A Niche History of Erie Television News--A Lesson That Should be Remembered Or Why I Learned To Love Salmonilla

How do you break a habit? Television news loyalty among viewers traditionally has been very intense. As an example, WICU’s news dominance in its first 30 years was overwhelming for the other two fledgling stations until WJET-TV made a major change in its on air presentation and behind the scenes. Even then it took nearly 10 years for WJET-TV to pull even.

For JET, the informal news team approach combined with JET’s historical reputation for being on the scene of every local car crash or fire slowly moved the ratings in JET’s direction. The management team of Myron Jones and John Kanzius broke the old habits when they hired Eric Johnson away from WICU to head their news operation.

WICU fired a weak volley back by trashing their veteran news team where the results lead to further eroding of their existing base which was comprised mostly of over 50ish.

Management changes at all stations also forced a major and even bizarre reshuffling of the anchor desks. Viewers had to look at their channel numbers to know which station they were really watching. The faces stayed the same but on another channel. In spite of the enormous popularity of a Don Shriver and Joey Stevens formally on JET, the audience didn’t move from their preference for fire and crashes. WICU played revolving anchors to find the right combination to counter JET’s move of putting the bright and mature looking Kelly Gaughan as its sole anchor.

Let’s fast forward to the present. After much experimentation, WICU finally found a mature, experienced news team and supporting company in Amanda Post and Kevin MacDowell as its anchors. (Although, it is my personal opinion that Post still lacks the on-air polish of a Gaughan.)

But the old firehouse on State Street needed much more if they were going to tackle the champions on upper Peach. Low and behold, the behind of scenes driving force of WICU news Phil Hayes and John Last borrowed an old but effective marketing tool to get sampling…”niche marketing.”

Niche marketing is a classic advertising tool to find a unique proposition your competition hasn’t employed to exploit their vulnerability and create sampling of your product. In this case, health inspections that had been gathering dust and nobody cared about. The utter simplicity of finding something that everyone did… eating out, and exploiting the implied health threat to a viewer and his family. “Behind The Kitchen Door,” was born. How could viewers resist it?

In the capable and mature hands of reporter Scott Cook, “Behind the Kitchen Door” has done the one thing that WICU desparetly needed to have happen. They needed viewers to at least sample their new look and news approach. “Behind the Kitchen Door” provided that vehicle for sampling and in my opinion it has worked well. You know its working when the Erie Times-News starts to copy its broadcast brothers.

The official ratings of WICU have shown a steady progress that I am sure delights the bean counters in the front office. However, since neither WICU nor any of the other stations currently subscribe to the Nielsen ratings, bragging rights are still up for grabs. But that is the subject of another post who’s explanation of what the stations are doing for promotion would even confuse Abbott and Costello.

"Heyyyyy... Abbott!!"

(Correction: I was just informed that WICU does subscribe and is the only station in the market that does subscribe to the ratings. So they have legitimate bragging rights. Anyway, congradulations to the news team for their innovative thinking. )