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When officials at Tribune Broadcasting decided to dive into the Indianapolis morning news show market, they cast about to hire "different" players for the on-air talent. For the new Fox 59 A.M. program, they sought people who were energetic about mornings, anchors who didn't drag preconceived notions of how to run a program to the table and, most importantly, journalists who didn't accept a morning show routine as simply a stepping stone to a glamorous 11 p.m. news spot.

Among the candidates they caught with their wide nets: Jordana Green, a medical reporter and fill-in anchor at WBRE-TV, the NBC affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Pa. The witty brunette captured them with her warm personality, and Green soon found herself with a contract for the chance of a lifetime.

At least, that's the Disneyfied version of how this city's newest anchor wound up on the airwaves for three hours every weekday sunrise. The behind-the-scenes details, however, reveal a woman who's not afraid to take a chance and make a mistake in the process.

The middle child of three, Green grew up in Parsippany, N.J., a hotbed for national media outlets just across the river in the Big Apple. The idea of reporting captured her attention throughout school: She recalls dressing for high school while studying how Diane Sawyer delivered the morning news cut-ins on WCBS out of New York City. "It wasn't a very glamorous job, but I thought she was terrific — so poised and sounding extremely intelligent," Green says.

But Green's journalism degree alone from Syracuse University didn't inspire news directors to hire her after graduation, so she opted for a route she swore she'd never take: She lived at home with her parents while seeking any position that would give her a chance to get her foot in a newsroom. Her determination paid off with a $5-an-hour job — before taxes — in Fox 5's creative services department in New York City. "I was a peon," she says of her coffee-making and filing duties. Spending $10 a day on bus transportation to and from Manhattan did nothing to polish this lump of coal, either.

But it did put her in a spot seven months later to snag the production assistant position in the newsroom. Her pay jumped to a whopping $7 an hour as she ripped wire copy, ran videotapes and performed other gopher jobs relegated to the low man on the totem pole. "My parents weren't exactly impressed," she says today. "I was surviving paycheck to paycheck."

As luck would have it, though, the job gave her access to valuable editing equipment and proved her ticket to the next stop on her career path. One evening Green followed a reporter into the field and quickly shot a stand-up with spare film — then she snuck back into the building at 2 a.m. to record her own voice track and pull the elements together into a résumé tape. Because Fox operates according to union rules, a production assistant wasn't allowed to touch anything technical, but Green took the risk — all the while praying that a security guard wouldn't walk by. "I might still get in trouble today for telling you this," she says jokingly.

Such resourcefulness, however, earned her a general assignment reporter offer from a cable outlet in New Jersey known as Regional News Network. Green grabbed at the chance to work 12-hour days for $20,000 a year — and provided her own transportation to news events as part of the bargain. A one-woman band, she would appear on a scene, set up the camera on its tripod, then run around the front with an attached microphone to fulfill the reporter's role. "I knew I looked like an idiot," she says. "But we all have the humble beginnings, and as much as I complained about that job, I learned a lot."

Ironically, the lesson that drove her into reshaping her career stemmed from an assignment that most journalists would count as a coup. A local man died in an Army helicopter crash, and Green drew the lot to interview his grieving parents — on Mother's Day. "My stomach cramped making that call; I was almost in tears," she recalls. Voice shaking, she asked permission to pay her respects to their son's memory by airing a piece that honored his life.

The mother agreed, commenting, "All the other media have either knocked on the door or are camped out on my front lawn. You are the only one who had the decency to call, introduce yourself and explain what you wanted to do." Green scooped the mighty New York media with her exclusive, but still the praise — and the heartfelt thank-you cards from the parents — didn't make her day. "The son had been engaged to marry the next month, and they got out all these pictures of him in his uniform," she says. "And here I am with a camera, watching his father sob. It was a terrible experience. I still get chills.

"That story turned it around for me. I'd always thought being a reporter was great and exciting. Then I was one — and it made me sick," she says.

Looking Up

Determined to put some distance between herself and general assignment reporting, Green called Terri Simonich, the news director at WBRE-TV, and convinced her to set up a meeting that weekend. "I could see something in her," Simonich recalls of their interview. "Jordana has the ability to take complicated issues and make them understandable yet interesting to the average viewer. I knew then that she was bigger than our market." Of course, that didn't stop Simonich from hiring her two weeks later when the station's medical reporter turned in notice.

From Green's perspective, the offer was a godsend. The young reporter was in the midst of planning her wedding to her childhood sweetheart, another professional on the rise in his field of pharmaceutical advertising. The Wilkes-Barre location meant that the newlyweds could live between their jobs in East Stroudsburg, Penn., with Jordana driving one hour west and Jonathan commuting one hour east each morning.

Medical reporting, too, threw her a rope. "It's news you can use," Green explains. "It's not just that this person died, this woman was raped, this murder happened." Instead, she pored over journals for leads on cholesterol-lowering breakthroughs, cancer-fighting drugs and even advanced prosthetics products. Viewers responded with letters claiming that without her research, they would have never walked again or enrolled in a life-saving drug study across the country. Seemingly overnight, as Simonich phrases it, Green's cheerful delivery became a popular segment on the 5 p.m. news.

The gig also paved the way for Green to influence her own loved ones. For instance, her mother, who always feared breast cancer, took Green's advice to bypass estrogen replacement therapy after menopause. Husband Jonathan also found relief for his bad back from magnets and cortisone injections his wife dug up for her viewers. Personally, Green acquired an herb habit to boost her near-vegetarian diet, thanks to chats with various doctors.

"I like a good burger once in a while, don't get me wrong," she explains. "But medical reporting has empowered me by teaching me that we all must be responsible for our health. We can't just let doctors take care of us." She also exercises exercises at the gym at least five times a week and walks her dog, Casey, near her downtown apartment. "A healthy lifestyle makes me feel good, and with the hours we keep in this industry, you need to keep yourself well," she says. "You easily can get run down."

Moving Up

After nearly two years at WBRE-TV, Green decided to turn her energy toward advancing her on-air career, which boiled down to trotting out the résumé tapes again. The reception was warmer this time around. Des Moines called, dangling an evening anchor chair, and Orlando eagerly rolled its young, growing market at her feet, hoping she'd choose its warmer climes to continue her medical reporting. Yet Green took a deep breath and refused both proposals.

"My agent probably preferred that I'd gone to Florida, but after hard thinking, I knew something better would come along," she says. For starters, neither city offered her husband a shot at staying in his profession. The second reason took more guts to admit. Although Orlando in particular represented a move from the 51st market in the country to the 17th — a quantum leap every professional dreams of making — in truth the position was the same set-up she had experienced in Wilkes-Barre. Green respected her talent too much to settle for the same picture dressed in a gilded frame.

Two weeks later, she interviewed at Fox 59 for the dream job floating in her head: anchoring a brand-new program, a position that would forgive her mistakes more readily and encourage individuality. The fact that Green's current idol, Katie Couric, reigns as queen of the morning, or that Diane Sawyer began with this shift wasn't lost on her, either. Throw in Indianapolis' strong pharmaceutical manufacturing base to suit Jonathan's ambition, and the ingredients added up to a nerve-wracking plane flight. "I didn't get butterflies for the other city interviews," she says. "This one would have broken my heart not to get."

The show's concept, says executive producer Antoine Lewis, is to mirror its audience: the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket, known in popular marketing circles as the young professionals. "We're not always serious, we're not always playful — we spin together," he says. "If it's fun for us to be together, hopefully that will translate to the viewer."

A kick-off before syndicated shows Judge Mills Lane and The Ricki Lake Show take the airwaves, Fox 59 A.M. reverberates with a casual atmosphere. From the red, overstuffed anchor chairs to the contemporary wood-and-glass coffee table where Green parks her coffee, the three-hour program strives to maintain a likability from start to finish.

For her part, Green arrives at the North Meridian station at 3 a.m. ready to write copy, update breaking news, review background on the morning's guests and sketchily rehearse her news delivery for specific stories. She's responsible for producing a daily medical report (national headlines usually suffice) as well as shooting taped packages, including the "Do My Job" segments. (So far, Green has filled in as a dog groomer and driven the Zambone machine for the Indianapolis Ice hockey team.)

She can even find positive points about her middle-of-the-night start time. "It's amazing how you can fill your day when you come home by 1 p.m.," she notes. "And 3 a.m. is such an ungodly hour. No sane person is awake, so it fosters a sense of isolated ‘we're in this together' teamwork with colleagues." In fact, co-anchor Clarence Reynolds lives in the same apartment building, so the two bump into each other constantly.

"Jordana is the sprinkles on our morning show sundae," says Lewis. "A lot of people will like her because she's a news person who's not afraid to jump outside that persona and have fun."

Ante Up

What you see is what you get with Green, on air and off, Simonich confirms. "We miss her in the newsroom," she admits. "She always drew a group of people around her, whether she was telling a story about her puppy or an interesting medical fact she'd discovered."

Yet Green pays a dear price for the chance to stand in that spotlight, beginning with her appearance. From the get-go, even news directors who weren't interested in hiring her phoned to advise she cut her naturally curly, long locks. She complied, eventually opting for a short Winona Ryder style. Her boss at the time bluntly told her it looked better on the actress. Based on audience calls, that was kind.

"Viewers will sooner forgive a mistake on the pronunciation of Milosevic than they will a bad haircut," she notes. "Sometimes I'll hear the backhanded complement, ‘Honey, you look much prettier in person than on television.' You have to blow it off, but it hurts every time." Clothing offers no respite. One news director appreciated her appearance in a black dress and requested that she send him copies of more interviews in that attire. Green's agent, whom she hired to help improve her skills for the market, also responded with feedback only on her clothing and hair style.

"I kept prodding, ‘How do you feel about my approach to the story? Was that a good stand-up in the emergency room?' He'd reply, ‘Yeah, you're a good journalist, a solid writer, a good storyteller.' And all that was secondary," she says with disappointment. Even her robust approach to exercise, Green confesses, is motivated in part by that nagging voice in the back of her mind that she can't gain 10 pounds and look acceptable in front of the camera. "You start to second-guess yourself because there's always someone who is more beautiful or thinner or whatever than you," she adds.

Yet being under the microscope also allows her to examine her life, clarify her values and build a workable strategy for future assaults. Green draws the self-improvement line at anything that would make her feel uncomfortable — a breast augmentation, a command to suddenly take up life as a blonde, even suggestions to trim her already-thin body frame. And she doesn't stop there — she applies this same self-searching to every aspect of her life, believing that to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

So, she acknowledges that if Jonathan would receive an offer that would skyrocket his career, as Fox 59 A.M. boosted hers, the couple would follow his job. "Marriage goes both ways," she says with a shrug. "And if I ever feel that my job decisions could put my marriage in danger in any way, I'd always choose my marriage. He's the most important thing in my life, above career." Jonathan's New Jersey company currently is experimenting with a cyberspace employee blueprint, allowing Jonathan to work from a home office in Indianapolis and fly to the client's site on a regular basis. "He, of course, says it's no problem, but once in a while I get a twinge of guilt that I'm forcing this tough traveling schedule on him," says Green.

She's well aware, too, of the sacrifices this career will cost. Her siblings and parents still reside on the East Coast, so she misses out on the impromptu dinners, the baby showers, Fourth of July picnics and other activities. "My grandmother is very old," she adds, "and there's not as many opportunities to spend these last years with her." On the other hand, her mother, who works as an elementary schoolteacher, often talks to Green about the opportunities she wishes she'd had to travel and experience new adventures.

"She was so jubilant when I got this job," Green recalls. "She kept saying how happy she was for me, how exciting my life had become as she choked up and cried." The emotions drove home the stakes this journalist plays with, but she faltered only for a moment. "Moving is tough, but it was never a question," she says. "I know what I want, and I'm very driven."

Green's next goal is to conquer morning television from the inside as well as the outside. She aims to have colleagues view her as a leader, a professional they can rely on to support their work as well as her own: "I want people to say, ‘Jordana will do the job — and we can count on her for a good laugh when we're having a rough morning.'"