NYC newsman hails from Hoosier heartland

Carmel native lands his own nightly political program on Newsmax TV

By STU CLAMPITT

Hamilton County native and Carmel High School graduate Rob Schmitt has taken his Hoosier education and conservative values to the New York broadcasting world, where he currently has his own nightly program on Newsmax TV in the 10 p.m. slot. Schmitt took some time Friday afternoon to talk to the Reporter about his broadcast career and his Hamilton County roots.

Schmitt was previously an anchor on Fox and Friends First, but he moved to Newsmax approximately 18 months ago.

Schmitt

“I just thought it was a good opportunity,” Schmitt said about the network change. “They were small when I got to them, but I saw an opportunity for some growth and I saw an opportunity to get into a really good slot, to be honest. When I was with Fox, I was on at 5 a.m. and that’s just a tough place to break out of. So I said, ‘Let’s try something new.’ They [Newsmax] had shown an interest for a couple years. We just took a chance. It was really crazy. Right after I got there everything just exploded with the election and Newsmax was all of the sudden on the radar. Now we’re trying to figure it out. We went from a very small network to a network that is getting better numbers than a lot of mainstream networks that have been around for a long time. It’s pretty crazy to see.”

Instead of co-anchoring a show in the morning, Schmitt now has his own program, Rob Schmitt Tonight which airs weekdays at 10 p.m. He told The Reporter it is a very different and rewarding change.

“It’s a lot of work!” Schmitt said “For the first 15 years in the business I was just an anchor. So you’re just kind of reading the box. It was a job where, as long as you were reading and you knew what was going on in the news, it required very little effort to get good at. This job is just completely different. Filling that show every night – the workload has got to be three times what it was before I got to this position. The cool thing is that you’ve got your name on the show, so you say what you want. You get the final word on everything, so you get to control the content, which is nice. In all my other jobs you had executive producers who were the boss, and you didn’t get the final say.”

In addition to having more content control, Schmitt enjoys the urgency of live broadcasting and said he believes it makes everyone involved do better.

“To me live broadcasting is dramatically easier,” Schmitt said. “I’ve done pre-taped shows. When you take out the urgency of, ‘We have to figure this out in four minutes because we are coming back from break,’ it makes everything take longer and everyone just gets lazy. But when it’s live, that is the whip that cracks over everybody. It makes everybody move and figure things out. You’ve got to get it right in that hour. When you pre-tape a show, no matter how fast you try to go, it always takes an hour and half to two hours. But when you do it live it always takes exactly one hour.”

Rob Schmitt Tonight is a conservative political program with nightly guests who are broadcasting remotely, rather than being on set with him. Even before the pandemic, due to his 5 a.m. timeslot on Fox, he was one of a very few people going to the studio every day. Thus, he has not seen COVID-related changes in how he needs to work, but he has seen changes in the industry which have made his program easier to organize.

“The pandemic definitely changed news,” Schmitt said. “You had all these people Skyping in, and I think the networks have figured out that there is a way cheaper way to do this where you can just show people on their computer at home instead of booking them a thousand-dollar studio, and you can get away with it. That’s the biggest thing that changed. On every network you are seeing people Skyping from their living rooms in a T-shirt now, and that’s become the new mainstream.”

That industry change has made it less complicated for Schmitt to book guests for his show.

“If we’re trying to get senators, even if they are in Washington for that period of time, by 10 p.m. they want to be relaxed or they want to be out at dinner,” Schmitt said. “Now you can throw them up on Skype on their computers and they can just take a pause at whatever they are doing to jump on and jump off. They don’t have to go all the way to a studio or the Capitol Rotunda for a shot.”

Schmitt graduated from Carmel High School in 2001, then studied journalism at Indiana University. He mentioned with pride IU’s connection to legendary journalist Ernie Pyle. He then moved back and forth across the country for his career, settling for nearly the last decade in New York. He said one of the things he misses most about Indiana is the people.

“I’ve moved a lot,” Schmitt told The Reporter. “I’ve lived in southern Florida in Miami, I’ve lived in Los Angeles and now New York. You just miss the quality of people. When my boss in Miami hired me, he said, ‘When I saw you were from Indiana, I just had a good feeling. There are certain parts of the country where good people come from. There just are some places where you just get good people and Indiana is one of those places.’ That always stuck with me, and I agree with it. We have good, humble people who are genuine and real. You don’t see that in a lot of the places I’ve had to live with this career.”

Schmitt played golf in high school and grew up roughly half a mile from Brookshire Golf Club in Carmel. He said he has many great memories from his time at Carmel High School, his Hamilton County friends and the people he knew at Brookshire when he was younger.

“I just think Carmel is a great example of what a suburban city community can be,” Schmitt said. I wish there were more like it around New York.”