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Longtime anchor Eric Mansfield to still cover area
By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer
Published on Friday, May 30, 2008
About two weeks shy of its seventh birthday, the Akron-Canton news ends today.
At 6:30 and 10 tonight, anchor Eric Mansfield will present a half-hour of news, weather and sports to viewers receiving Time Warner Cable in five local counties. He plans some kind of farewell, although he was still working on what kind at midweek.
After that, local TV news viewers will have to get their information from Cleveland telecasts. Time Warner would like to find a new partner for Akron TV news, a cable company spokesman said, but there are no talks with anyone right now.
Mansfield will be the soleAkron-Canton reporter for WKYC (Channel 3), which has produced the Akron-Canton news. He will still be based in the United Building in downtown Akron, as he has been since WKYC moved in back in 2001. But instead of sharing that space with as many as 10 other staffers from WKYC, he will work with two videographers and eventually just one. The space will change, too, as WKSU (89.7-FM) and WNEO/WEAO (Channels 45/49) plan to use part of the facilities beginning in July.
The reason: money.
''The truth is, the half-hour shows just couldn't be produced at the [revenue] level that was necessary to make it viable,'' Channel 3 General Manager Brooke Spectorsky said in Akron on Wednesday.
''It's not that everyone didn't try over seven years. Anybody, from every major company here to the mayor to the head of Time Warner Cable — everybody put a yeoman effort forward. But as things tighten up [economically], something has to give,'' he said. ''You can't keep trying to make something work that we don't have support for, in the sense of advertising dollars.''
''We will still be covering Akron,'' Channel 3 news director Rita Andolsen said Wednesday over lunch at the Crave restaurant with Mansfield and Spectorsky. ''I can't say 'like we always have.' Because obviously we will have fewer people. . . . I am confident that Eric will give us the meaty stories, the stories that matter, the important things that are going on.''
Andolsen noted that the station's Internet presence, at http://www.wkyc.com, also gives it a place to put some Akron-Canton stories that don't make it on air. (Mansfield already has a blog on the site.)
Stories will compete
Still, asked if there will be a specific Akron-Canton segment on the nightly news, she said, ''I don't ever want to say we're going to have an Akron block and fill it with whatever we can put in there. The Akron stories will compete with news stories from across the area. But, again, I think with Eric's level of expertise . . . you will see a fair amount [of Akron area news].''
''I've never been out of touch even though I've been on the evening shift for the last few years,'' Mansfield added. ''I'm already working on stories for next week. And one thing we've never been afraid to do is send additional reporters, additional photographers [from WKYC's Cleveland base] down here when a story warrants it. . . .
''I'm very passionate about covering the news,'' he said. ''We're going to do our best every day. We're not just going to cover the front-page story out of the Beacon or whatever crime of the day is.''
''A third of our service area is Akron-Canton,'' said Spectorsky.
But it's an area that has struggled to have its own full-service newscast for more than a decade.
The Mansfield-anchored newscast began with great optimism on June 13, 2001, more than five years after Akron had lost its TV news standard-bearer, nightly telecasts on what was then WAKC (Channel 23).
Paxson cuts news
The Akron newscasts dated back to 1953, when the station had gone on the air as WAKR (Channel 49). But in February 1996, a new owner, Paxson Communications, took over Channel 23 and immediately dropped both newscasts and about two-thirds of the station's staff. Paxson had previously killed a Canton newscast and cut staff at WOAC (Channel 67), when it took over operations of that station in November 1995.
While Cleveland-based stations cover local news and maintain bureaus in the Akron and Canton areas, they do so as part of a larger mandate to cover Northeast Ohio. Local viewers felt they were entitled to their own news, although it did not go unnoticed that the actual audience was small.
''It's like when O'Neil's closed,'' Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic said at the time. ''People said it was such a shame, and I asked, 'When was the last time you shopped there?' ''
But Akron in particular demanded local news. Some modest attempts were made. And, in 1999, the city strong-armed $300,000 out of Paxson for local news initiatives, in exchange for permitting the construction of a new tower for Channel 23.
The following year, WKYC's owner, Gannett, made a deal with Paxson to provide services in markets where both had stations, including Northeast Ohio. The deal gave WKYC the option to produce local programming — and that opened the door for the Akron-Canton news.
Advertisers were lined up for what was at first known as Pax 23 News. The Paxson seed money and another $475,000 in local government support helped fund the creation of a studio.
A reporter covering the official announcement of the newscast compared it to a pep rally — complete with University of Akron cheerleaders wearing Channel 23 logos.
Small viewership
The viewership for the 6:30 p.m weeknight newscast was relatively small, 14,000 to 20,000 households in the early days, which was about 1.4 percent of the total TV audience in Northeast Ohio, according to Nielsen estimates. That was good enough at first to beat the national news on WOIO (Channel 19), which was in the early stages of carrying its own and CBS newscasts. Channel 3 estimates at the time said the Channel 23 news was drawing about 5 percent of the Akron-Canton audience.
But there were drawbacks from the beginning. The 6:30 p.m. newscast, necessitated by Channel 3 producing its own news at 6 p.m., started at an odd time for local TV news viewers, and against the major national network newscasts. The 10 p.m. newscast added in 2003 had to compete against network entertainment programming and two established 10 p.m. newscasts from Cleveland.
And Spectorsky said that it was difficult to get attention for the Akron operation because it wasn't fundamentally designed for breaking news. ''Unlike Channel 3, when we were on 24/7, anytime anything happened, we would break in,'' he said. ''We lived and breathed news. The Akron-Canton news just wasn't built that way.''
It didn't control the airwaves round the clock on WVPX or later on Time Warner. It didn't have ''a full-time, ready to go [operation] at a moment's notice,'' Spectorsky said.
And Channel 3 was the big dog.
''If Eric broke a story, and he broke a lot of them, we were going to put it on the big channel that gets viewership,'' Spectorsky said. The Akron-Canton reporters were scooping themselves, putting stories on Channel 3's air before their own telecast.
Still, if the arrangement with Paxson had continued, Spectorsky said, the newscasts might have been healthy enough to keep going. But in March 2005, Paxson — which had problems of its own — opted out of the Gannett deal. Soon enough, the news was looking for a home.
Move to cable
In July 2005, it moved into one, on Time Warner Cable. But the circumstances were different from what they had been on Channel 23. It was no longer available over the air, or to people not getting Time Warner, or to people getting Time Warner outside of Summit, Stark, Wayne, Portage and Medina Counties.
The cable company's subscribers also had to find it in a new channel position; even being on cable channel 23, as it was in Akron, was confusing to viewers used to finding WVPX — broadcast Channel 23 — on cable channel 4.
And being on cable channels that did not have a regularly watched lineup of entertainment programs made it harder to get people in the habit of turning to that channel, Spectorsky said. ''At least Pax had some viewership for their other shows.''
By 2006, the news had six-figure losses annually. The audience was minuscule. Where Channel 3 might have 100,000 homes tuned to its early-evening news, Spectorsky said, ''if we were getting 2,000 [for the Akron-Canton news] I would be very surprised.''
In March of that year, Channel 3 warned that it might drop the news if things did not improve. Plusquellic met with community leaders and enough support was found to keep the telecasts going.
''It was going along, losing a little money, then it would break even, then lose a little money,'' Spectorsky said. ''I could deal with that when the big station [Channel 3] was doing OK.''
But the later downturn in the economy is affecting media companies and advertisers across the board. A growing portion of the news audience is looking more to the Internet than to traditional news sources, including network TV and print.
''You can go online and get anything you want,'' said Andolsen. ''And I've found it's not just the younger people. . . . More and more folks in older age groups are getting computers, and our seniors are a growing area of folks that have access to the Internet. . . . Why wait until 6 or 6:30 or 10 or 11 to get your news when you don't have to wait?''
Spectorsky said those forces made it harder to justify the expense of an Akron news, especially when he was having to make cuts in the Cleveland operation.
''We're proud of the content'' of the Akron news, he said. ''We don't want to give up on Akron at all. This is strictly an economic move.''
''I hope people will see that we tried,'' added Mansfield. ''We stepped up when nobody was stepping up. It's not like there was a line of people outside Mayor Plusquellic's office saying, 'Hey, we want to talk to you about putting a newscast on.' . . . We gave it our best shot.''
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
About two weeks shy of its seventh birthday, the Akron-Canton news ends today.
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