Posted by Bud on July 02, 2010 at 09:30:03:
Courtesy of Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune:
June 30, 2010
Sources: Bob Sirott poised to join WFLD
Bob Sirott, the long-time Chicago radio host and former anchor for WMAQ-Ch. 5, WTTW-Ch. 11 and WFLD-Ch. 32, is poised to to return to Fox-owned Channel 32 as replacement for 9 p.m. co-anchor Jeff Goldblatt.
Sources say the long-anticipated deal is imminent, although there obviously remain details to be worked out. A WFLD spokeswoman said Wednesday that the station has no announcement to make at present. Sirott's agent, Steve Mandell, had no comment.
WFLD's spokeswoman did confirm that Channel 32 reporter Lilia Chacon's last day on the air is set for Friday. Chacon had been at the station 21 years. Her contract was not renewed.
Sirott has been off television since June of last year, when he left Channel 5 rather than accept the station's effort to tweak terms of his multi-year contract, which the NBC-owned station wound up having to pay off even as it released him.
He continues to host a weekend radio show for Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.'s WGN-AM 720 with his wife and former Channel 32 co-anchor, Marianne Murciano, and fill in at the station. From April 2007 to last January, he also hosted WGN-AM's "The Noon Show."
The Chicago Cubs have hired Sirott to conduct in-depth interviews with Cubs greats of the past half-century. The video segments are for the team's archives with an eye to eventually making them available to fans.
Sirott is pegged at WFLD to succeed Goldblatt, a solid former Fox News Channel correspondent whose unremarkable two-year run as Channel 32's replacement for Mark Suppelsa (now lead anchor at Tribune Co.-owned rival WGN-Ch. 9) is set to end this summer.
At Channel 32, Sirott would join Robin Robinson, who has been a WFLD anchor since the station entered the nightly news fray in August 1987, and recent WMAQ import Anna Davlantes, who came aboard last year as a contributing anchor reporter.
Sirott is among this city's best and most versatile live broadcasters, comfortable with shifting between the serious and light. And indications are the station, which this week added former WBBM-Ch. 2 political ace Mike Flannery to its lineup, is going to make over its 9 p.m. newscast. There has been chatter about the revamp being similar to what Sirott did with public broadcaster WTTW's " Chicago Tonight."
He is available because a clause in Sirott's multi-year WMAQ contract assured him of the station's 10 p.m. broadcast opening opposite coanchor Allison Rosati upon the retirement of Warner Saunders in May 2009.
Sirott already had replaced Saunders alongside Rosati on earlier Channel 5 newscasts and was filling in on the late newscast. But if officially given the 10 p.m. job, his contract called for a pay increase and the station balked, seeking to shorten the guaranteed length of the deal in exchange.
Negotiations failed to produce a settlement to keep Sirott on the air at 10 p.m. So he left the station while continuing to be paid under the terms of his existing deal, which had been negotiated less than a year earlier.
A Chicago native and former NBC page who became known as a local radio personality in the 1970s, Sirott transitioned into television with Channel 2 in 1980, later becoming a correspondent on CBS News' "West 57th" newsmagazine alongside Steve Kroft and Meredith Vieira.
Sirott went on to anchor morning news programs for WMAQ and WFLD and then helped update the format of WTTW's "Chicago Tonight," in addition to reporting occasionally for CBS News' "Sunday Morning." He returned to Channel 5 in January 2006.