June 28th, 2009 
joel Like the newspaper headline screamed, “Erie’s going to Extremes!” The Extreme Makeover: Home Edition build of Clara Ward’s new home on East 21st Street has every old and new media outlet buzzing. We will be posting every day this week through the reveal, giving you behind the scenes glances on what it takes to pull off an hour-long TV show, build a 2-3,000 square foot house, and change the course of a family’s and neighborhood’s reality.
If you have a comment to share, but it’s not appropriate to just “blurt out” e-mail me at joel@nataliemedia.com or tweet @pressandtower.
Embrace the Extreme Chaos!
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Scott Fybush is featuring Erie TV this week and next on his Northeast Radio Watch site:
http://www.fybush.com
Great pictures and story.
Thanks to Jim Griffey for the heads up!
Great pictures and a one sided story. Not a great story. A sad story – a story of greed and looking at the instant bottom line instead of a story of looking at quality journalism and community service and workers’ lives.
The pics were great, the story sucked! (It wasn’t written badly, just the subject that sucked! It would have been nice if Fybush had talked to some of the workers who were displaced, and some of the loyal viewers who were not served by this decision, not just to the Chief Engineer who has to stick to the company line.)
By the way, the picture of the WSEE master control is not of master control, it is the Director’s control room – there hasn’t been a Master Control at WSEE since about 2003 – when Parkervision was installed.
I agree with Bob Bohen. It would have been nice if some of the displaced workers or even the viewers who are getting shortchanged. Not a single mention of the chaos that was the frist weeks newscast on the merged entities.
Kudos to Fybush for the Lilly broadcasting PAID infomercial. Almost made it sound like Lilly Broadcasting was pioneering the future of small market, multiple ownership TV. Ugh!
Bob, you are absolutely right. Fybush took the persona of the giddy engineering geek getting an inside look at facilities, while totally neglecting to consider the personal toll these moves have had on great professionals in our industry and the community at large.
Mea maxima culpa.
What happened to the Meadville and Warren “Live Eyes” that WSEE formerly used on-the-air during the weather? Did they not survive the transition to State Street?
It’s also disappointing to see that WSEE’s Mornings Live set is not being used. It really made the show seem less like a newscast and more like a morning show. I’m not sure how much space there actually is in the WICU/WSEE studio, but it would be nice to see it again.
I’m still wondering why WSEE’s newscasts (excluding noon) have to be taped. A better solution should have been found long before the merger happened.
I spoke with Mike Csop (Former WICU Chief Engineer 1949-1993) this morning. He insists that WICU Radio was on AM 1260 and not AM 1330 as Fybush claims.
I guess Mike Csop should know but unfortunately Fybush drank the Lilly kool-aid right to the last delicious drop.
Memo to Fybush: Check your facts and then check them again.
Hate to disagree Mr. Csop, but 1330 WAS the home of WICU for many years before it became WRIE in the late 60’s. 1260 was first WERC, then WWYN by the early 60’s.
It certainly wasn’t my intention to be provocative in one direction or the other with this week’s “Site of the Week,” and I hope Joel will allow me a few words of explanation:
“Site of the Week” is a weekly feature I’ve been doing for almost a decade that is aimed primarily at the engineering community, showcasing interesting or newsworthy or historic broadcast facilities that otherwise don’t get much attention, even in the engineering world.
It’s true that I was excited to get the chance to see 1220 Peach before the last day of news there, simply because it was home to a heck of a lot of broadcast history over half a century, and I felt – and continue to feel – that it deserved to be documented and remembered before the building is cleaned out and sold.
If, in the process, I minimized the pain being suffered by good people like Bob and Raychel and the rest of the WSEE’ers who are now out of work, I apologize. As a fellow veteran of the broadcast news trenches, I certainly sympathize with them, and with everyone who’s fallen victim to this economy and the decisions that are being made as a result. (We lost half our market’s institutional memory up here in Rochester just last week when the station where I work went through a series of buyouts. It sucks – and yet we’re still one of the lucky newsrooms that still exists at all.)
That said, I’d also note that I have been covering the other, non-engineering angles of this story on another part of my website. NorthEast Radio Watch, which has been reporting on the news of the industry each week, has prominently mentioned the WSEE cutbacks on several occasions in the last few months, most recently on June 1 after the end of news from 1220 Peach.
I know it’s no comfort to anyone from WSEE – and it shouldn’t be – but in the context of the region I cover for NERW, which stretches from Maine to Pennsylvania, what’s happening in Erie is, sadly, par for the course. In the last year alone, entire newsrooms have been shuttered in Altoona, Scranton, Watertown and Binghamton. Watertown, in particular, is down to just one TV newsroom, without even the competition that still exists between WICU/WSEE and WJET/WFXP.
I wish I had the power (and the money) to change that. Absent that, about the best I can do is to make sure the history gets documented on Site of the Week and the news of the business gets reported in NERW. (For which, incidentally, I’ve long been indebted both to Joel for Press and Tower and to Jack Tirak for EMGR before that, as well as to Tom Lavery for his coverage on PBRTV.)
As for WICU radio, I stand partially corrected, and will update the piece accordingly: while WICU was indeed on 1330, it didn’t take those calls on radio until 1959, when what had been WIKK radio was purchased by WICU-TV. The WICU calls lasted only into the 1960s before becoming WRIE and later WFNN. As Jim Griffey correctly notes, 1260 was WERC for most of that time, later WWYN (and still later WLKK and then WRIE.)
Scott, thanks for clarifying the piece for our readers here.
Oops. Sorry Jim Griffey. Mike is old and I’m sure his memory isn’t what it used to be. Thanks for correcting him.
If memory serves me correctly, and keep in mind I was 8 or 9 at the time, the only one to make the transistion from WICU to WRIE was the late Bob Eaton.
Oogie Pringle, Bob Hughes, Pat Rogers etc. were all hired for WRIE. WICU Radio, it’s predecessor, featured personalities from WICU-TV.
What high def channels are avaivable on the City of Erie basic TW cable? I can get the Erie channels, but i thought Cleveland was also in there. I scanned a couple of times.
As of yesterday night, I noticed that WICU is also broadcasting the CW as a subchannel, in addition to WSEE. It’s on channel 12-2 and 35-2 (RF 16-2).
Any thoughts on digital subchannels? What would Erie like to see? Here’s a couple of ideas: Retro TV, 24/7 Weather Channel, MyNetwork TV…
Here’s what’s out there:
12.1 WICU
12.2 CW
35.1 WSEE
35.2 CW
35.3 WICU
Aren’t there some programming alternatives out there to replace the repetition?
Does anyone know when wicu is going to broadcast hd ota? They missed the Stanley Cup and are missing Wimbledon now.