Amy Kaufeldt bid goodbye to her morning co-anchors on Fox 35 Friday. She's moving to the new "Fox at 5" evening newscast, which begins on March 6 on WOFL.

Here's what we know about the new newscast and what's going to happen on WOFL's morning show. The new 5 p.m. newscast will be split into 20-minute segments, heavy with weather first with chief met Glenn Richards. The show is being described as "family friendly" -- aka, lots of soft features, I would suspect.

As for mornings, Kaufeldt said Trei Johnson is replacing her as anchor, effective Monday. Julie Kim replaces Johnson as field reporter for the morning show.

Best part about the move to the evening newscast fro Kaufeldt? She's now on a 9 a.m.-6 p.m. work day. Pretty amazing.

Click here for Kaufeldt's morning news goodbye

As WOFL prepares to launch its new 5 p.m. newscast in a little more than a week, it will be doing so without Assistant News Director Chris Ford. After three years, he's leaving WOFL to become assistant news director at Tribune Co.'s CLTV cable operation in Chicago.

The Fox 35 news at 5 p.m. is set for a March 6 debut, with Amy Kaufeldt and Glenn Richards.

Go ahead and call me crazy. But what if WESH did something dramatic with its anchor line-up ... like move Pat Clarke over one seat, from sports to the main anchor chair next to Wendy Chioji?

When I've seen Clarke and Chioji on Channel 2's Olympic Zone broadcasts, they really seem to click and have great chemistry. And Clarke has clearly shown he can handle more air time than the couple of minutes he gets for sports nightly.

Such a move wouldn't be unprecedented. Down in Miami, sports guy Tony Segreto was moved over to the main anchor chair at WTVJ years ago. And WKMG's sports anchor Todd Lewis switched to morning news anchor for awhile before heading back to sports.

I doubt this Clarke move to the anchor chair will happen -- and, no, I haven't heard anything -- but it just struck me as something WESH might want to consider. And, yes, I must admit that the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that maybe, just maybe, anchor Jim Payne was dispatched to Italy so Channel 2 could pair Clarke and Chioji for a two-week tryout on the Olympics Zone.

Shawn Bartelt, director of sales for Cox's stations in Charlotte, N.C. (WSOC and WAXN) will succeed Bill Hoffman as vice president and general manager of Orlando's WFTV and WRDQ.

According to a press release, Bartelt joined Cox in 2000 as director of sales at WSOC and WAXN. She began her broadcasting career at WWSB in Sarasota in 1977 as a reporter on the late-night shift and left in 1978 to become a daytime reporter and weekend anchor at WMBB in Panama City. In 1979 she returned to WWSB as daytime reporter and weekend anchor. She joined Storer Cable in Sarasota as local origination manager from 1981-1986 where she coordinated and hosted local programming covering Sarasota County and then launched and managed the sales team there from 1986-1988.

In 1989, she returned to WWSB on the broadcasting side as a local account executive and was soon promoted to national sales manager. She held positions as national sales manager at Orlando's WESH from 1990-1992, local sales manager at WTOG in Tampa from 1993-1994 and general sales manager at WPBF in West Palm from 1994-2000.

WFTV and WRDQ General Manager Bill Hoffman is leaving Orlando to become GM at Cox-owned flagship WSB in Atlanta. It was under Hoffman's tenure that stability returned to WFTV, including the re-hiring of news director Bob Jordan and the return of Eyewitness News to ratings dominance across the board.

Hoffman will replace retiring WSB GM Greg Stone, who has been with Cox for 43 years. WSB has consistently been named as one of the top-rated ABC affiliates in the country in terms of local news audience

Hoffman joined Cox in 1979 as an account representative at TeleRep. He left in 1983 to become national sales manager at Cox-owned WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh and then left the company to serve as local and national sales manager of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, Minn. from 1984-1990. He returned to Cox in July 1990 as office manager at TeleRep and held his position there until 1995 when he moved to WSB-TV as local sales manager.

In 1997, Hoffman transferred to WFTV in Orlando as general sales manager and was promoted to director of sales in 2000 and then vice president and general manager in 2002.

NBC's ratings woes from its Torino Olympics coverage have been well-documented already. The ratings are expected to pick up this week with the figure skating competition, but will that be enough to ignite Olympics TV fever in Orlando?

So far, through Tuesday night's Olympics programming, WESH-Channel 2 is getting some of the worst ratings in the state for the Torino Games. According to NBC, Orlando also ranks 37th among Nielsen's 55 metered markets for Olympics ratings, with WESH averaging a 12.6 and 19 share.

The Olympics ratings are worse than Orlando's in only one other Florida market -- Miami-Fort Lauderdale, where ratings on NBC O&O WTVJ rank 54th out of the 55 metered markets. Here's how the Sunshine State markets are faring with NBC's Olympics programming:

• West Palm Beach, tied for 6th overall with Milwaukee, with a 17.6 /27
• Jacksonville, 17th overall, with a 14.9 /22
• Fort Myers, tied for 18th overall with Hartford, with a 14.8 /22
• Tampa-St. Pete, 22nd overall, with a 14.5 / 21
• Orlando-Daytona-Melbourne, 37th overall, with a 12.6 / 19
• Miami-Fort Lauderdale, 54th overall, with a 9.3 / 14

I haven't seen any local ratings on how it may be faring, but I can say that I have been enjoying WESH's nightly Olympics show, The Olympics Zone. I like it more -- and watch it more -- than the actual Olympics programming that follows it.

Orlando's former UPN 65 is getting a new name and a new network. Get ready for My TV 65.

News Corp. announced plans Wednesday to create a new network for its Fox-owned stations that are losing UPN affiliation when that network shuts down this fall. News Corp. will launch My Network TV on Sept. 5, and WRBW will be among the O&O stations that will make up the new netlet.

According to Broadcasting and Cable, My Network TV will consist of 12 hours of original programming each week, with shows airing at 8-10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. It will launch with two hour-long dramas, English-language telenovelas from News Corp.-owned Twentieth Television. Desires will focus on two brothers on the run from the mob, while Secrets will be set in the fashion industry. Each of the soaps will run five nights a week.

The network promises fresh programming 52 weeks a year. Other shows in development include several reality programs as well as a Fox News-produced magazine.

My TV will start on Channel 65 and nine other Fox-owned stations, but its programming will be offered to other stations across the nation in hopes of building the new network. This will make it a direct competitor with the CW Network, which is cherry-picking the best shows from the soon-to-be extinct UPN and WB networks.

With My TV on WRBW, that leaves WKCF-Channel 18 and WRDQ-Channel 27 as the two possible homes for the new CW Network.

Former Local 6 reporter Todd Jurkowski has been hired as Channel 6's new weekend anchor. Jurkowski currently is the 4 p.m. anchor/reporter for his hometown NBC affiliate, WBBH in Fort Myers. He's a Lee County native and worked at the station before he came to Orlando the first time, then returned to the station after he left O-Town.

"It's a bit melancholy leaving the hometown, having grown up here," Jurkowski told the Fort Myers News-Press. "My long-term goal was to be the main anchor here. I couldn't get a guarantee of that, so I had to go with something rock solid."

Jurkowski's last day hasn't been settled yet. In Orlando, he'll replace Gerald Reznick, who left the anchor desk because of a vision disorder.

Following up on the item about the two WKMG reporters who posted on MySpace.com, listing themselves as 15 year olds ...

Heard from several people, including one person who said he was a friend of the women, who explained this is a common practice on the MySpace site to keep some privacy.

Another agreed, "The only way to hide your profile is to change your birthday to 14 or 15. The police actually encourage it in order to protect your information. If you list your age over that then anyone can read your profile, stories, and see your friends! Most users are listed this way ... duh!"

Duh, indeed! That was news to me. Anytime I see adults posing as 15 year olds, I get suspicious. But apparently that suspicion was misplaced.

Meanwhile, the MySpace pages for Jessica D'Onofrio and Jessica Sanchez now list their real ages.

I received an e-mail late last week saying to check out two postings on the popular site MySpace.com.

The first link was to a 15-year-old girl named Jessica (top left) who lives in Orlando. The second link was to another girl named "Lady J" (top right), this one saying she is 15, lives in Orlando and "If it weren't for Myspace I'd have no friends."

What's interesting is the "girls" in the photos look very, very similar to WKMG reporters Jessica D'Onofrio (bottom left) and Jessica Sanchez (bottom right).

So, is this a hoax, a prank ... or possibly part of a Local 6 sweeps story trying to find out if anyone will attempt to pick up these "underage" girls? You decide.

I'm totally in favor of getting scuzzballs off the street, but this sure seems to raise a lot of ethical questions about doing something like this just for a sweeps story -- if, indeed, that is the case here.

Sweeps are a time when some stations try to grab viewers by, well, stretching the truth a bit to pass off old news as "breaking news" or by labeling widely reported stories as "exclusives." Some like, Fox 35, try both -- to con viewers into thinking they're breaking an exclusive story that "you have to see!"

Monday night during 24, WOFL aired a promo for its 10 p.m. news. Anchor Shelly Ribando breathless reported, "Fox 35 makes an alarming discovery! Foreign companies taking charge of security in our nation's ports! Tonight, on Fox 35 News at 10." Same tease with same wording ran later during Fox 35's newscast. Remember, this is Fox 35 saying it's making this "alarming discovery."

The story is about a British company that runs port operations in six U.S. cities, including Miami. That company -- Peninsular and Oriental -- is being taken over by a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates called Dubai Ports World.

Wow! Great get by Fox 35, right? Well ... except for the fact that this story (a) was all over the network news earlier in the evening, (b) has been reported almost daily by CNN since last week and (c) was run in some newspaper more than a month ago.

When WOFL aired its report, no mention was made about how Fox 35 "discovered" this story. So, we'll never know if WOFL uncovered this bombshell by (a) checking the wires, (b) reading the newspaper, (c) watching CNN (heavens to Rupert, say that ain't so!) or (d) surfing the internet.

If you ever wonder why the public has such a low opinion of the media, it's because of useless hyperbole such as this sweeps stinker. I now will step down from the soapbox.

I'm not sure if it was a terrorist group -- or more likely some bored loner kid in a basement somewhere -- but the RogerSimmons.com Orlando TV Talk Forum message board was hacked on Friday morning. (And when I say "hacked," basically that means they were able to overwrite some of the coding so their page showed up instead of the messages posted there.)

If you went to the site, instead of getting the message board you were greeted by a big page that said "Allahu Akbar" -- which translates from Arabic as "God is Great." It also said "Islamic Warriors" were responsible for hijacking the site. Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not.

But, in reality, no harm was done. The message board was easily restored because all the data is backed up each day.

So make sure you keep posting all about Orlando TV ... because if you don't, then the terrorists have won!

TVWeek reports that more than 200 TV station owners and executives received their first communications from the new CW Network on Tuesday -- starting the process for affiliate selection.

In Orlando, that affiliation choice comes down to two stations:

• WKCF-Channel 18, the current WB affiliate and one of the strongest WB stations in the nation.
• WRDQ-Channel 27, the independent station owned by Cox and run by the stongest station in the market, WFTV.

Selection of O-Town's CW station could come quickly, according to the letters sent out. "Affiliation materials will be sent out this week. At the same time, we will be contacting each company involved in the first wave of affiliation discussions," the letter said. "We will do what is necessary to move quickly to evaluate each market, as well as to provide each television station that wishes to participate in our evaluation process an opportunity to do so."

As they say in TV, stay tuned ...

WFTV weekend anchor Jorge Estevez is leaving Channel 9 to become the weekday morning anchor at CBS O&O WFOR in Miami, according to NewsBlues.com. Estevez has been with WFTV since 2001.

Also, former WFTV general assignment reporter Jamison Uhler has moved to the Philadelphia area and joined NBC O&O WCAU as a general assignment reporter. Uhler, a Pennsylvania native, started at NBC 10 on Jan. 31.

Colleague David Whitley, sports columnist for the Orlando Sentinel and quite literally the funniest man on the planet, was the subject of a report on NBC Nightly News on Monday night.

Whitley wrote a column last week trying to figure out why NBC was referring to Turin, Italy as Torino, Italy. It was a very funny bit. And it apparently caught the eye of someone at NBC News.

Whitley, who is covering the Winter Games in Torino, er, Turin, was asked to meet with anchor Brian Williams to tape a segment on the name game. Whitley got plenty of face time and was characterized by Williams as the "newspaper guy" who was fighting the NBC-ization of the town's name.

If you missed the report, here's a link to video.

Fox 35 News at Ten had video last night of Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shooting someone while quail hunting. Here's a link to the video.

(Oh, did I mention it was from a video game?)

Some quick hits for you today:

>> WESH starts its Olympic coverage tonight with the debut of its nightly preview show, The O-Zone. News anchor Wendy Chioji and sports director Pat Clarke host the show from Universal Orlando. It airs at 7:30 p.m.

>> In the past week, KABC in Los Angeles and WXIA in Atlanta started broadcasting their news in high definition. When do you think that will start in O-Town, and who will be the first? I would place my bet on WFTV.

>> Comings and goins at WFTV: Reporter Carl Willis has left to join KPRC in Houston. David Ham from WGGB in Springfield, Mass., and Tim Wetzel from WINK in Fort Myers join Channel 9 as reporters.

>> Can't get enough Daily Buzz? Sure, there's the three-hour show live on WB18 each morning, and the 24-hours-a-day replay on WB 18's digital subchannel. But is that really enough? If not, check out the show's website, DailyBuzz.tv, for video offerings including "Fast Casts" and "Behind the Scenes." It's pretty entertaining.

When I unveiled the redesign of the website several weeks ago, I promised more new stuff. Actually, it's more old stuff.

Because of all the changes that occurred at WESH last week, I've update the Channel 2 page first here on the site. Included are more than 100 screen shots of WESH newscasts through the years, more than 30 video clips plus old newspaper advertisements and photos related to WESH. Channel 2 will celebrate it's 50th anniversary later this year on June 10.

You can access the new WESH page via this new link. This is the treatment the other stations will get also once I am able to update pages for them. If you have old, historical material you would like to have included on one of the station pages, please pass it along.

And, if you take a look to the left, the media links have been updated to include some new sites. Surf's up.

Hal Boedeker of the Orlando Sentinel broke the story today that Fox 35 will start its new evening newscast one month from today, on March 6.

Morning anchor Amy Kaufeldt will be moving to the new 5 p.m. newscast, which will also feature chief meteorologist Glenn Richards. Other details, such as who will replace Kaufeldt in the morning and if she'll have a co-anchor in addition to Richards, were not released.

Fox 35 GM Stan Knott told Boedeker: "The way it will be formatted will be different from what are considered early evening, traditional newscasts. We're looking for the morning feel at the early evening."

Fox's 10 p.m. news offers an eclectic lineup of stories each night leaning more toward the soft side. But it's somewhat understandable because it's the station's only evening newscast and it needs to come up with different angles to cover stories that have been around all day.

But it seems to me that by adding an early evening newscast Fox will need to use more of a traditional approach to succeed. It will be tough to change the habits of viewers used to the meat-and-potato news coverage from Orlando's Big 3. Maybe they'll want something light, but if that was the case why hasn't anyone else succeeded doing it already?

Marc Middleton, who is leaving WESH at the end of the month after 18 years at the station, is teaming up with former Channel 2 anchor Andrea Coudriet to form a media relations company.

Middleton Coudriet Media Group already has its first client —Tavistock Cup, the annual Isleworth vs. Lake Nona golf competition that is televised internationally on The Golf Channel.
"We are thrilled to be working with an internationally respected company like the Tavistock Group," Middleton said in a news release. "We feel like we've made a hole in one off the first tee."

Added Coudriet: "The Tavistock Cup will provide the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what we can do. This event deserves a lot of attention. We're anxious to help tell this story."

Middleton is leaving WESH after joining the station the 1980s and has served as sports director, news anchor and business and technology reporter. Coudriet left the WESH anchor desk in 1996 and has become one of Central Florida's most successful event organizers and fundraisers.

Via Florida Today, WKMG confirms what we first reported on Jan. 13 -- that morning anchor Mark McEwen is not expected to return to the anchor desk until March at the earliest. McEwen continues to recover from a stroke he suffered in November.

Former WFTV reporter Scott Thuman, who left Orlando in December to take a job at WJLA in Washington, D.C., is back in O-Town to help with the search for missing Jennifer Kesse, NewsBlues.com reports.

Thuman has reportedly taken a leave of absence from WJLA to oversee media inquiries into the disappearance of Kesse, the 24-year-old Orlando woman who has been missing since Jan. 23. NewsBlues said Thuman dated Kesse, and he is advising her family on dealing with the media.

A website has been created to help with the search for Kesse.

In a move that will better position the station for the future, WRDQ is moving.

Not from Orlando or from sister-station WFTV's studios. It's moving on Bright House Networks cable. The station has been airing on channel 21 on the cable lineup since not long after it went on the air in 2001. But starting in mid-March, it's movin' on down the dial to channel 10 -- a much nicer neighborhood populated by many of the other local stations.

The station has been upgrading its programming, adding South Park, 24, My Wife and Kids and the Tom Joyner Show to staples that include Oprah reruns and the WFTV-produced Action News at 10 This fall, the station will add Monday-Friday reruns of Scrubs, Acording to Jim and That 70s Show.

And there the possibility of affiliation with the new CW Network. The move to a more favorable cable channel position could only help those prospects.

As part of its move to new downtown digs in December, Central Florida News 13 promised to make its presence known in its new neighborhood. And it's already starting to do so.

The station has erected a big screen -- 10-feet-by-10-feet, or maybe 12-by-12 -- on the side of the Wachovia building facing Orange Avenue and directly across from popular Wall Street Plaza. As of yesterday, no one had pushed the "on" button, but that should come soon. And it looks like it will be pretty cool.

As reported earlier, the station also plans to create an electronic headline crawl on the other side of the building on Central Avenue.

If you watch The Daily Buzz on WB18, you may have noticed something different about the nationally syndicated morning show. There's more news about Central Florida.

Orlando is one of four test markets where the show is adding local news inserts. This week, WKCF also started a partnership with Metro Traffic to include local traffic segments during the show. And the station has been offering local weather forecasts for awhile.

How important is the weather in Central Florida? That's like asking if Disney World is a popular tourist spot.

The local importance -- even perhaps obsession -- with weather here hasn't gone unnoticed by the folks at WKMG. I noticed this week the station now starts its 5 p.m. newscast with "Forecast First" -- a complete weather report from chief meteorologist Tom Sorrells before the news even begins. And if you turn to Local 6 to watch Forecast First, the thinking is you might hang around for the newscast, too.

Of course, weather is important to WKMG. They still devote more than half of the Wednesday night newscast to "Big Picture Weather Wednesday."

So, what's the long-range forecast for Forecast First on WKMG? Consult your nearest Nielsen Doppler.

Multichannel News, the noted cable television industry publication, has named Sun Sports and Fox Sports Net Florida VP/GM Cathy Weeden as one of their 12 "Wonder Women" for 2006.

Orlando-based Sun counts some 6.1 million subscribers, while FSN Florida, located in Sunrise, is home to 5.1 customers. In the profile in the magazine's Jan. 30 issue, it notes that if running two of the nation's largest regional sports television networks wasn't enough of a challenge, Weeden is facing personal challenges as well. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in December.

Weeden will be honored at the "Wonder Women 2006" luncheon presented by Multichannel News and Women in Cable & Telecommunications' New York chapter on March 7 at the Marriott Marquis in New York.