Blowing

Credit KETV's Chuck McWilliams with being the only area meteorologist to be on the air early Sunday morning when Omaha was being hammered by a fast-moving storm system that produced tornado-like winds and damaged homes in Millard.A calm, collected McWilliams deftly shifted among various radar tools at his disposal, identifying the center of the storm and warning viewers in its path.The more

Crash

Oh, SuxNews, you claim to be so hip to technology, what with your connections on "Facebick" and what-not.Why, then, is this story on your "web-channel"? Ann McIntire's repeated references to an Omaha-born "iTunes app," suggest that one of the station's youngest on-air hipsters doesn't realize that there's no such animal. There are iTunes—songs and videos—sold on the iTunes store. And there are

Even Ten Minutes a Day Is Too Much Channel Sux

Unable to bear the sight of cross-eyed Sheila Brummer in the afternoon/evening or the thound of a solo, loud-talking, know-it-all Jim Thiedlecki in the morning, we've avoided Channel 6 this week. Unfortunately, we twice made the mistake of not changing the station when we got in the car after someone else had left the radio on 87.7. During Wednesday's "Live at Five" broadcast, when corpse

Since When Do Anchors Take Days Off During Sweeps?

Just when we were ready to propose a "Free John Oakey" campaign to get the KETV anchor released from his obnoxious co-anchor, Elictia Hammond, the gods gave us a respite Monday morning. The Omarosa lookalike was nowhere to be found, leaving Oakey to deliver the news to us without her shrill babble sending viewers scrambling for their remotes. If Channel 6 had the wherewithal, it would have been

Unsolved

Just received this from an alert, inquisitive reader. 

I am trying to do some research on Omaha television news from back in the early 1960s and I am hoping you may be able to give me a helping hand or point me in the right direction. As I recall, there was an on-air newscaster, possibly on KETV, in the early 1960s. It turned out that he had abandoned his family and previous life in Minnesota (

Arf

The crackerjack news team at WOWTard slapped together quite a series of stories for Tuesday night's 10 o'clock newscast.Ann McIntyre reported on a man who tried to get a ball out his dog's gullet, only to be bitten by the dog. J-Pa Knicely even held up a ball to show us what the ball looked like. It was round. And yellow.Then Mike McKnight used his sharply honed journalistic instincts to reveal

WeatherHype

lather over the possibilities that lurk just beyond the horizon. Off all last week, Flowers burst back onto our screens this week looking giddy about each forecast and doing some serious jonesin' for his new graphicsSpring is here and with it comes the annual ritual of watching WOWT Chief Meteorologist work himself into a package.Nearly every weather segment now features the excitable Mr. F.

About Those Ads

Several of you have commented on the ads that have begun springing up on these pages in the past few weeks. We have adopted the ads in an attempt to support our humble effort here without being obnoxious. In all cases, we try to keep the ads from interfering with the content. We despise it, for example, when sites interrupt content with giant ads that force readers to scroll down the page to keep

Sad

SuxNews has never looked quite as pathetic as it did during Friday's 4 p.m. newscast. Among the problems...• the debacle was anchored by morning fire-chaser Nadia Singh, who seems as ill-equipped for the task as anyone at the station;• Singh showed up for work wearing a trowelful of blue eye shadow, an inappropriately short skirt, and a pair of dominatrix boots, all of which were on full display

Monkeys Seize KPTM Control Room

Either that, or it was "blindfold day" at Channel 42. Viewers trying to catch the end of the Red Sox-Orioles game and the Fox postgame show were treated to at least four interruptions in a span of about ten minutes. The interruptions included a couple of 20-second clips of "Friends," a station ID, and part of a commercial. What's going on there? Are they just letting people come in off the street

Mal-Tard Word of the Day

Words, actually...kawlidge hewps: focus of March Madness

Gambling

We put it off as long as we could, but last night, we finally broke down and watched "Jim's Winter Forecast." After lots of yammering about a "La Nina" and water temps and jet streams, WOWT Chief Ejacucaster Jim Flowers got around to his prediction: early "ice events," and a winter snowfall total of between 28 and 32 inches. Guess what the average annual snowfall total in for Omaha is.Yep, 30

Better than FUBAR, But...

We thought it was bad enough when KPTM hired Calvert Collins straight out of college last May. However, it seems that Channel 7 has now sunk to hiring people who aren't even out of college yet, as is the case with reporter Laura Liggett. She graduates from UNL in May. Granted, she is better than FUBAR Fazal, but that's not exactly a huge bar to leap over, is it?The Channel 7 website features

Graphics Envy

We didn't catch Channel 7's 5 p.m. newscast, but two alert readers tipped us off to the station's new graphics package, a new sans-serif font in an obtrusive white and red stripe that consumes nearly a quarter of the screen. (We were able to see it on the 6 p.m. cast.) The new look is incorporated into the entire program, and isn't, at first blush, all that impressive. The unveiling comes on the

Now This Is How to Respond to a Critique

Harry Flansburg from KM3 posted this in the Comments section in response to our remarks about his Independence Day story/camerawork. It's so honest and free of ego that we thought it was worthy of posting on the main page. My name is Harry and I'm the one who shot the story about the flags at Ashland Cemetary with Niver. You're right, I did go a little overboard with the "low angles" but it was