After months of building a newsroom from scratch, CBS’s WWJ Detroit flipped the switch on its first newscasts last week. Adrienne Roark, president of CBS Stations; Brian Watson, VP and GM of WWJ; and Paul Pytlowany, its news director, make the case for how its community-based approach to reporting will differentiate the station. A full transcript of the conversation is included.
The latest of the CBS hyper-local streaming news services debuts on WWJ and the CBS News Detroit streaming channel at 6 p.m., giving WWJ its own full-scale local news department for the first time since becoming a CBS Television Network-owned station in 1995. Above (l-r): Sports anchor Ronnie Duncan, news anchors Jeff Skversky and Shaina Humphries and meteorologist Ahmad Bajjey.
When CBS News Detroit launches in January, viewers in the Motor City will get a healthy dose of the Duncan family on their air. Ronnie Duncan is the sports anchor at CBS News Detroit, as the WWJ news operation is known, while his daughter, Jericka Duncan, is a national correspondent at CBS News and anchors CBS Weekend News on Sundays.
Exclusives
WWJ will offer both streaming and linear newscasts beginning in January. Jeff Sversky and Shaina Humphries moved from rival Philadelphia stations to share the anchor desk at WWJ. WWJ is the rare Big Four station without local news. “It’s the 14th-largest television market in the country, and the fact that there was no news really stood out glaringly to me,” Adrienne Roark, president of CBS Stations, said. “It’s a strong news market, and the opportunity to imagine this in a totally innovative way really was too hard to pass up.”
WWJ Detroit is launching news, and will encounter some lively competitors in the 14th DMA.
The veteran of the CBS Detroit duopoly is the first executive appointed to work on the creation of CBS News and Stations’ local news startup, CBS News Detroit, a full-scale, hyper-local news department that is being built from scratch and will launch later this year.
For years, CBS’s WWJ-TV Detroit held the dubious distinction of being the only major network O&O without a news department. But that’s about to change: 20 years after eliminating its news presence, WWJ (ch. 62, branded as “CBS 62”) will launch a news department in 2022, as part of an ambitious plan to create a “CBS News Detroit” hub.
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With the city on the rebound, Detroit’s news-producing affiliates WDIV (NBC), WXYZ (ABC) and WJBK (Fox) are investing heavily in their digital platforms to secure core audiences while drawing the newcomers (artists, techies and the like) lured by the chance to build from the ground up. “We are trying to reinvent ourselves along with them,” says Catherine Badalamente, VP of digital media for Graham Media, which owns NBC affiliate WDIV.
