Every weekday morning at 7:42, the NY1 newsman Pat Kiernan does an eight-minute segment called “In the Papers” in which he summarizes important articles from that day’s newspapers. It is this portion of the newscast—not “Weather on the 1’s,” not “The Rail and Road Report,” not the breaking news from the station’s far-flung (in the five boroughs, at least) reporters—that has endeared Mr. Kiernan, who is 39 years old and has been with the station since 1997, to thousands of culturally literate New Yorkers who, it is safe to say, do not watch any other local newscasts. But ask them, and they’ll cop to a certain degree of sincere admiration, bordering on obsession for some, of Mr. Kiernan and his deadpan delivery, his boyish face, and his slight Canadian accent. (He is from Calgary originally, and moved here with his wife, Dawn, in March 1996.)

“I think a lot of the people who watch me and react that way are supposed to be part of the generation who supposedly stopped watching TV news,” Mr. Kiernan told The Observer the other day from the green room in NY1’s studio in Chelsea Market. He wore a light blue shirt, light brown suit, blue tie and black shoes; he does his pancake makeup himself, as per NY1’s non-union, DIY ethos. (Reporters, who start at around $40,000 a year, generally take their cameras with them on assignments and set them up on a tripod; the station’s budget in 2006 was a mere $25 million.) He has a break every morning around 8:15, after “In the Papers” is finished (it is shown again at 8:42 and 9:42), and he records voice-overs for upcoming segments.

“I think the presentation of TV news is as much the problem as the technological changes,” he continued. “People like a more honest presentation of the news. I don’t shy away from that honesty and presentation of analysis in the news. I hope people have the sense that I understand the stories I’m talking about. I’ve personally edited scripts on my computer.” Indeed, in an age in which broadcast news audiences have been atrophying at an alarming rate, Mr. Kiernan seems to have maintained his morning viewers over the past few years: Weekdays from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., about 73,000 people tune in; the station says this number is larger than it was five years ago.

“Pat brings a lot of depth to the job that you don’t always see with morning news anchors,” said Bob Hardt, political director for NY1. “He has a real love for the stories surrounding the city. That’s what ‘In the Papers’ is all about. In the ’40s or ’50s, he would’ve been one of the newspaper guys you’d see in a black-and-white movie saying, ‘Hey, kid, what’s the story?’”

“We have a no-nonsense attitude that you want to turn on the TV, you want to get the news,” said Mr. Kiernan. “You want to show up to work and you want to be reasonably informed when you get there. You don’t want to sit down for an extra half-hour with a bunch of cooking segments. You just want to get out the door and have a clue of what’s going on.”

For “In the Papers,” Mr. Kiernan starts with The New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post, which he calls the “core of the segment.” Then comes The Sun, which Mr. Kiernan says “clearly in the past few months ousted Newsday as the fourth-most-cited newspaper. That’s as much about The Sun as that what Newsday is doing is dishonest. They slap something about New York City on the front page—they’ve really given up… They do some good Albany reporting and things like that, so I won’t ignore it, but it’s tough to hold up the front page with some story from far out on Long Island. I look at The Observer and The Voice on Wednesday and make a decision based on what else I have and whether there’s time for a particular story.

“I get AM New York and sometimes Metro, but there’s a high percentage of wire stuff that’s available elsewhere,” he continued. “I think the viewer’s time is better spent with one of the other papers and I’d prefer to steer them in that direction. There’s sort of a subtext of wanting to encourage the employment of journalists in the city, you know? I think a paper should be rewarded for doing original reporting.”

The day before The Observer met Mr. Kiernan, he had selected a story from Keith Kelly’s column in the Post about how Star editor at large Julia Allison’s contract with the magazine had not been renewed. “I felt like her profile was high enough, between her print background and her blogging background, that that would be a juicy little water cooler thing for a certain percentage of New Yorkers,” he said. “Probably 95 percent of the audience the name means nothing to, but the 5 percent of the audience it means something to would have a fun time talking about that.

“And, you know, same thing with some of the Wall Street stories,” Mr. Kiernan continued. “It’s such an important machine to the economy. We want those people watching. You want them to feel like the segment is their way of kind of cheating, getting ready for the day. You know, like, Pat’s looking out for me.”

And so fans like 27-year-old Blair Blanchard, a freelance writer who lives in Greenpoint, has made T-shirts that say “I ❤ Pat Kiernan,” which he has given out to friends. “My friend Lindsay and I are obsessed with him,” he said. “We watch it every morning. She texts me every time he says something funny or weird. He’s very random. It’s kind of like he’s talking to himself. It’s like he woke up in the morning and he’s like, I’m going to go have a good time with myself.”

Mr. Kiernan gets out of bed around the time that some of his audience might be going to sleep: He’s up at 3 a.m., getting picked up by a car so he can be at the studio at 4, reading the newspapers and picking out the 30 to 35 stories that will be that morning’s In the Papers segment. He leaves the office around noon and takes the subway home to the Upper West Side, where he lives with his wife, Dawn, and their daughters Lucy, 6, and Maeve, 3. Then there’s an afternoon nap—“I’m adamant about getting in a two-hour nap,” he says. “Not a ‘napping in front of the TV for a while’ nap, but a real nap in bed with the blinds drawn”—before he takes over kid duties around 5. Lately, he and Dawn have been playing tennis in Central Park in the evenings. At 11, he watches a competitor’s newscast. “It’s just nice to kind of have an idea about whether anyone else dug up something that we weren’t aware of, and from time to time we’ll send an e-mail based on that. When I get in the building five hours later, we’ll take some action on it.”

He is clearly comfortable with this routine. But that also raises the delicate question of whether he could be almost too comfortable in his anchor chair on Ninth Avenue. In 2001, New York magazine quoted an unnamed colleague of Mr. Kiernan’s as saying that he would be “snapped up within a year.” And yet, here he still is.

“They take good care of me here,” said Mr. Kiernan. “I like the way we do news here. You can hold your head up high within an industry that doesn’t always do the best journalism—we’re on the higher end of that spectrum. I’m not trying to set some unrealistic standard, but we hit the mark more often than some of our competitors. That’s a factor in why I stay.”

It can’t hurt that Mr. Kiernan appeals not only to the news junkies of the city, but also the Blair Blanchards, and that his appeal is predicated upon his place in that anchor chair. “If the opportunity presents itself to do The Today Show, I’m all over that,” said Mr. Kiernan. “But do I want to be the Chicago bureau chief for ABC? I’m not even sure they still have a Chicago bureau chief. That’s a discussion I’ve had before as well—people telling me, ‘We can find you a job as one of our correspondents,’ and that’s a path that many a reporter has taken to becoming one of our anchors. Is that the best career strategy for me when I have the audience and the influence that I do here, to go off and go from having all morning, every morning on TV in New York, to being the person who’s on camera 92 seconds three times a week from your reporting post? I just think this is a better fit for me. So at some point, someone may decide they like what I do here and there might be an opportunity for that, but generally, the business model of the networks is: Take those correspondents and work them into the rotation and promote them. It’s not a path I have a lot of interest in pursuing.”

Mr. Kiernan has, however, moonlighted—for several years, he was the anchor of The Money Gang on the now defunct business news channel CNNfn (CNN is also owned by Time Warner). But it is his appearances as himself in Night at the Museum and The Interpreter, and his hosting of VH1’s short-lived game show The World Series of Pop Culture, which aired in the summers of 2006 and 2007, and hosting of an even shorter-lived game show on the WB called Studio 7, in which contestants lived together, that have contributed to the sense among his fans that Mr. Kiernan is in on the joke, that he understands that he is, in some sense, playing a role in the anchor chair.

“I had a bad experience my second year at NY1,” said Mr. Kiernan. “This casting agent called and they said this new HBO show is casting, they need someone to do an interview show—a Larry King-type character is what they said. I trekked out to Queens, some room in Kaufman Astoria, and went through their audition.” It turned out to be for The Sopranos. “And literally, they were like, ‘Can you be more like Larry King?’ I don’t know what the secret is in what I am here. I’m on TV every day. I kind of made a decision at that point: I’m cool with doing those bits and I don’t buy into the fact that the audience is confused by these things. The audience is in on the gag. But I’ve restricted myself to playing myself. It’s Pat Kiernan playing himself. If they’re doing a story that Pat Kiernan and New York 1 would conceivably be part of, and New York 1 approves the script and isn’t embarrassed by the content, I’ll generally play along and do the Pat Kiernan-as-himself thing.”

dshafrir@observer.com