It's April 2nd

We've turned the calendar to April 2nd, which means you may actually be able to believe what you hear or read again.

We'll have an April Fools' Day aftermath item later in this scroll...but more important information comes first...

NEWSCHANNEL 5 CHANGES: It's not quite the talent upheaval that Cleveland Scripps ABC affiliate WEWS/5 "NewsChannel 5" has been known for in the past couple of years or so...but the station is doing some more on-air shuffling in the next week or so.

OMW hears that "NC5"'s Alicia Booth will become dedicated to full-time health reporting, which means she won't be seen anchoring "NewsChannel 5 at Noon" anymore.

Sources at 3001 Euclid tell us that Lee Jordan will remain as a noon show anchor, and will be joined by "Good Morning Cleveland" co-anchors Kimberly Gill and Pete Kenworthy.

No, "NC5" isn't expanding the set for a three-person team...Gill and Kenworthy will apparently switch off with the noon co-anchor duties, with Gill joining Lee Jordan some days, and Kenworthy joining Jordan on other days.

We don't know if that's "set" on the schedule or not, or if it depends on who has a story, or perhaps errands to run, in late morning...

NEW BLOG: It's just starting, but OMW has a new sister (brother?) blog.

As hinted earlier, we've started the Ohio Digital TV Blog - we presume we'll call it "ODTV" for short. The ODTV blog will provide all the detailed information on the digital TV transition you've come to expect from OMW, but in a separate entity.

Not only does this allow us to go off into digital TV land in great detail...it also allows us to move the minutae off the main blog. We realize not everyone is interested in such detail here.

We'll post links to new items here as needed, newswise, but the "DTV meat" will be "over there" from now on...

LIRPA SLOOF PART 1: Borrowing the header from the name of PBRTV.com's once-a-year "staff writer"...

It is indeed April 2nd, and that means that Clear Channel talk WTAM/1100 is indeed back to being...uh, WTAM.

The station kept its April Fools' Day joke - a wholesale conversion to 1100's former "3WE" branding - going all day.

Even afternoon driver Mike Trivisonno, who was clearly not a willing participant, mostly let the prank go unabated on his 3-7 PM show...with an occasional stumble on the station name when going to callers ("what am I supposed to say here...uh...3WE, you're in the air!") before finally just settling on the usual "WTAM 1100".

And aside from telling a caller jokingly asking about the 3WE branding "it's amazing what people fall for", Triv didn't call attention to the gag.

But a willing participant in the day-long joke? Premiere's Glenn Beck, who recorded liners welcoming listeners to "Radio 1100, 3WE"...

LIRPA SLOOF 2: Elsewhere in April Fools' land, it was the second year in a row for WKYC/3 7 PM co-anchor Eric Mansfield pranking on his "Have I Got News For You" blog.

After "breaking news" online about a new aquarium coming to Akron last year, this time around, it was a Big Bang at the University of Akron's new (insert name of telemarketing company) Stadium. Quoting Eric's original post:

The announcement is coming early next week, but I've learned that rock legends Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin will christen Akron's new football stadium with back-to-back concerts on Sept. 11th and 12th. The two icons of Rock are making Akron the second stop on their "Better off Dead" tour .. which looks to be a blockbuster in the world of music.

Eric's 2009 joke went multimedia, with Clear Channel hot AC WKDD/98.1 morning drive host Matt Patrick taking part in the merriment as well.

But no, the "two icons of Rock" won't be performing before the University of Akron Zips first take the field at their new stadium. Check the calendar...

Eric has a follow up here:

As most of you figured out quickly, my blog post about the big Clapton/Zeppelin concert is an April Fool's joke.

There's no concert at the new U of A stadium ... and as far as I know, Led Zeppelin and Clapton won't be passing through any time soon.

Still .. it was a fun few hours as Matt Patrick and Krissi Taylor picked up on my prank and had some fun with the WKDD morning drive. Their listeners (most anyway) saw through the April Fool's prank right away.

The "Big Concert" story never made it to air on WKYC, of course. Mansfield tried to keep it, as intended, only on his personal blog.

But that personal blog has a feed which gets scraped by the station's Twitter account, and...oops, there it went out to the world with a Channel 3 logo attached! (Eric says he leapt into action when he learned that it appeared there, and pulled the link. At least he didn't add anything about changing the time of a Saturday yoga class.)

Meanwhile, former WKYCer, friend of Eric Mansfield, and OMW reader Chris Hyser points out some of those dangers in his own blog:

You see, those social media sites are ALSO "official" ways to distribute the news. In fact, my friend uses both to solicit both story ideas, and to "tease" folks to that evening's newscasts.

Today, some of his Facebook "friends" have already posted responses that indicate they believe his joke is a REAL story that my former colleague is breaking.

This is really, really dangerous to me.

Lesson learned, we would assume, assuming Eric does another one in 2010. The importance of "new media" has grown between April 1, 2008 and April 1, 2009, and that trend is only likely to continue.

Eric is a good guy and a solid journalist, and didn't expect the prank to get swept up off his blog. But even so, that blog does feature his in-depth takes on actual news stories, like the Akron pizza shop robbery item that's up now...

LIRPA SLOOF 3: One of our readers asked if we'd heard anything about yet another delay in the digital TV transition...but this is an item we won't put up on the new blog.

He pointed to this item on PBRTV:

Just when you thought that the transition to digital TV would finally take place by June 12th, you might want to sit down. According to sources in Washington, both leaders in the U.S. House and Senate are looking at ways to delay the DTV transition AGAIN until December 25th. Yes folks, December 25th is Christmas believe it or not.

Aside from the April 1st date on PBRTV contributor and OMW reader Tom Lavery's item, take a look at the last line:

Thanks to PBRTV reader Josh Kiddenya for this breaking news update.

Yep, Josh Kiddenya.

And Tom even had us going for a minute...