WJZ Baltimore

The CBS O&O leads Charm City in social media actions over the last six months according to data from audience insight firm Shareablee. What’s its secret to success? Being attentive to what your audience wants, powerful visuals, choosing quality posts over quantity, and, sometimes, stories that bring a smile.

CBS Television Stations chooses the former GM of KSNV-KVCW Las Vegas to succeed the retiring Jay Newman as head of its Baltimore O&O.

He will step down from the CBS’s Baltimore O&O in September after 34 years with CBS and 44 in broadcasting.

Look for Hillary Clinton ads to start appearing on WJZ and WBAL Wednesday or Thursday. The Democratic frontrunner’s campaign bought airtime Tuesday on the two top-rated Baltimore stations for an ad that is expected to show the candidate’s relationship to the African-American community.

Stacia L. Brown: “I never think about which TV networks or anchors I trust to break news to me in times of crisis, until I’ve been parked in front of the television for hours, scared to move or to break eye contact with the screen. I don’t realize it’s the anchor’s soothing voice or the on-the-ground reporter’s empathetic interviewing style that’s tethering me to their coverage, until I feel my heart rate steadying. So it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was favoring local news [stations], rather than cable ones, in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death and Baltimore’s ongoing response to it.”

CBS-owned WJZ Baltimore (DMA 27) and The Baltimore Sun announced today that they will jointly co-host a debate between the major candidates for Governor of Maryland. The debate will be held at the WJZ […]

All the TV stations in Baltimore say they’re the ones to turn to for breaking news. Coverage of a shooting Saturday morning at the Mall in Columbia that left three dead put those promises to the test in a major way. Not everyone passed.

I turned on the TV at noon Wednesday to see how Baltimore stations handled what I was thinking of as fluff: the arrival of the first ships for the Star-Spangled Sailabration. I came away instead impressed with the performance of Baltimore’s top two broadcast news operations, WBAL (pictured) and WJZ, in handling serious breaking news without ignoring the kind of culturally important softer stories that make a city into a community rather than just a TV market.

In Charm City, the only daily paper, The Baltimore Sun — which went behind a paywall in October — rules the roost, but Baltimore’s TV stations are taking some bold strides on the mobile front in an effort to draw bigger audiences and change the digital media pecking order.