NBC's Jensen Signs Off With Series

NEW YORK (AP) â€” As a newly married reporter working nights and weekends on the now-defunct Boston Herald-Traveler, Mike Jensen was approached by an editor with a proposition. <br><br>How would he like

Wednesday, December 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) â€” As a newly married reporter working nights and weekends on the now-defunct Boston Herald-Traveler, Mike Jensen was approached by an editor with a proposition.

How would he like to work 9 to 5 with weekends off?

``I said, `Yes, hand me the broom. What do I do?''' Jensen recalled. ``He said, `You're my business reporter.'''

He's remained a business reporter for nearly 40 years, the last 22 at NBC News, specializing in telling complex economic stories through the experiences of real people.

It's fitting, then, that Jensen narrates a three-part series on retirement planning this week on the ``NBC Nightly News,'' through the eyes of a man eagerly awaiting the close of his career.

Jensen, 66, found his final subject in the mirror. The series airs the week after Jensen's last day at work.

The contents of Jensen's office were packed in boxes one day as he paused to talk about his career. The exceptions were the computers in the corner whose screens showed a running tally of the Dow Jones industrial average and the NASDAQ composite index. If those numbers grew large â€” with either a plus or minus sign in front â€” he'd be on the air in a few hours.

``I'm financially ready for this, I'm emotionally ready for this, I've got my health, I've got a great wife and family and a zillion things I want to do,'' he said. ``This is the perfect time for me to do it.''

Financial journalism on television is filled with reporters who can spew hundreds of numbers per minute. Jensen was a generalist who never assumed that his viewers studied economics or worked on Wall Street.

Even though he was the lead financial correspondent for NBC's flagship broadcast, he never appeared on the network's more specialized business network, CNBC.

``He had a capacity for telling a macro story in a micro way, without dumbing it down, through people or businesses that were affected by the trends of the day,'' NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw said.

That's not as easy as it sounds, particularly the point about not dumbing it down. It was what Jensen vowed to do when he got the assignment in Boston and later at The New York Times, where he worked in the 1970s.

``If you look at The Wall Street Journal, they don't say `there's a shortage of steel,''' he explained. ``They'll say, `Sam Jones couldn't get the size nails he wanted when he went to the hardware store' to get into the story. Television is a great medium for that.''

Jensen's only TV experience was as a contestant on ``Password'' when he called a friend at NBC in 1978. He was trying to line up extra work during a newspaper strike.

After trying the part-time gig, Jensen instantly liked the challenge of combining journalism with performance, and the need to precisely match words with pictures. His NBC moonlighting became full-time.

The job has sent him around the world; Jensen takes particular pride in stories done in Russia and the eastern bloc around the fall of communism. For a while, he specialized in stories about the economic impact of natural disasters.

``When Aetna went in, Jensen went in,'' was the line around NBC.

The stock market boom of the 1990s kept him closer to home, since he was often needed to do Wall Street stories on short notice. Jensen loved the adrenaline rush of ``crashing on deadline,'' where he and his production team would report, write, film and deliver a story in a couple of hours.

When Jensen began covering the stock market, ``it was an elitist thing.'' Now about two-thirds of the ``Nightly News'' audience owns stock, ``so it's very important to understand not only what is happening but why it is happening,'' he said.

Because the economy has been such a big story, he's appeared more on the nightly news over the past few years than ever before. But with a strength-sapping pace, Jensen was finding that Monday mornings were coming too fast.

It was the right time to get out.

``How lucky can I get?'' he said. ``I'm 66 years old, and I'm ending up my career playing centerfield in Yankee Stadium. A lot of guys my age end up sort of shouldered aside ... I have no interest in ending up as a designated hitter.''

He's leaving with little apparent bitterness, no grumbling that the news business doesn't do the job as well as it did in the days of Edward R. Murrow.

``It's better now,'' he said. ``I really believe that, and I have nothing to gain by saying that. I think we cover the news more fully, in more digestible form.''

Jensen's planning some writing and lecturing in retirement. He's going to take up the banjo again, which he hasn't played since his Army days. He's plotting out a five-week European vacation on his computer.

And his grandchildren better get used to seeing him more. His weekends won't end on Monday mornings.

``I'm so puffed up about all of this,'' he said. ``I really do believe that this is going to be the best part of my life coming up. Everything I want to do now is what I choose to do.''