Ballet's Loss   

As a teenager, Liz Trottahad a decision to make: journalism or ballet. "When I realized I wasn't any good at ballet," she recalls, "it was journalism by default."
She went on to attend Boston Universityand Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, spending a year between writing steamy blurbs for then-popular "confession" magazines. Following stints at the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Pressand Newsday, Trotta reported for 14 years at NBC, another six at CBSand "about four minutes" at CNN(she disdained its "news packaging"). Now 56, Trotta returns to newspaper journalism as chief of the one-person Washington TimesNew York bureau, located in her Manhattan apartment. Her love affair with television has gone sour.

"It sounds so archaic to say it, but television isn't a viable news medium anymore," says Trotta, whose 1991 memoirs, "Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News," appears in paperback next spring. "The entire approach is different, with all the laughing and joking and ratings. Why does a reporter have to smile or frown? Is it imperative to have the reporter put forth his personality? The ego of this [younger] generation is so astonishing; reporters can't resist the temptation to assert themselves."

Trotta jumped to television in 1965 after the news director of New York's WNBCread a Newsday investigative series she had written and offered an audition. From there she rose to NBC, where in 1968 she became the first female network reporter sent to cover Vietnam. "I begged for the assignment," she recalls.

Despite her groundbreaking work, Trotta says she has little patience for "gene counters" who track the number and status of women in newsrooms. "How are women doing? Who cares?" she says. "Real women don't give a fig about this, especially in my day. The whole debate is not only self-centered, it's unprofessional, it has no place in the business, and finally, it's boring."