We hate after-holiday media!

Getting back to MediaWatch after a holiday is always aggravating since we have to pay attention to the morning TV news shows, and they really grate.

Indiana’s NewsCenter’s a.m. efforts, with Ryan Elijah and Mary Collins rush through news items, almost breathlessly, providing no details or context so what that team is reporting makes little or no sense.



And weather-person Chris Daniels just has a voice and demeanor that viewers hate to wake up to. The guy’s a stiff. (Why is he still employed here.)



WANE-TV, this Monday [7/7/] morning was without Pat Hoffman, whose mellifluous voice is always a nice offset to Terra Brantley’s “hammer-pounding-a-nail-in-viewers-heads” voice, which has been, lately, even worse than in the past.



Ms. Brantley over-inflects (as we’ve noted many times) everything, and reads news accounts as if they were drama auditions by a really bad actor.

Brantley ain’t going anyplace, even though she’s tried often enough, so viewers are stuck with the up-and-down and in-and-out, over-enthused verbal thrusts by her, until they go back to INC where the meaningless newscast is less awful, by a smidgen.

The morning paper (Journal Gazette) sits in driveways, and will until near noon, and then will remain unread for hours after that.

Monday morning radio? A hodge-podge of what deejays and hosts did or didn’t do for the 4th of July, all inane and hokey humored.

(Try Majic 95 for an example.)

And network news (The Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS’s Morning Show)? Just as bad or worse, since those people are supposed to be professional broadcasters but are only better than Fort Wayne’s broadcasters and media in the salary department.



Back to bed, for us…..

Why WANE beats INC during Sweeps

Why has WANE-TV (generally) beat Indiana’s NewsCenter in the Nielsen ratings for several years now?

The news from WANE isn’t any better than that from INC, so that’s not the reason.

And some of WANE’s anchors and reporters are no better than those at INC, so that isn’t the reason….or is it?

INC’s news-team, except for Nicole Pence and Jessica Toumani, seems old, tired and just going through the motions, whereas WANE’s news-team seems constantly energized and vibrant.

It’s not content but style evidently.

Viewers who see lethargic Jeff Neumeyer show up with an INC report, or catch Jennifer Blomquist doing her tired takes on canned (generic) stories for women, get the idea that INC is half-hearted about news gathering.

Yes, INC has gone whole-hog in its promotion of viewer input, but that isn’t news and normal viewers want news not self-aggrandizing items from their peers.

WANE also seeks viewer input but less so than INC.

And WANE’s reporters evoke élan when they’re on-air.

There’s a kind of excitement when WANE does stories, while INC’s reportage is staid, which was how news used to be done or was told how news should be done, but that’s changed nowadays.

News today needs punch in a society that has seen everything and expects a touch of wildness in the news it seeks.

That’s not wholesome, but that’s how it is, and WANE provides a spate of energy and INC’s reports seem enervated.

Also, INC has partnered with The Journal Gazette, a boring, tired newspaper that has all the values of the 1950s and none of the spark of the 21st Century.

WANE has recently partnered with The News-Sentinel, a dying newspaper but one with the appearance of a little more life in it than JG.

(N-S isn’t substantial by a long shot, and its format is dark and brooding, but JG’s image in the community is petrified – a traditional newspaper that just is, with no current redeeming qualities.)

So, INC will continue to come in second to WANE, so long as INC management maintains the status quo, which it seems determined to do.

INC and the 6/6/08 Storm(s)

Indiana’s NewsCenter covered the storms that hit Fort Wayne, Friday, 6/6/08.

The coverage was intrusive, wiping out programming on ABC, NBC, the CW, etc. for over an hour, but the coverage was necessary as one can see from this capture of INC’s radar:



And this is a rundown of storm damage by Linda Jackson:



Of course, Curtis Smith was the over-reaching weatherist during the storm…



But he rambled for the hour plus that INC was on the air, providing discursive and manic accounts of the fast-moving storm.

Here’s a snippet of his patter:



Of course INC’s coverage seemed to be warranted; the storms in the Midwest all week were tragic and this one in our area was pretty bad.

WANE’s Sandy Thomson provided more judicious coverage, not disrupting CBS programming to the extent that Smith ravaged the INC stations.



But we’re not so sure that Smith and INC were remiss.

And here is an INC snap of the storms denouement. Nice…

It's nuts -- and not in a good way

Yes, the Komets won the Turner Cup but did media (and does media) have to go as crazy as the Fort Wayne/Indiana fans?

INC was particularly gaga, while WANE was a bit more subdued, until the station’s sport segment.

(Melissa Long was enthused and Linda Jackson was hysterical. Even Dean Pantazi wasn’t as nuts as Jackson.)

The Journal Gazette provided ample coverage, as did The News-Sentinel on its web-site, from which we culled Ellie Bogue’s photo above.

What does it mean when the Komets or any other Fort Wayne sport team (such as the Wizards) win a contest?

Does it mean that Fort Wayne is a primo city, and its residents primo citizens of America, or the world?

No, the fanaticism of sport is a neurotic syndrome – an escape from reality to a faux reality: sport.

But it has always been thus, as it was in the heady days of Rome when the Coliseum harbored contests involving Christian martyrdom and/or other inhumane activity.

The early Greeks liked sport also. But what else did those societies have to do, just out of primitive antecedents.

Today, there are a multiplicity of problems for Fort Wayne: unsolved murders, high gas prices, failing infrastructure. Mitch Harper’s self-aggrandizing blog, but the rabble choose to identify with the Komet hockey team, as if the team’s win was the rabble’s win.

Such behavior isn’t unique to Fort Wayne or media here, but it sure is indicative of a populace that has its priorities all wrong, and media, unfortunately, goes overboard to exacerbate the lunacy.

Former JG intern/reporter

From ThePhoenix.com

CHARLIE SAVAGE TO NYT

Big loss for the Boston Globe: Charlie Savage, who won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Bush Administration's sweeping expansion of executive power, is headed to the New York Times. He'll start there later this month.

"I'm very sorry to lose Charlie," says Peter Canellos, the Globe's D.C.-bureau chief. "There's nothing more to say about that. But we will be replacing Charlie in the bureau, which is good--and we're going to take a look at internal candidates first."

"Charlie's been terrific for us," adds Globe editor Marty Baron. "He did great work in Washington--he won a Pulitzer, as you know--and it's no wonder that the New York Times is interested in him. But he's not the first talented person from the Globe that's been hired elsewhere. And in the same way that we found the talent of Charlie Savage, I trust that we'll have another talented person in Washington."

The impending end of the Bush presidency may make it a little easier for the paper to cope with Savage's departure; even if John McCain wins in November, he probably won't push the Unitary Executive the way Bush has. Still, an unfortunate development.

5/8/2008 2:53:30 PM by Adam Reilly

That damn Indiana’s NewsCenter

During a crucial scene in ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters” Sunday night [5/4], a blurb for the upcoming newscast at 11 p.m. interrupted and destroyed an important denouement for viewers.

This happens all the time with INC; the stations here (NBC33, WPTA, CW) often cut into openings (of the Tonight Show for instance) and interrupt programming to accommodate advertisements or self-serving promos.

VP Jerry Giesler doesn’t seem able to curb the gaffes. And it’s not as if the engineers and staff are underpaid.

It’s just sloppy television broadcasting, and we don’t see any corrections in sight.


On a lighter note, at least Greg Perigo’s Northern Indiana LAKES magazine brings relief from such things as the above.

Mr. Perigo lets readers know and see that there is surcease from Fort Wayne’s crime, stupidity, noise, and over all stink.

The lakes, while not perfect (being inhabited by some human slugs), allow moments of beauty and quiescence that soothe high blood pressure and city aggravations.

LAKES is a wonderful respite for those who seek something more than the cacophony of a town (FW) that is short on aesthetics and enjoyable living.

Seek it out, even if you don’t have a lake place. (And we bet you’ll want a cottage after you get a copy of Mr. Perigo’s really excellent periodical.)



And we also find a nice escape from the journalese and TV reportage that is humdrum in Fort Wayne media.

It’s a little column in WhatzUp called “Lip Service” – a spunky, but not snarky read by a writer (unknown to us) but unique and quite marvelous.

Walking (and running) to nowhere

Fort Wayne is obsessed with walking, because there is little else to do here.

What is pathetic is that walking and walkers pretend that the effort of walking is for some good cause or another.

Walks for AIDS, walks for cancer, walks for diabetes, walks to support “trails,” walks to curb violence, and so on.

Media exacerbates the nonsense by covering the activity, television more than the print press because there’s some movement involved.

But take the recent walks to protest shootings in the city. Will carrying banners and asking for surcease in the criminal community, with banners and speeches, actually curtail the gang activity and random shootings or purposeless killings?

No, but people want to do something to assuage their irritation with the felonies committed. (Outrage isn’t what they feel, or else they’d come up with something substantial to attack the crime waves that sporadically occur here.)

Walking in Fort Wayne is a social activity, an excuse to get together with other do-nothings.

Making walks cause-oriented provides a cover for the inane strolls. (It might be better if persons walking used calorie-burning as their motive; that would at least have a ring of truth to it.)

But walking has become endemic to the town, and Fort Waynians are nothing is not habitual in their minor insanities, so we expect to see a raft of more walks, for more causes, along streets and by-ways that may no be suited to ambling yet are used for such.

And we suspect media will be right there, ready to capture the petty promenades.

And while on the topic of walking, how about running?

Fort Wayne is suffused with runners – persons trying to stay thin in a city of obese residents.

But some runners have gone to far with their jogging.

Ian Rolland is a runner, and it seems to have given him longevity.

Steve Shine is a runner, but that hasn’t kept him free of various controversies; it has just kept him moderately thin, in body and hair.

However, take a look at some of Indiana’s NewsCenter’s runners….

Morning anchor Mary Collins is a runner, but she looks cadaverous:



Weather guy Jason Meyers is a runner, and he is skeletal:



Chris Daniels, another weather guy, is a runner? He sure has the physiognomy of one:



Noon anchor Corinne Rose isn’t a runner:



And WANE’s Greg Shoup isn’t a runner either:

Going Green (in a way)

Fort Wayne needs a media clean-up



Media in Fort Wayne can’t go on as it has for the recent past.

Media, like Fort Wayne itself, stinks.

Some will e-mail us saying if we don’t like Fort Wayne, we should leave – a position that only fools present.

Fort Wayne and its media may be likened to a toxic waste dump, and we, upon discovering it, could walk away or we can alert the public to the thing, hoping that the dump can be eradicated, or made harmless in some way.

If Craig Klugman were removed as Editor of The Journal Gazette, the paper, with a new Editor (Sherry Skufca or Tracy Warner) might make the morning sheets into a vibrant journalistic effort, rather than the staid, and oh-so-boring rag that it is now.

Removing the encrusted Leo Morris from the Editorial section of The News-Sentinel, replacing him with someone who is attuned to the 21st Century, might keep that paper alive for a few more years, instead of the six or seven months it now has as a life-line.

Getting rid of Dean Pantazi and the other scummy-looking sport guys at Indiana’s NewsCenter might help that “group” of cloned television stations get back its once dominant cachet.

Forcing(?) Sandy Thomson out of WANE could provide a younger patina to that TV station, which, with her and Randy Schiffman, is mired in the past, to the point that INC is gathering some viewers who are a bit tired of the elderly smell that WANE evokes when Sandy and Randy show up.

When Candy Wendling leaves Sarkus Tazian’s WAJI and Oldies stations, and Lee Tobin takes over, that’s one fetid radio operation that may go green, and we mean monetarily.

If Federated Media was fumigated, from the top down, that bevy of passé radio stations might thrive and the re-invigorated pastiche might thrill Fort Wayne listeners, as some of the stations (WMEE, K105, WOWO) did in the past.

Going “green” or cleaning house, either way, Fort Wayne media might just be vehicle by which the town can move from a crappy persona to one with a environmentally friendly façade.

That might not help intrinsically with improving the lot of Fort Wayne’s intellectually deficient citizenry, but it’s a start.

Entombed in Fort Wayne media

It may be repressed but being stuck in Fort Wayne media has got to be awfully depressing for those who have some intellect and cultural sensibility.

By that we mean it is a sad thing to have a journalistic or radio career only to find yourself in a city where media is irrelevant, and you’re going to die here, without making a mark on society and won’t (or can’t) leave a personal legacy that your spouse, children, and friends can point to as significant.

Take Steve Penhollow, the Journal Gazette entertainment reporter for instance; a writer of eminent qualifications who has been relegated to ruminating about tawdry performers (and entertainment), with a Friday stint on 21Alive’s newscasts where he tries to be funny and erudite but falls flat as a Aunt Jemima pancake.

Penhollow was destined for better things in journalism we think, but he ended up marrying Bonnie Blackburn. A former JG editorialist then reporter, who now is an adjunct editor/writer for Fort Wayne magazine.

This has ensconced Mr. Penhollow in Fort Wayne, and kept him in a job that pays the bills but surely has to irk his desire to be something more than a JG hack.

His wife is a terrific writer also, but has succumbed to the Fort Wayne “vapors” and finds this town worthy enough to sap her talents too.

Then take a journalistic quidnunc like Derrick Gingery who writes (or tries to) for The Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly.

He’s slogged through a few years in his job, having come here from Chicago where he didn’t make a mark, and married, not long ago, a JG business reporter, both now happy to make Fort Wayne their home and journalistic resting place.

Like Mr. And Mrs. Penhollow, they are relatively young, and already cretaively atrophied.

They’ll die in Fort Wayne, and no one will care, not even their offspring we imagine.

The old-timers in the print press (and you all know who they are: Ben Smith, Leo Morris, Craig Klugman, Reggie Hayes, Jennifer Boen, Bob Caylor, et al.) have already accepted their journalistic fates, and have figuratively died, at least career-wise (as one might put it).

TV newsies move on usually.

There are some who’ve been raised in this area and like it: INC’s Melissa Long and Linda Jackson, and WANE’s Heather Herron, for example.

But the go-getters – WANE’s Niccole Caan or Megan Stembol or INC’s Jessica Toumani – will leave Fort Wayne and head down career paths that bring satisfying personal reward and substantial remuneration.

The rest, such as WANE’s Randy Schiffman and Sandy Thomson or INC’s Dean Pantazi, have mouldered here, so they no longer care that they are only earning a living and not making a media mark.

As we wrote earlier, this would be depressing for most people but those named have inured themselves of their failures – measured in qualitative terms not quantitative (materialistic) terms – and just put in a days work (or something like that).

In Fort Wayne radio, Doc West, Dan Austin, Weasel, Melissa Montana, Dirk Rowley, Billy Elvis, Charly Butcher, Jim Reed, and a whole lot more, have settled into moribund routines and FM careers; they don’t care that they matter not to the world outside (and some of) Fort Wayne.

They earn a paycheck, and have a few fans, so what’s not to like they may ask?

Being a big fish in a small pond can be rewarding. It isn’t transcendent in any way but it keeps food on the table, and for many media folks here that’s enough.

Nonetheless, taking an objective view – and we are being objective here regardless of the quasi-rant – for most Fort Wayne media people, their careers aren’t going to lift them to notable heights.

And while that’s sad, in many ways, it is not as bad as just dying with nothing worthwhile to put a tombstone, but it’s damn close.

WLKI in Angola has new owner

[From WLKI.COM]

Lake Cities Broadcasting has been sold. Pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission, the company will become known as Swick Broadcasting Corporation on or about June 1st.

Businessman Steve Swick of Coldwater will take over ownership of WLKI in Angola, WTHD in LaGrange, WLZZ in Montpelier, Ohio and our two Sturgis, Michigan stations; ESPN-AM1230 and Oldies 99.3.

Swick says he has been interested in buying the stations for several years. In this era of corporate and satellite radio, Swick intends to keep a local presence on all of the stations. Swick is taking over ownership of the five stations from Tom Andrews who helped sign WLKI on the air in July of 1974.

Andrews says it's time to be semi-retired but he will be available to Swick in whatever capacity he is needed.

Our bad...

A response from Indiana’s NewsCenter has corrected the MediaWatch impression (in the March 17th posting below) where we said INC was suffering “dismal ratings.”

(We didn’t get the February 2008 ratings this time around so our observation was flawed it seems.)

The February Nielsen ratings book showed that INC’s 21Alive gained viewers in the morning, at 5 pm, 6 pm and at 11pm and the rating jumped three household points and 7 share points.

At the same time, WANE lost 3 household points and 13 share points at 11pm and
also showed a loss at 6 pm.

21Alive is one point behind WANE at 5 pm, and has now tied them at 6 and 11.

This is the second ratings book in which WPTA/21 has steadily gained viewers.

Indiana's NewsCenter thinks it's radio

We’ve wondered why the INC stations (particularly NBC33 and 21Alive) suffer dismal Nielsen ratings.

And we think we know why.

INC has come to be a radio station with TV credentials.

Why a radio station? Look at some of the staffers and the set, which is cluttered, non-esthetic:







The people look grubby, not clean, as if they were in a radio studio, not on television., and the set has a radio feel to it.

(Even Linda Jackson, whom we love, has become somewhat dowdy.)

But the sloppiness isn’t just confined to staff. Look at this video from Sunday night [3/16/08] on 21Alive:



Whatever “photojournalist” (and we use the term photojournalist advisedly) shot this video should be fired; they besmirch the epithet “photog.”

And look at what happens when INC incorporates a Journal Gazette staffer:



Why is this guy on television? He’s got a face that only a mother could love.

And what about the two skinny weather guys and this a.m. anchor?








They look emaciated, as if they were in the midst of a famine, which is not what TV fare likes to present to viewers.

Then there are the gaffes, ongoing, as when NBC33, because of advertising and poor engineering, cut into NBC’s Nightly News Sunday [3/16], which isn’t atypical.

But 21Alive, which refuses to curtail its thirty-minutes newscast because it believes it is sacrosanct and should remain intact, in toto, also cut into ABC’s network news Sunday [3/16] at 6 :35 p.m.

WANE shortens its newscasts to accommodate network broadcasts, and they do it on the run.

And WANE’s on-air people look clean, and spiffy, not disheveled like this new WPTA sport guy, Kark Mandik:



INC is a mess, as if it is a radio station where unkempt people are typical and ingrained.

That’s why INC has lost so many viewers

The Bad Penny

Nancy Nall hasn’t been in Fort Wayne for years, having been fired from her job at The News-Sentinel long ago. But she continues to haunt this town, because she thought she was something here and hasn’t been able to become something elsewhere.

Nall is no lady. A check of her blog continues to show a particularly vulgar woman, with bad taste and self-promotion of an egregious kind.

A local editor once told us that he met Nall at an Ohio campaign rally many moons ago; she looked awful and didn’t smell too good either.

Her recent outing of Tim Goeglein was a coup for Nall. She takes sexism and stands it on its head, giving men columnists a thrashing every chance she gets, and she got Mr. Goeglein good (and rightfully so apparently).

But Nall still tries to impact Fort Wayne, even though she now lives in a lower, middle-income suburb of Fort Wayne,

(She pretends to live in Grosse Pointe, but she’s far from that exclusive community, in distance and class.)

Nall still has a small contingent of Fort Wayne sycophants, but she visited the city a few weeks ago, calling for a gathering of those lackeys for a dinner confab. Few showed up, but Nall didn’t bring up that fact on her blog, where she had touted the get-together for several days beforehand.

(She also brings up pending job interviews but doesn’t provide their denouement. She doesn’t get the jobs she seeks, and you can guess why – remember that Ohio rally.)

We though we’d never have to contend with Nall once she left here. But that’s not the case.

The woman will not leave fort Wayne alone, always talking about it on her blog, and revisiting the city that was glad to see her leave.

She is, indeed, the proverbial bad penny.

The Goeglein Aftermath

Tim Goeglein is not a journalist or a professional (for pay) writer, so his plagiarism – in Catholic parlance – is a venial sin not a mortal sin.

Mr. Goeglein is (or was) merely a political hack.

Ms. Nall excoriated Goeglin’s writings because they reeked of a Hoosier drippiness, but it turns out that the writing wasn’t from Tim (or any Hoosier) at all but a raft of eminent scholars and writers.

So much for Ms. Nall’s acute observation(s).

Ms. Nall’s exposé is fine with us but, as it is with blogs and bloggers, the comments, which Nall moderates – she selects them for inclusion on her blog – got away from the core of the issue – Goeglein’s text stealing – and degenerated into rants about the Bush administration, conservative Republicans, and other liberal targets.

The mob became like that of the French Terror in the 1790s, full of hate and vengeance but, fortu- nately, of a symbolic kind rather than a lop-off-their-head kind.

And finally, the News-Sentinel isn’t totally blameless in all this.

The paper selects its op-ed writers. We, at Media- Watch, have never been allowed to enter copy for the page. The Editors (Leo Morris in particular) hate us.

But they do allow the chosen few (like Tim Goeglein) to ramble on for inches of space, without editorial scrutiny, and this time they got bit in the ass.

Oh, one more thing…Nancy Nall may be gloating now, but her fifteen minutes of fame will come back to haunt her…..and we’ll explain why upcoming.

Oh that Melissa!

Melissa Long, getting ribbed by Harlem Globetrotters for missing free throws:

Score Two

Indiana's NewsCenter presents, on 21Alive, each Friday night, its commercial free sports segment, The Score.

Lately, INC has taken to opening the segment with some schtick.

Here's the 11/9/07 effort:

Fort Wayne's Weather-Ass

Yes. storm notification is important, and television stations should (and are required to) provide alerts.

But Indiana's NewsCenter, which provides broadcast feeds for three networks -- ABC, NBC, and the CW -- interrupts programming when the National Weather Service issues weather cautions.

And INC uses beaver-faced Curtis Smith -- their "Chief Meteorologist" -- who takes weather alerts, pads them with redundant and unnecessary information for protracted periods of time, and makes a mishmash of the alerts and network programming.

This excerpt -- from our YouTube video -- is only part of the first 7 minute interruption by Smith, who continued to insert himself and weather nonsense for the whole evening of October 18th, 2007:



The full interruption can be viewed at our Google video account -- RRRGroup Videos.

Smith is not informative, as you can see. His spiel is laced with what-might-be and what isn't.

Those viewers who need information that might keep them from harm will not get that information from Smith. He babbles, and viewers tune him out.

INC management won't curb this overpaid golfer. He has carte blanche to ruin network programming and put viewers in dire straits with his unclear and rambling weather diatribes.

For him it's ego -- not public service.