Moving on, but staying put

There have been several e-mails and calls here at the station asking where I am and if I’ve left. I’m still here, but you won’t be seeing as much of me.

You see, we’ve been going through a round of change lately. Our old news director Paul Paolicelli retired back in the fall. So for a few months, I was helping fill some gaps in running the newsroom. When our new news director Scott Pickey started last month, he asked me to keep doing some of those jobs and be his No. 2 in the newsroom.

The decision to make a change was not an easy one for me. I’ve long wanted and waited to be a news manager, but the proposal required me to leave the anchor desk. Scott said the decision came down to ego: Could I live without the camera on me. It took some thinking and soul searching, but I decided it was best for me, my career and my family in the long run to take a chance and do something different. As a result, I am now WWAY’s news content manager.

So what does the news content manager do? Well, to keep it simple, I won’t be on TV every morning. Instead I’ll be working behind the scenes each day to help put together our news coverage and work with our young talent to help make them a little better. If you call the newsroom, I’ll probably be the one answering the phone, too. The good thing is I’ll still be on TV every now and then. I’m working on a story that will air in a couple of weeks, and I’ll do special stories from time to time. I’ll also probably do some fill-in anchoring when the need arises.

There are definitely things I will miss about my life on the anchor desk. I will miss telling stories to viewers every day. I truly feel the relationship developed between viewers and news anchors is an important one, even if it’s one we all take for granted on both sides of the TV. There’s a great deal of responsibility with being an anchor or reporter. We have to get you to trust us and count on us. That’s a pretty neat feeling when it works out. I’ll also miss joking around with Marcy Cuevas and Jerry Jackson each morning. We’ve had a lot of fun times over the year. To be honest, I didn’t think Marcy and I would get along when we started. I quickly found out my assessment was wrong. When our former colleague Sonya Stevens started, she sat in and watched Good Morning Carolina for her first few days to learn the ropes in the weather department. During a commercial break she asked me and Marcy how long we’d been co-anchors because our chemistry was so good. She didn’t believe it when we told her it was our seventh or eighth day together, but it was the truth. Since then Marcy, Jerry and I became the longest-running anchor/weather team on the air in Wilmington. No other grouping at any TV station has been together as long as we have… until now. It’s rare in this business to develop the partnership that Marcy, Jerry and I have built. I will always treasure that.

There are definitely things I won’t miss, though. The big one is getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. That carries over to the rest of your life. Working on this shift leaves you tired most of the time. I often woke up too early on weekends and could rarely stay up late. It’ll be nice to have an adult schedule again.

Of course this change in schedule may be more of a transition for my wife. Tiffany has been great the last several years dealing with me waking up in the wee hours while she tried to sleep and going to bed early. The trade off was that dinner was usually waiting when she got home. Now she’s the one waking up early and getting ready for work in the dark. Now she’s the one who gets home first and winds up making dinner, unless she waits for me to get home and make it. It’s a change, but we see each other more, and that’s always a plus.

Finally, to you viewers who have made anchoring Good Morning Carolina such a great experience, I say thank you. We’ve developed a loyal following the last three-and-a-half years. I know this from all the people who stop me in the grocery store and especally the ones who side-step me to meet my wife, who they’ve heard so much about. Of course, not everyone has been a fan. In my early days here there was a woman who often wrote the station telling them to get rid of me and Sonya. For some reason the lady just didn’t like us. We always say in this business, though, that if someone isn’t mad at you, you must not be doing your job right. I’m sure there were others who were not fans, but they are far overshadowed by all the wonderful people out there who have made us part of their morning routine. I hope I’ll show up on your TV often enough that you don’t forget me for good.

Again, thank you for watching all these years. I hope you’ll keep tuning in. And if you ever have an idea for a story or just want to say hi, give me a call or drop me an e-mail. I’d love to hear from you.