‘Nightly Business Report’ cuts jobs, closes Chicago bureau
In two decades as Midwest bureau chief and correspondent for Nightly Business Report, Diane Eastabrook reported on countless workers who’d lost jobs to downsizing and layoffs. On Wednesday, she became one of them.
“I’ve been a TV reporter for 30 years — a business reporter for 20 years,” she told me. “It’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve never lost a job. I’ve never been laid off. I’ve never been part of a staff reduction. This is all very new to me.”
So long, Phyllis: Schwartz bails out as Fox 32 news director
Robservations on the media beat:
- Well, that didn’t last long. Less than a year after she flounced into town, the perpetually pissed off Phyllis Schwartz is on her way out as vice president and news director of Fox 32. Claiming “strictly personal” reasons for returning to San Diego, where her family lives, Schwartz told staffers Tuesday the decision was hers alone. She insisted that she wasn’t passed over for promotion when Fox Television Stations reassigned general manager Mike Renda to Detroit and replaced him with Dennis Welch from Orlando. Ratings have remained dismal under Schwartz, who previously was news director at NBC 5 and ABC 7 here. Her trademark style of management by fear and intimidation won her few admirers this time around. No successor has been named. Assistant news director Chris Myers will serve as interim news director.
Why Chicago will always love the man who brought Bozo to life
No, it turned out it wasn’t just childhood nostalgia or a middle-aged man’s faulty memory. Bob Bell really was as great as I’d remembered.
Watching Bozo’s Circus: The Lost Tape Sunday night evoked a flood of recollections about a show that defined growing up in Chicago for hundreds of thousands of us kids. And the legendary performer at the heart of everything was the peerless improvisational comedy actor who brought Bozo to life for nearly a quarter-century.
Hall comes home to anchor morning news on CLTV
Robservations on the media beat:
- Cortney Hall, morning news anchor and reporter at WKMG-TV in Orlando, Florida, has been hired as morning news anchor at CLTV, the Tribune Co.-owned news channel. Starting December 17, she will succeed Tonya Francisco, who shifted to Trib-owned WGN-Channel 9. Hall, a Chicago native who grew up in west suburban Oak Brook, holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Georgetown University and a master’s in journalism from Medill at Northwestern University. Before joining WKMG in 2010, she worked at WCIA-TV in Champaign, and Bloomberg News in New York.
It’s over and out for Eddie & Jobo on K-Hits morning show
Chicago radio icons Ed Volkman and Joe Bohannon, whose celebrated partnership as Eddie & Jobo has endured through 25 years of ups and downs, are out of work again.
On Thursday they were cut after 20 months as morning personalities on CBS Radio classic hits WJMK-FM (104.3), the station they helped kick off as K-Hits in 2011. They declined to go on the air for a final show Friday, but will be paid through the remainder of their two-year contracts, which expire in March.
Chicago stations hit in Clear Channel’s latest round of layoffs
As cheery Christmas tunes were playing on The Holiday Lite, the bosses of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment carried out another annual tradition Thursday — a sweeping round of end-of-the-year layoffs.
In Chicago, at least four on-air positions and an unspecified number of jobs in other areas were eliminated as part of a companywide purge that’s become as familiar to employees this time of year as fruitcake and eggnog. Clear Channel operates six stations from studios at 233 North Michigan Avenue.
One year later, ratings remain elusive for Johnny B.
One year ago this week, Jonathon Brandmeier joined news/talk WGN-AM (720), inheriting the morning mantle of the late Radio Hall of Famers Wally Phillips and Bob Collins, and accepting the huge challenge of reviving the Chicago Tribune’s 87-year-old radio flagship.
“This is the perfect home for me,” he told me on the eve of his debut. “It was one of the first things in my life that I didn’t have to overthink.”
But could he be having second thoughts now?
ABC News hires ‘hugely talented’ Sun-Times reporter
It won’t be easy, but readers of the Sun-Times will have to muddle through from now on without Stephanie Zimmermann to fight their battles, solve their problems, right their wrongs and collect their refunds.
After more than seven years as the consumer-help columnist and investigative dynamo known as The Fixer — and 17 years as a reporter for the Sun-Times — Zimmermann, 47, resigned Tuesday to become a reporter/producer with the investigative unit of ABC News, led by chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross.
Chicago magazine editor adding her own style to website
Chicago magazine editor-in-chief Beth Fenner will begin writing a weekly blog on “classic style” as part of a new editorial approach to chicagomag.com designed to bring the print product and website together for the first time.
NBC 5 reporter left them smiling in Salt Lake City
Robservations on the media beat:
- Although her hiring as a per diem reporter at NBC 5 flew under the radar, newcomer Emily Florez received a welcome fit for a star when she started her last job at KUTV-TV in Salt Lake City. (Watch the You Tube video — complete with Mary Tyler Moore graphics and music — here.) Two years later, they gave her a similar send-off when she left the station. One of nine children from Taylorsville, Utah, and a 2009 graduate of Brigham Young University, Florez joined KUTV after a year at KIDK-TV in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Frank Whittaker, station manager and vice president of news at NBC 5, said Florez and her husband relocated to Chicago at the end of the summer, and she’s been free-lancing here since early September. Her husband, Reyes Florez, is pursuing an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
- Proving that its Arbitron triumph in October was no fluke, WOJO-FM (105.1) again was Chicago’s top-rated station in November among listeners between 25 and 54 — the demo most coveted by advertisers. The continued success of Univision Radio’s regional Mexican La Que Buena underscores the growing influence of Spanish-language media in the market. How did they do it? “It is really a matter of concentrating on the fundamentals,” said Doug Levy, vice president and general manager of Univision Radio Chicago. “We instituted a few changes to our clocks, focused on our music, created some great commercials to air on WGBO Univision Chicago and ran some on-air promotional contesting — all of which are proving to be very effective with the results speaking for themselves.”
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