(This chapter is excerpted from “Akron’s Daily Miracle,” edited by Stuart Warner and Deb Van Tassel Warner, copyright 2020, University of Akron Press)
By Mark Williamson
Its end was ignominious. Just a passing comment to a young reporter and that was that. Local television news in Akron was dead.
Lowell “Bud” Paxson, the Florida-based founder of the Home Shopping Network, took legal ownership of WAKC Television, Channel 23, at midnight February 26, 1996.
By 10 the next morning, as news crews headed out to cover their stories for the early newscast at 6 p.m., Paxson had ordered his management team occupying TV 23’s studios at 853 Copley Road to terminate nearly the entire staff of more than 80 employees.
Accompanied by armed guards, their approach was certainly newsworthy. They fired nearly a hundred people by word of mouth. Ironic, perhaps, that a communications company would merely tell a young reporter named Steve Litz, passing in a hallway on his way to an editing suite, “We’re firing you and your co-workers. Go around the place and pass the word to your friends that we won’t be needing you people anymore.”
It is important to note here that Paxson made a personal appeal six months before the takeover. The staff had been notified to attend a meeting in the studio to meet and greet him. Paxson, the staff was told, was coming to talk to everyone about his plans for WAKC once he assumed ownership. He promised to take the news product to a “whole new level.” It would be “competitive” with Cleveland. He was going to “sink more money” into the set design, the news product, the people doing the news. And there would be raises, higher starting pay and “more promotion of the product” out in the community.
Reporters are suspicious by nature but most stayed on to see it through. That would turn out to be regrettable for most.
Paxson made verbal commitments to plans he never intended to keep. His intent, as it turns out, was to keep everyone he could on the payroll to maintain the value of the operation until he could officially own it and then turn it into another portal for syndicated TV shows and home shopping. Nothing local, save for the occasional and obligatory public affairs program, would ever appear again on the “Akron” station. It no longer looked like Akron on TV 23. That broadcast could have been coming from anywhere: Amarillo; Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; Winona; Kingman, Barstow or San Bernardino (with apologies to Bobby Troup). The AK, the Akron in WAKC, was gone forever. So was Bud Paxson 19 years later, when he died in Montana. But he certainly left a mark on Akron.
After Paxson chose the nuclear option, Akron tried to fight back. Mayor Don Plusquellic went to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1997 to express to Paxson, in person, how he felt about what he had done to his city. Mayor Plusquellic wanted to work with Paxson to see about funding for just a pared-down newscast once per day on the station. Paxson refused.
You have to give Mayor Plusquellic credit. Plenty of government leaders would be happy to have one less gaggle of reporters following them around with cameras and audio recorders. But the mayor had a good story to tell about Akron and understood the value of what a local television news operation could bring to promoting that story to his community every day.
“It’s a two-edged sword,” he would say. “A love-hate relationship we have with the media. We need them. They need us. But sometimes, there’s a helluva price for people in my business to pay for those relationships. They never pay.”
Another amusing aside about the mayor’s view of the media was that he felt the good people in government who were doing their jobs and doing them well received no coverage to speak of. “They only cover two kinds of people in my business. Crooks and clowns. That’s it.”
As the mayor’s communications director and media relations person for many years after leaving WAKC, I’d have to say that when it came to television news, that was pretty much right on the money.
But back to Copley Road and TV 23.
A mere 18 hours after taking ownership of WAKC, Bud Paxson removed a news broadcast that had been a part of the TV landscape and people’s daily habits since the early 1970s, and replaced it with an episode of The Love Boat. The switchboard lit up at the old theater building that had housed WAKR Radio and Television since the 1940s, and for the very first time in more than 50 years, calls were answered at the station by automated voice mail. Not by Hazel Botzum or Isabelle Summerville. Both women had been part of the station and their community for many years. They typified the style of ownership of founder Bernard Berk, son Roger Berk, Sr., and grandsons Roger Berk, Jr., and Robert Berk. They hired local people, for the most part. Nice people. Friendly people who cared about Akron. The Berks are from Akron and it mattered to them that they served the community in which they lived.
But now, that personal touch was gone. The news went dark. The commitment to community was jerked out from under the city that had watched a mix of young college students and wily veterans work their tails off to capture the day’s events on camera and present them on the air.
The relatively small station had its struggles competing with four bigger-market TV news operations in Cleveland, 30 miles to the north. Our challenge each day to compete for viewers was akin to putting a mom-and-pop grocery store next to a massive chain store and telling it to go out there and make some money.
The people on the air at WAKC had endeared themselves in many ways to Akronites and viewers around Northeast and North Central Ohio. (Its over-the-air signal was strong to the south, even beyond Canton, which is 20 miles south of Akron). It was the little engine that could of TV news. Viewers got to know the staff, reporters, anchor people and the videographers (mobile cameramen and camerawomen). Mark Johnson, from Ashtabula, and Mark Nolan, from Stark County, both did the weather at TV 23 and moved on to do the same in Cleveland television. Phil Ferguson, our Copley-Fairlawn born-and-bred sports anchor, has been a fixture in local radio ever since TV 23. Tim Daugherty, who grew up in the Cleveland area, also did the weather at WAKC while working on the air at 97.5 WONE. He remains at WONE today. Others our viewers may remember from the last couple of years on the air: Lauren Glassberg is with WABC in New York City as a reporter; Steve Litz is a reporter at NBC 6 in Miami; and Dawn Gigi (Gigi Hinton) is a producer at TV ONE in Washington, D.C. Carole Sullivan, who was Carole Chandler on the air, went to work at Channel 3 (WKYC) in Cleveland after leaving TV 23 and is now hosting Today in Nashville on WSMV. Co-anchor Jim Kambrich is anchoring the news in Albany, N.Y. And, of course, Carol Costello was at CNN, then Headline News until the fall of 2018.
A host of talented off-camera people who got their start in Akron are still working in Cleveland television as editors, producers and videographers. They were mere rookies when we hired them at TV 23. Now many of them are closing in on retirement.
The Cleveland on-air presentation was more polished, had more money to invest in every aspect of the broadcast. But the no-nonsense approach at WAKC (and, before it, WAKR-TV) had a loyal following from viewers who regularly lauded the station for just delivering the news. No comedy. No contrived cross chatter on the news set. Nothing fancy. Just the facts, as Jack Webb would say.
The job was to cover what happened each day while the viewers were otherwise occupied. So the team would hit the streets and bring back a product every day that folks came to rely upon. To have the proverbial rug pulled from underneath them was truly a shock to many. Even those folks who might have poked fun at the station’s sometimes less-than-polished look (compared to bigger city news) realized what they were losing.
The irony of what was about to occur wasn’t lost on me. After spending nearly 20 years at TV 23 as a reporter, news anchor and news director, I was intimately aware of the difficulties of covering news in our town — a town that was losing jobs, population, businesses, nightlife and its downtown. In fact, our downtown had been made famous in a song by native daughter Chrissie Hynde and it wasn’t for anything positive.
Akron’s population was falling from its peak of around 290,351 in 1960 to 217,613 in 1996 when Bud Paxson pulled the plug on local news. A city that once boasted five Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, was the tire and rubber capital of the world and was once the trucking capital, too, now was struggling with unemployment, the pivotal companies that made it great looking to move out of town. Many did. Akron no longer employed 40,000 in the rubber industry. There may have been 5,000 or fewer by the early 1980s.
One of the many phrases coined about the TV news business is that it doesn’t cover planes that land. Or, if there’s a second coming of Christ and we don’t have video, we’re not leading with it. There’s no shortage of crassness, that’s for certain. But there is a point to be made in that TV news relies on conflict, negative emotion and the kinds of seedy things people just might not see every day. Murder. Mayhem. Fire. Chemical leaks.
And scandals.
A spate of high-profile scandals that thrust Akron into the national news more than once served to energize viewership in local news in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Perhaps the most notorious was a public corruption scandal within Summit County government that took down a few public officials and gave news reporters more than a year’s worth of follow-up stories that led directly to the indictment and conviction of a local probate judge. The story received coverage by a new reporter on the national scene named Geraldo Rivera, who was on a relatively new format of news program on a show called 20/20 on ABC with Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. Its ratings were strong. That didn’t bode well for Akron’s reputation in the Rivera-created, theatrically produced series titled Injustice for All.
I have argued in the last 20 years that even murders, for the most part, capture much less attention than before because they have become more commonplace. We needed stories about the city itself and where it was going. What was it doing to attract business, jobs, people? There wasn’t much to say at that time. But a city’s image, the face it shows to the region and the rest of the world, as it were, comes often from the high gloss of chamber of commerce-type commercials, fun promotional spots for the local stations, and the kinds of news stories that promote a lifestyle that might retain and attract young people and families.
In Akron, a town that endured decades without much of a good story about its image, a town that had more news about layoffs and business closures (especially in the vital rubber industry) than anything else, except crime, something was about to change.
But there would now be no television station left to cover it, to tell the stories, and most importantly, to show nightly images of the now evolving city.
The irony – especially for the mayor and the investors sticking their necks out to make Akron catch up after about 50 years of neglect – was that this all began to change almost immediately after the demise of local television news. Not long after Capt. Merrill Stubing began to pilot the 6 o’clock hour on TV 23, downtown Akron began to demonstrate it had a pulse. It was coming alive. With $100 million in investments, Mayor Plusquellic was able to deliver three high-profile projects that would draw people back downtown: the John S. Knight Center, Inventure Place (National Inventors Hall of Fame) and Canal Park, home to the AA baseball affiliate for the Cleveland Indians.
“A city’s downtown is like the front room of a home. It’s the first and last thing people see when they visit, and it better leave a good impression,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Development James Phelps once said.
Within 10 years, by the early 2000s, downtown Akron was out-producing all other areas of the city combined when it came to the taxes it generated. The investment was working and sending tax dollars to the city treasury in amounts stout enough to keep 50-100 of Akron’s police force on the payroll. Close to 25,000 people were working downtown, another huge leap even from the early 1990s.
But without local television to assist in telling this story – with images of crowds of people and traffic coming back to downtown for baseball and nightlife – how would Akron get its story out to even its own citizens?
Not through Cleveland media. Cleveland television news has never done a thorough job covering Akron. How can it? But as long as there is no one else doing it in our city, Cleveland can get away with reporting on news here as if we were a mere suburb. That’s why for years, much of the time, newsrooms in Cleveland have merely opened the morning Akron Beacon Journal, scanned it, and pulled out the stories it wanted to cover that day. Most of the work was already done by a print reporter, so there really wasn’t much to it, and let’s face it, 70 percent of their audiences lived in the Cleveland area and had no idea it was old news. It was, as we at TV 23 used to say, news to THEM.
I’m going to share with you a secret Cleveland doesn’t want you to know. When the A.C. Nielsen Company (now the Nielsen Corporation) does ratings surveys to determine how many folks are watching television news in Cleveland, it includes the population of Akron. Akron was and is considered part of the Cleveland TV market. That helps Cleveland because the larger the population, the more advertisers pay the stations to run commercials.
In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, they charge more than in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Daytona Beach. Cleveland’s stature in the world of TV markets is inflated by Akron residents who make up 30 percent of Cleveland’s “TV population.” Have you ever seen a successful business that could ignore a third of its customers? If I owned a men’s clothing store and refused to sell the white dress shirts that one in three of my customers demanded, and those customers quit coming to my store, I’d be out of business. Not in Cleveland television. It makes money from Akron merely because we exist. We are a number that serves them well whether we watch or don’t watch and whether they cover news here or not.
At WAKC, we called this phenomenon a Catch 23. Akron advertisers were not crazy about paying Cleveland ad rates to buy time on a local news program that didn’t have Cleveland’s larger population watching. Nielsen did not want us selling advertising without using its numbers. But, if we used them, it appeared we had no audience because 70 percent of the people it was looking at as potential viewers lived in Greater Cleveland and couldn’t pick us up and, quite frankly, did not want to. Why would they?
We had some loyal advertisers who sustained us for years, but I’m fairly certain we continued to lose money year after year. When we went on the market to purchase syndicated programs to air whenever there was no network programming, Akron television had to pay the much higher Cleveland rate for those shows. But, again, we could not get the size of audience to justify or even pay for the shows we had to buy. Hence, Catch 23.
Former WAKC weatherman Tim Daugherty knew the value of those images. His nightly weather always featured video shot that day of something interesting going on around the region. “We actually would receive comments from viewers asking about the weather video…where it was taken and even what we might have been looking at in the shots we used. It was an effective way of showing off something new, a development, a natural resource such as the river or parks or an event that was drawing crowds,” Daugherty said.
Half an hour of local television time twice each day could be a powerful vehicle for getting the good that was going on into homes around the city. The Akron Beacon Journal did a good job of those days of downtown growth, though Mayor Plusquellic would disagree, but a newspaper is a poor substitute for video when it comes to showing off a city’s best elements day or night.
Missing were the cameras at the opening of a brand-new park for professional baseball. Or at the opening ceremony for the National Inventors Hall of Fame. There was coverage of the christening of the John S. Knight Center downtown in 1994, but as the new convention center started to come into its own, attracting convention business and new visitors to the city, television news was gone.
We missed the opening of the remodeled and redesigned O’Neil’s Department Store building into a beautiful home for a local law firm overlooking center field at Canal Park.
We missed restaurant openings and the creation and completion of the Towpath Trail. Children’s Hospital has expanded about 10 times since TV 23 went under, but not one image of this beautiful transformation has been broadcast on local television news.
The East End development, the new Goodyear headquarters, the new Bridgestone headquarters, GOJO’s move into downtown and so many more big stories all came about after the signal from TV 23 was cut off for local news.
There’s a new hotel downtown near Luigi’s. Heck, Luigi’s is now just a small part of what has transformed the north end of downtown, including high-rise condos, cool new apartments, businesses, galleries, a fencing school and the rebirth of America’s first and oldest public housing complex, once known as Elizabeth Park.
Lock 3, an outdoor entertainment venue along the banks of the historic Ohio & Erie Canal, the waterway that made Akron grow in its infancy, is again a resource. The entire downtown area has the canal in view
New office buildings went up downtown, old ones were saved and restored by Tony Troppe, a loquacious developer who was putting his money were his mouth was and bringing new life to historic buildings that Akron had long since written off as useless.
But you will hardly see any of that.
Much of what I’ve written is within an almost archaic model in the first quarter of the 21st century. Fewer and fewer people are watching traditionally delivered television (over the air, or cable). Of those who still do, the numbers watching television news are dropping. Younger generations are finding it obsolete, not part of their culture, too linear to view in their on-demand world.
Newspapers, sadly, are in decline as well. So I’m not sure the idea of resurrecting TV news for this community (as many continue to suggest today) is at all worthwhile. In Akron, even during its very best days, it was a struggle to make it work commercially with dedicated owners (the Berk family) and enthusiastic employees because of the forces of the Cleveland market.
With today’s declining viewership nationwide, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see true, local television news in that form again. It was local theater, live in your living room every night, done by young people you may have known. It gave many a good start to a long career. But the strangely configured market it was trapped in made it vulnerable to out-of-town owners who truly cared not about Akron or news. They stalked it, killed it, made a bundle and took off.
That, my friends, is a Catch 23.
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