A Good Year for the Outlaw

TWO NEW UPDATES BELOW

Individual meetings are happening right now with WEEK management and WHOI newsroom employees, with each employee finding out their immediate future. WEEK as entered into a direct-share agreement with WHOI to produce the ABC affiliate’s news.

My source tells me the WHOI newsroom is indeed closed. There are no newscasts being prepared for tonight, no weather, no sports. At this time, it appears the 5:30 pm cast will be live, the 10:00 pm newscast will be prerecorded.

As far as who will anchor what…no one can be sure right now. I asked about weather, and it looks like WEEK’s weatherman will be doing weather on both WHOI and WEEK, at least on weeknights.

More to come as WHOI employees come out of their individual meetings.

I’ll try to start a scoreboard as to who’s left and who’s gone as soon as that information is available. But we do know for sure…WHOI’s Creve Coeur newsroom is closed.

UPDATE: Most, if not all, of the off-air editorial staff from WHOI will NOT be retained by WEEK and Granite Broadcasting.

I’m hearing from my source that Jen Christensen, Mark Welp, and Gretchen Wirtz will be retained, and WHOI Daybreak appears to be the least-affected by the change for the time being. It’s my understanding that the Daybreak show will still be done at the Creve Coeur location, with WEEK news stories, until they can get a new set built for that show in East Peoria at the WEEK studios.

As far as the 5:30 and 10:00 pm newscasts, they will apparently be the exact same stories on both WEEK and WHOI, with the only difference being graphics and the anchors reading the stories.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the official list of who is staying from the WHOI staff, according to my source, who is NOT staying:

Jen Christensen, Mark Welp, Gretchen Wirtz, Jim Mattson, one producer from the Daybreak morning show and one producer from the evening news staff.

Also, I’m told that a couple of control room employees are staying for now, probably to run Daybreak from the Creve Coeur studios until that show moves over the Springfield Road.

And finally, two business office people are staying and will most likely move with the others to East Peoria. No word on sales and other employees from my source.

WHOI is already running promos stating that the 5pm and 6pm newscasts are now combined into one 5:30pm newscasts, with ABC World News Tonight moving from 5:30 to 6pm. As we suspected earlier, and it is now pretty much confirmed, the 5:30 will be live, and the 10pm newscast will be prerecorded, which could be devastating to sports in particular, as they won’t have as many “final scores” to report, be it high school, college, or pro.

It remains to be seen, obviously, how it’s all going to work out for WHOI’s sportscasts.