his consummate style and delivery both on and off the screen. His television production style often incorporated cinéma vérité and man in the street interviews that were technically complex, yet required few takes to achieve. In an era when television reporters were expected to keep the viewers attention while reporting live from the scene, Spens drew the viewer in using the kinetic visual style, walking the audience through the news scene in his trademark trenchcoat while expertly narrating the story in a pleasing voice and raising the production quality of news reporting to the level of art. Over the course of his career, he received two New York Emmy Awards and a Public Affairs Award for his local news reporting, and a New York City Civilian Heroism Award.

Life and career

Spens was born in Connecticut in 1950 to Alasdair William Spence Thomson (1914–1977) and Elizabeth "Betty" Frost Miner (1915–1988). His mother was a freelance writer and photographer with a special interest in boating, who received credits under pseudonyms such as "Betty Popkin" for Life magazine and as "Lisbeth Miner" for Sports Illustrated, Popular Boating magazine, Encyclopedia of Sailing, and The New York Times. He had two other siblings, including one brother and one sister named Shena. He was raised in East Norwalk and attended the private Kent School.

He began his career in the late 1960s as news director of WNAB AM in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the age of 18 while living in Norwalk. He moved to the New York market in the 1970s, holding the weekend anchor spot at WCBS Radio from 1974 to 1975 in his early twenties. He worked as the morning drive anchor with Don Imus at WNBC AM from 1976 to 1977. He became city hall reporter and weekend anchor during the fiscal crisis in the city at WNBC TV from 1977 to 1980. In 1978, he was awarded the American College of Health Care Administrators Public Affairs Award (then known as the American College of Nursing Home Administrators) for his reporting on nursing home care. After making several major errors, one of which had him mistakenly read a day-old story about Reagan potentially choosing Ford as a Vice-Presidential running mate (Reagan had already selected Bush by the time Spens read the story), and another in which he read a year-old news story live on the air about the Pope visiting New York, which had occurred the previous year, he was fired. He moved to WABC TV from 1980 to 1987, where he worked as a general reporter and fill in anchor. At WABC he received two New York Emmy Awards for his live reporting, one for his live, April 30, 1982, story on the "Herald Square Crash", and the other for his March 29-30, 1984, story on the "Jersey Flooding", covering the New York metropolitan area floods of 1984.

During that same time Spens also worked at RKO radio. His reporting and production skills were highly regarded, but his personal problems became so great that he could no longer hold a job in New York. He moved to California, rebooting his career in Los Angeles, where he transitioned to crime reporting at KNBC TV from 1990 to 1991. Spens covered the Rodney King riots for KCBS TV, working there from 1991 to 1993. Spens had a signature reporting style where he appeared in segments wearing a trench coat while walking as the camera followed him in the field during his reports. He later appeared in the September 19, 1992, pilot episode of the TV series Renegade, playing a news reporter much like himself, shot in the style of one of his own productions. He moved to KNX News Radio shortly thereafter where he worked as anchor and general assignment reporter until 1995. In 1997, he was hired by Fox News Channel, where he worked for six months as a reporter. He then moved to Santa Barbara, telling his family he was going to become a monk.

By the 2000s, he was allegedly destitute, often homeless, and for the last ten years of his life living at the Faulding Hotel in Santa Barbara and eating at the Salvation Army. By 2006-2007, Spens had begun blogging as "kzak monk" under the account "zmonk33" in various places, particularly on Blogger and "Daily Webloid" which he stopped updating on October 9, 2006. On his blog, he wrote that he was working as a car salesman and as a telemarketer. His last entry on Blogger is dated January 7, 2007. Most of his blog posts during this time describe his anger over the role of the Catholic Church and their complicity in the Catholic Church sexual abuse cases, a topic that was dominating headlines at the time.

The last time he ever worked on air was at KIST, a radio station in Santa Barbara.

Death

By early 2008, Spens had become extremely paranoid. Gil Gross of ABC Radio, who spoke with Spens at the time, told her "the Catholic Church was hounding him, watching him and keeping him from being hired". Spens had been known to suffer from apparent mental health challenges as well as heart problems likely brought on by chain smoking cigarettes. He was treated for cardiac issues at a hospital in late March 2008. A day after his treatment, he died at the age of 57 in a car accident in Ventura County, California, after swerving into a concrete bridge abutment near Santa Barbara in the middle of the afternoon with no other cars involved.

Personal life

Spens was married twice, both of which ended in divorce. He was said by cowokers in New York to have suffered from hypoglycemia which led to a dietary regimen he tried to follow in the newsroom. According to Peter Noyes, Spens moved to Santa Barbara to study contemplative practices and was once "cloistered as a monk".

Lou Young, his former colleague at WCBS, kept in contact with Spens throughout the years and urged him to seek mental health treatment. Young believed that his friend's "formidable intellect" had allowed him to work productively in the news business until the time came when it could no longer protect him and his mental health issues were so great that Spens could no longer hold a job. Young recalls that Spens "had what we politely called 'personality problems.' He'd make friends then turn them to enemies. He'd imagine enemies where there were none". Spens began reaching out to Young in 2007, sharing his conspiracy theories "about the Catholic Church and a plot to silence him and it was his disease talking...Will had constructed a perfect unprovable symmetry of intrigue involving paid assassins who were systematically poisoning him with chemicals that clouded his mind and made people think he was insane...I did what I could, suggesting that he put aside the source of his distress and simply seek treatment for the symptoms."

Legacy

Lou Young recalled Spens as a remarkable reporter who managed to turn his walking, cinéma vérité field reports into works of art: "Will's stories on local news were some of the damnedest TV pieces I'd ever seen. He did virtually EVERYTHING on camera. You'd see him at the scene of the story, with his BACK to the viewer and he'd turn and begin talking, then walk to an interview, conduct the interview and continue narrating while the camera panned off him. The scene would change and Will would walk back in to the next scene, take you through a door, interview someone else, then keep talking as the camera moved to something the man was holding...Then there'd be a third scene and Will would come out of a door or through an open window and wrap up the tale. It was sometimes seamless art, sometimes absurdly fascinating, and always completely out of character with everything else that appeared on the screen before and after. It was amazing."

Keith Olbermann, also one of Spens' former colleagues, made similar observations about the genius of Spens, and how his reporting style and uncanny ability to compose and recite entire stories live and extemporaneously and coordinate the narration as he was walking in the field made it seem effortless, as if he had practiced it for weeks at a time. Olbermann notes that Spens had "impeccable sentence structure and diction and complete accuracy." As an example, Olbermann notes a segment where "Spens took this extraordinarily complicated rescue plan for New York's hemorrhaging finances with algorithms and explained it calmly, succinctly, expertly, simply a little touch of snark in his voice, and he kept walking, and kept walking, and kept walking, and kept looking to the cameraman by his side, and then away into the ground, and then back to the cameraman, and then he stopped on the sidewalk of Park Row, where he was perfectly framed by the Brooklyn Bridge—'Will Spens, News Center 4 at City Hall'. I couldn't do that in a million years..." Pete Noyes of KNBC, Spens' former managing editor, remembered Spens as a "fearless reporter" who would often put himself into harm's way to get the story.

Selected work

• "Luke and Laura's Wedding". WABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News. (November 1981)
• "Train derailment injures 10, spotlights crumbling subway system". ABC7NY. (December 1981)
• "Blue Angels fly over Coney island". ABC7NY. (1985)

Further reading

• Adams, Val (August 3, 1975). "Radio Roundup". Daily News. p. 240.
• Maksian, George (March 25, 1985). "Hambrick Show Wins Top Emmy". TV Scene. Daily News.
• "Man killed in Rincon crash is identified". McClatchy. Tribune Business News; Washington. Apr 5, 2008.
• Olbermann, Keith; Dan Patrick (1998). The Big Show: A Tribute to Espn’s Sportscenter. New York: Pocket Books. pp. 126-127. ISBN 9780671009199. OCLC 38861460.
• Teague, Bob (1982). Live and Off-Color: News Biz. New York: A & W Publishers. ISBN 0894791036. OCLC 8132984.
• "WABC Reporter in Fight at AP Building in NYC". Tarrytown Daily News. Associated Press. p. 27. October 6, 1986.