You have to be tough to be in the TV news business — dealing with angry viewers, demanding bosses and overprotective hawks. Yep, hawks. Folks at WOFL-Fox 35 are making news themselves after an agressive mother hawk has been attacking employees outside the station’s Lake Mary studios. One recent high-profile…
Month: April 2009
Digital signals bring good news, bad news
When Orlando’s TV stations — and all others in the nation — finally turn off their analog transmitters on June 12, some Central Florida viewers might be in for a surprise. Because of tower relocations and the switch to a digital signal, many area stations will reach more households over…
News 13, WESH pick up awards
Central Florida News 13 took home three awards from the Florida Associated Press Broadcasters competition on Saturday. Chief met Jeff Day won first place for best weathercast for his coverage of Tropical Storm Fay. Scott Fais won second place for best short light feature about Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon. And the station took second…
New GM hints of changes at Local 6
Former Local 6 news director Skip Valet returned to WKMG last week as its new general manager. He’s replacing retiring GM Henry Maldonado — and it sounds like he’s ready to get to work to push WKMG out of the ratings cellar. In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Valet said, “I…
Fox 35’s singing anchors in video
We knew that Fox 35 weatherman Jim Van Fleet could sing, but who knew about some of the other anchors over at WOFL? This clip I stumbled across on YouTube is more than a year old, but still entertaining nonetheless. I believe it was produced by “John” aka Jhbmw007….
New morning show getting ready to air
There’s a new morning show that will go on the air in about a week. What’s different about it? Well, it’s being produced at a newspaper. SouthFlorida.com Live is the brainchild of Tribune Co., owner of the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. In addition to owning the newspaper…
No March madness: WFTV still No. 1
The unusual — and basically meaningless — March sweeps ended on Wednesday. To no one’s surprise, WFTV-Channel 9 was once again the Nielsen powerhouse for Central Florida. The ratings numbers show 9’s Eyewitness News was the top choice in households and in the 25-54 demo in all the time periods. WESH…
Blago! WESH gets video of gov at Disney
Score one for WESH. Reports on Thursday had former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich spotted spending time at Walt Disney World — hours before an expected indictment over allegedly trying to sell Pres. Barack Obama’s senate seat. All the local media outlets were looking for Blago — and asking readers/viewers to…
Who will jump into the pool with Fox 35?
As you may have heard, Fox O&O stations are teaming with other stations in their markets to create a pooled news service to feed news to both stations and cut costs. The latest examples came Wednesday when Fox announced a deal with E.W. Scripps stations to pool resouces. According to TVNewsday.com,…
Television in Florida turns 60
Although I missed it by a couple of weeks, I couldn’t let an important milestone in Florida television history go unnoted. Miami’s WTVJ celebrated its 60th anniversary on March 21. WTVJ, originally broadcasting on Channel 4, was the first television station in Florida — and just the 16th in the…