Channel 4 Shakeup
Major-shakeup-at-WNBC/4 alert!
Dan Forman, the top news director and a Channel 4 vet who oversaw the recent overhaul of the early evening news, has been ousted. He'll stick around until the end of March, per a memo sent out by station boss, Frank Comerford.
While hardly as important to Ch. 4 as Chuck/Sue (though Sue has lately been dropped somewhat from that linkage), Forman's been the captain of this ship for years (and he was once Howard Stern's producer.) His most recent gambit - dropping Sue Simmons off the early evening (she's back on 5 and has remained at 11) while letting Chuck S. run solo.
Problem is, numbers. They're awful.
Chuck's 7 p.m. solo shot in February, for example, got only 249,000 viewers; at 6, NBC was seen by ONLY 248,000 viewers. Keep in mind, friends. This is New York City - the biggest apple in the barrel, and only 248,000? Which is EVEN less than Ch. 41 (280,000)?
The local news market got hit hard in February sweeps overall, (although there were isolated bright spots for Ch. 2.)
How does this affect Chuck and Sue? We await...
(Above, is Sue happy about all this?)
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Comments (1)
No more "Butt Bongo Dan"!!!
A person who has done so much damage to local news I don't know where to begin!
His nickname comes from the video he produced with Stern ... just go to Amazon.com for the description.
Here's a guy that wore diapers on the air, and around Christmas time long ago mocked the baby Jesus. And it's all on video tape.
Sue is quite happy about this, for sure.
So are most of her colleagues, in front of and behind the cameras.