When Linda DesMarais retired from the television business about 10 years ago and went back to school to get a master’s in psychology, her friends got a little worried. On the surface everything was fine. She liked taking classes at Lynn University in Boca Raton, and she was living a busy life with her boyfriend, Doug Barker. They were even planning to get married. Her various houses—they had one on Florida’s east coast, in Jupiter, and one in Sarasota—were looking better than ever, particularly now that Linda had time to decorate, or more correctly, decorate even more elaborately (her extracurricular passion).

            But something was missing. Linda wasn’t exactly moping around, but she wasn’t her old self, either. She was only using part of her brain, and that spark that made her Linda—that jolt of adrenaline that she got from solving problems under pressure—just wasn’t there.

            It is now. In 2005, her friend Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, who had been working with her as a consultant, talked her into becoming general manager of the newspaper’s SNN News 6, and Linda, who is now in her 50s, was once again doing what she was meant to do—run a TV station. True, it is an unusual TV station—much smaller than the ones she is used to managing (sometimes as a part-owner). SNN (the call letters stand for Sarasota News Now) is a 24-hour local news station that first went on the air in the summer of 1995.

As TV goes, it’s small town and small time. Market-wise, Sarasota is way down, at number 154 in the country, and little SNN can’t begin to compete in viewership or revenue with the network stations that serve the region. But it’s in an area of high growth and affluence. It’s even world-famous. True, that’s because of the Internet clip that showed weatherman Justin Moseley’s onscreen meltdown when he discovered a cockroach crawling up his leg during a broadcast a few months ago, but still—the potential is there.

            It’s the cockroach incident that symbolizes Linda’s challenge. Right now, SNN may be small-town cable TV, with its roach problems, technical glitches, and occasional Keystone Cops atmosphere, but Linda is determined, despite her comparatively tiny budget, resources and staff, to make it a serious competitor with WWSB ABC7 (formerly known to us as Channel 40), the granddaddy of Sarasota news operations. To a certain degree Linda is competing against herself, as it was her overhaul of WWSB back in the 1980s that helped it become what it is today—Mount Rushmore, unassailable in its authority and hometown roots. The town has literally watched anchorman Scott Dennis’ hair turn gray.

            But SNN has its pluses. Since Linda took over, it’s developed an edgier, more up-to-date look. It speeds along like an express train—Linda’s specialty. Under her hiring and constant tutelage, some of its on-the-air people can hold their own with WWSB’s. Its affiliation with the Herald-Tribune gives it an incalculable advantage in news gathering and news judgment. It’s constantly showing the local weather—extremely important in Sarasota. And best of all, it’s on all the time.

            Today, as Linda leaves her house in Southside Village, the stakes are about to be raised. SNN is going live. Yes, instead of a taped reel of news, weather and sports that is changed and updated every half hour, tonight there will be a live one-hour newscast, with two anchors, sports, weather, the works. It will go on at 10 p.m. That way it won’t compete directly with ABC7’s 11 p.m. news but will, she hopes, get the viewers who want to be asleep by 11. In Sarasota, that’s an awful lot of people.

            But, as Linda is the first to admit, the new show is under-rehearsed, has unsolved technical problems and some of her staff have never done live TV before—in other words, an awful lot can go wrong.

    

            SNN puts together its news broadcast partly by system and partly by serendipity. Associate producer Lindsay Smith attends the 9 a.m. meeting held by the top editors of the Herald-Tribune to get a handle on what the paper is covering that day. The various reporters and other producers go through Internet sites and watch CNN. Tabs are kept on competitors and what they are doing. The result is a commonsense approach to what is newsworthy and what people are interested in.

            But you also have to surprise people, delight them, tell them things they didn’t know. This where the art of news gathering comes in, where experience and an insider’s knowledge pay off. Linda is in an excellent position to practice the art; she’s been in TV programming since she was 22, working in markets from Washington, D.C., to Miami and West Palm Beach, and she not only knows who the movers and shakers are in town, she’s one of them, and has been since she moved here in 1986. And on her staff are several other old-timers, particularly daytime anchor John Hill, a former Channel 40 stalwart who had retired and gone into real estate before she persuaded him to join SNN in 2005, and Bill Wagy, a producer/videographer who is such a fixture on the social and cultural scene that he’s on a first-name basis with every important person in town, and is treated—by the smart ones, anyway—with the utmost care and respect, since his input, or lack of it, can make or break an event.