Posted by chicagomedia.org on January 23, 2009 at 07:27:12:
In Reply to: Surprise: WFLD/Fox Chicago names former CBS2 boss VP & News Director posted by chicagomedia.org on January 22, 2009 at 12:14:32:
From the ashes
Weeks after being fired at WBBM, Fowler is WFLD news director
January 23, 2009
BY LEWIS LAZARE Sun-Times Columnist
That didn't take long. Just weeks after being fired as news director at CBS-owned WBBM-Channel 2, Carol Fowler has signed on as news director at Fox-owned WFLD-Channel 32, effective Feb. 2. Fowler replaces Andrew Finlayson, who after three years as news director, is being reslotted in a Fox Stations corporate job as director of online content and business development.
Put in its most charitable light, Fowler could be said to be making a lateral move to WFLD. She's going from WBBM, where she failed over the course of six years to lift the station's newscasts out of the ratings dumpster, to another station that also tends to wind up at or near the bottom of the batch in the ongoing local newscast ratings competition. But in announcing Fowler's appointment, WFLD Vice President and General Manager Patrick Mullen chose not to dwell on ratings issues. Instead he characterized Fowler as a "driven leader with 26 years of local television news experience." A leader? Maybe. But one who did not fully get the job done when she was confronted with perhaps the biggest challenge of her career at WBBM.
At the very least, it will be interesting to see what Fowler might be able to accomplish at WFLD that she couldn't at WBBM, which at one time many years ago was delivering the highly rated gold standard for local newscasts. That was before ABC-owned WLS-Channel 7 claimed that title, one the station has resolutely refused to relinquish.
But Fowler's move into the news director job at WFLD probably has less to do with any magic she could possibly perform in that station's news department and more to do with her ties to Mullen, which date back a decade to when both were employees of Tribune Co. In the late 1990s, Fowler became WGN-Channel 9's news director around the time Mullen was named regional vice president of the Tribune Television unit. "She's one of the best news people I've worked with," Mullen said Thursday.