TV6 Changes Ahead?

Keep your eyes on TV6 and Fox UP in the weeks ahead. The Sinclair Broadcast Group recently bought WLUC, which operates both  TV6 and Fox UP, and now the employees are waiting to see what happens next. Who's going? Who's staying? Any programming changes? It's fair to say there's an air of nervousness in the halls of the station.

On the other hand, a big, well-funded broadcast group (Sinclair now owns 164 stations nationwide) just might decide to pour some money into one of its newest acquisitions.

Of concern to some employees and U.P. viewers: Sinclair has a controversial reputation when it comes news and politics. Back in 2004 on its ABC stations, it refused to air a Nightline segment that dramatically listed all of the dead soldiers from the Iraq war. Later that year, just before the presidential election, 62 of its stations preempted prime time programming to air a documentary highly critical of Democratic candidate John Kerry.

And in 2010 a handful of its stations aired an anti-Obama infomercial.

Partisan politics, news and business can make for a toxic mix.

Let's hope the local news coverage here doesn't suffer (Maybe it expands!) and everybody keeps their jobs. Too often, these big broadcast groups come in to a small market and say all the right things...and the next thing you know, they're tightening the purse strings and booting people out the door.
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Speaking of TV6, still no word on whether current and former news employees will be getting a lump sum for back pay.

In case you hadn't heard, the US Department of Labor came to town a couple months back and interviewed several news employees and determined they weren't making adequate salaries for the hours they worked.

Shortly afterwards, salaries for beginning employees were boosted from around $18,000 to $23,000 plus. A nice little hike that put smiles on the faces of the news kids.

Back pay? Nothing announced so far.

Full disclosure: I was the news director at WLUC from 2004 to 2011 and tried, probably not hard enough, to get salaries raised. The reasoning behind the paltry pay? If young, ambitious reporters were willing to accept a miserable salary, it wasn't management's role to insist they take more. Business is about making profits.
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Did you see the Jim Harrison article in the Sunday New York Times? Pretty damn flattering. Before moving to Montana, he lived in Grand Marais and often visited Marquette.

He had especially kind words for The Landmark Inn ("a hotel of New York standards") and the Vierling ("a restaurant I would visit every day"). It's priceless advertising to a national audience that has money and may not have heard of the UP until now.

Harrison hasn't been back here in a few years but he's fondly remembered for his sparkling conversation and his fine taste in food and drink.
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As for paid advertising, did you know that Marquette County has been promoted on the jumbo screen in Times Square in New York City?

It's just a four second spot every hour but it's a huge invitation, complete with photos, to come visit Marquette County. It's already been up twice this summer, again on Thanksgiving, and then again this coming New Years Eve. It plays for several days around those dates.

Pat Black of the Visitors and Convention Bureau is the brains behind the campaign. She wants to play with the big boys.


You got news? Contact me at briancabell@gmail.com

Book Signing on Saturday, March 6

We'll have a book-signing at Snowbound Books this Saturday from 2-4 pm. Come one, come all. I'd love to meet you and talk about the book or anything else on your mind.

It's interesting, I haven't read "Money in the Ground since I finished the last draft about four months ago, so I'm kind of curious to see how I react to it the next time I do read it all the way through.

It's good to get perspective. After laboring over something for a year, you get tired of it.

The novel got a mostly positive review from The Daily News in Iron Mountain on February 25th. The negatives dealt with my supposed arrogance and condescension, and my failure to accurately portray the Yooper dialect. I plead guilty on only the last charge. I'm still learning.

The book, by the way, is being offered on Amazon, as well as here on this website, and at bookstores throughout the U.P.

"Money in the Ground" Next Week

I'm told the novel should be back by next week, and ready for web orders and book stores immediately.

You'll notice there's a "Buy Now" tab on the website that we've just added.

Below is the first page of the novel....

Chapter One

The smell of smoke hung in the air but the smoke was no longer visible. Water dripped from the charred, skeletal remains of the house that had been soaked by 3000 gallons of firefighters’ water. Behind the house, the dark blue, velvety sky was slowly brightening but the sun’s appearance on the horizon was still a half hour away.

“It’s all gone,” Erica Rayburn said to no one in particular as she gazed at the grim remnants of her simple, one-story home. “Everything.” She was 24, short and solidly built, but with delicate, feminine features. She was a pretty woman but on this morning, in a worn, paisley bathrobe and with long, unkempt, brown hair, she looked like a refugee. She clutched her two-year-old daughter close to her bosom. The child had calmed down in the last few minutes and was now rhythmically sucking her thumb. Erica felt the girl’s heart pounding fast, next to her own.

Erica’s husband, Karl–clad only in shorts, a white t-shirt, and sandals–walked aimlessly amid the ashy ruins, kicking at singed two-by-fours that had collapsed to the ground, picking at picture frames, pans, silverware, a sewing machine, blackened CDs. He hadn’t spoken a word for fifteen minutes. After getting his wife and daughter out of the burning house, he had frantically attempted to douse the flames with a garden hose, but it had been futile, even laughable. He would have had just as much luck with a squirt gun.

Within five minutes, the entire house had been consumed in flames that began licking at the surrounding stand of jack pines. Two of the trees on either side of the house, in fact, had been charred by the blaze, but the fire hadn’t spread. When the firefighters arrived, that had been their first priority: wetting down the trees. The house clearly was a lost cause.

The closest neighboring house, a mobile home 50 yards away, hadn’t been touched, but the family inside had seen the fire lighting up the early morning sky and had scurried outside for safety, just in case. The man of the house and the two children had since gone back inside, but the mother, a beefy, rough-looking woman of 45 with grayish hair hanging to her waist, stood alongside Erica as she rocked her daughter back and forth. The girl’s eyes remained wide open, as though she was seeing, for the first time in her two years, that life was tenuous and troubling. She gripped her mother’s bathrobe more tightly.