Early this Sunday morning, Father’s Day, thousands of people will gather at the Philadelphia Art Museum to run or walk to raise money for prostate cancer awareness and research. Mike Monsell, creative services director at Philly’s ABC-owned WPVI will be among them. The event, the Gary Papa Run, is named after the long-time sports anchor […]

Last night in New York, PromaxBDA announced the winners of the 2014 Promotion, Marketing & Design North America Awards and Global Excellence Awards. The awards were announced at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2014, which recognizes the most creative and high-impact work produced in North America and throughout the world. FX Networks won big in the North American category […]

The 2014 Edward R. Murrow award winners were officially announced yesterday. To see who won, click here. In our recent TVNewsCheck/Market Share survey of local TV station creative services directors, (some results will be revealed at the PromaxBDA Station Summit later this month in Las Vegas), the “overall quality of news” scored high as most […]

When I was a broadcast VP of marketing, I visited every TV station in our group often and regularly. And in the hallways of many were the old photos, usually in black and white, that traced the history of the station back to when it first went on the air, and then down through time. […]

WNCN, the NBC affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., launched a video campaign yesterday to attract more subscribers to its YouTube channel. The video is hip and flip with plenty of attitude. “We hope it’s a conversation starter and attracts subscribers for us,” says Robby Thomas, WNCN’s director of marketing. Thomas admits the cheeky feel of the […]

A million Latinos living in the Washington, D.C., area can watch a half-hour news/public affairs show tailored just for them. In Spanish and/or English. The show is called Hispanic Agenda in English, Agenda in Spanish, and is Washington’s only bilingual news program. Recorded weekly at WJLA, the ABC affiliate, Agenda airs entirely in English on […]

It’s the kind of assignment I used to relish for a change, a chance to show some creativity, to balance the yin and the yang. If the yin is promoting hard news, then the yang is promoting top TV network comedy shows. So when KCRA’s creative services director, Larry Kellogg, assigned writer/producer Charles Abel-Lear the […]

I want to say thank you to all who filled out our survey. I’ve seen the results: All of them are interesting and much of them are specific and actionable. Your comments were honest and insightful. TVNewsCheck and Market Share will begin to report the results at the PromaxBDA Station Summit later this month in […]

When 4-year old cancer patient Alexandra “Alex” Scott held a front yard lemonade stand to raise money to help find a cure children’s cancer, it began a national fundraising movement that bears her name, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. Alex died in 2004 but the little girl left a big legacy, proving how one idea can […]

While it used to be the sole domain of sales managers or possibly news directors, there is a trend for local TV station general managers and upper TV broadcast group management to come from creative services. Valari Staab, president of the NBC Owned TV stations, was once a director of creative services. Early in her […]