Monday, October 17, 2005

Fox 8 Staffers - We Know What You've Been Doing This Fall

OMW first approached this topic below...when we shared the news of the new Fox TV local stations chief, and reports that the network intends on spreading the Fox "look and feel" down from its popular cable network to local Fox owned and operated - "O&O" - stations. One of those stations is Cleveland's WJW "Fox 8".

Now, comes this from an article by Michael Learmonth at Variety magazine:

"Staff at News Corp.'s far-flung station group -- which includes Fox and UPN affiliates across the country -- are waiting to see what changes are ahead. While it's still early in the new regime, one thing seems certain: The landscape of local television is going to change.

Local news editors, producers and on-air talent have been flown to New York for intense two-day training sessions to help local news personalities abandon dry anchor-speak and adopt a more Foxian barstool conversational style."

Now, we're not sure what a "Foxian barstool" style is, but our local Fox O&O doesn't really have THAT far to go in conversational style. It's always been one of the chattier outlets in the market, and has gone to great lengths to personalize its anchors to the audience. The station's 5 and 10 PM anchors - Bill Martin and Stacey Bell - casually joke about reader E-Mail and have an easygoing style. Even veteran anchors Tim Taylor and Wilma Smith, now voluntarily only on WJW's 6 PM show at this point in their careers, aren't exactly "stilted".

We haven't seen a promo for it on Fox 8, but do watch out for Geraldo Rivera's new "Geraldo at Large" syndicated news/talk show...now set for an October 31st premiere on all the Fox O&O's.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Say what you will about Fox News in general, but I like FOX 8 a lot. As far as local newscasts go, they are clearly the best in town in my opinion - whatever the ratings may say.