New ND at WOWK-TV

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genlock
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New ND at WOWK-TV

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Grendel Levy is the new news director for Nexstar’s WOWK in Charleston-Huntington, WV.
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Re: New ND at WOWK-TV

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Re: New ND at WOWK-TV

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What's the story about moving from Boise to Huntington?

I don't think that's a choice most would make......Boise's pretty nice.
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Re: New ND at WOWK-TV

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She looks sort of intense. Crazy even.
Maybe Nextar promised her something if she could do something/anything with channel 13.

Just a rant:
I wonder why local tv stations offer coverage of events (Miami Shooting) on their early news, while
the cable networks and even the broadcast nets have been going wall to wall with it for hours?
It is a compelling story, but it is not worth giving your news staff the afternoon/evening off just
so you can sit on network and watch the same facts re-hashed every 20 minutes.
Rant is over:
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Re: New ND at WOWK-TV

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genlock wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 5:30 pm Just a rant:
I wonder why local tv stations offer coverage of events (Miami Shooting) on their early news, while
the cable networks and even the broadcast nets have been going wall to wall with it for hours?
It is a compelling story, but it is not worth giving your news staff the afternoon/evening off just
so you can sit on network and watch the same facts re-hashed every 20 minutes.
Rant is over:
Funny you mention that...it's a smart person's confirmation of something I was talking about with a local news producer a couple years ago.

Partially for conversation's sake and partially because it was true, I was saying I'd been trying to sample her (everybody knows it's the last-place) station with some regularity again and had discovered that I really liked the product (variety of semi-smart stories, a number from regional sister stations, with a much-improved set and level of production), possibly even more than the longtime leader's (flashing blue lights and/or red lights dominate).

I speculated that her station's comparative limited resources (quantity and quality of talent and overall budget was what I was subtly suggesting) was forcing them to exercise more discretion in where to send people to cover what stories, and, thus, they wound up with more-valuable stories for the whole market, not just the calamities that don't really matter to you unless they're on your street. She didn't really take that as the compliment I meant, though, immediately telling me how many live trucks they had (the same as their other also-ran competitor) with a confused look on her face.

But she took that as an opportunity to begin a lament about her station's corporate news director's insistence that they make the local newscast overwhelmingly local and regional. She had this idea that the station's 6 o'clock newscast should be a one-stop for ALL the "important" news that had happened during the day and that that guy was forcing her to make a newscast that was less than what she wanted it to be. I said, "No, I understand that completely.....it's a question of why people are coming to you. They're coming to you, a local newscast, for all the LOCAL news that has happened. People have had probably a dozen options and opportunities to check on national and world news during the day and, even if they haven't, are about to have another with the 6:30 network news in just a few minutes. Yeah, be as local as you possibly can because that's what they're coming to you for and that's what they can't get from anyone else....anyone other than your competitors."

Well, now, she was in a huff....a poised and polite huff, but a huff, nonetheless. We were no longer friends. We weren't, really, anyway, yet, but we had good rapport and I thought we were going to be. As a matter of fact, in a later instance of us being in the same place at the same time, she breezed right by me, giving no acknowledgment and the silent treatment....I mean, literally just like a child. I think she even left the organization we were working with because of it....imagine that....irrationally left because another guy tangentially in her biz agreed with her boss' boss....for the same fairly obvious reasons that she just can't get her head around.....

And she decides what news we see.
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Re: New ND at WOWK-TV

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WSAZ has done hyper-local forever and has been market leader for almost 70 years.
Bos Johnson was always after more time. He wouldn't let programming run any promos in the news.
If they tried, he just bumped them from the log. For WSAZ to run net cut-ins or wire stories, It had to be big.
The morning news guy refused to run the breaking news of the Farmington mine explosion because it was not
in the market. Bos was on the way in and cell-phones were not invented yet. It led the next news just after
Bos hit the door.
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