Word: wls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Oprah breathed new life into the ratings and repeated the trick seven years later, when she became host of WLS's struggling AM Chicago show. The program, which went national in September 1986, has won a huge following by focusing -- unduly, say some critics -- on the often bizarre nooks and crannies of human misfortune. "There is a commonality in human experience," Oprah contends. "If it's happened to one person, it has happened to thousands of others. Our shows are hour-long life lessons...
...anchored WBBM's 6 p.m. weekday program. The station moved Porterfield to weekend anchor chores to make room for the returning Bill Kurtis, a former WBBM anchor who had left his post in 1982 to join the CBS Morning News. When the disaffected Porterfield was wooed by rival WLS-TV, WBBM offered to boost his salary to $300,000. After WLS again raised the ante, reportedly to a five-year contract worth more than $2 million, Porterfield opted to join WLS as a reporter and substitute anchor...
...boycott hurt the station's news shows? It is impossible to say. WBBM's news broadcasts, once ranked No. 1, have slipped to second place behind ABC-owned WLS. But the decline began several years ago, when Kurtis left for the CBS Morning News. WLS's potent schedule (the hugely popular Wheel of Fortune appears opposite the second half-hour of WBBM's 6 p.m. news show) and its vastly improved news programs have further siphoned off WBBM's audience. The CBS station has also been bedeviled by internal squabbling so severe that a shoving match once broke...
...Tartikoff. He took a job at a New Haven TV station, while playing semipro baseball for the New Haven Braves. Soon he was at Chicago's WLS-TV, run by Lew Erlicht, who introduced him to Fred Silverman. From Erlicht (now president of ABC Entertainment), Tartikoff picked up programming smarts; from Silverman, he learned the importance of loving TV. Even today Tartikoff can rhapsodize about his job as if he were a kid who has just been deeded the - candy store. "In movies," he says, "unless you make E.T., you reach maybe as many people as watched a TV show...
Tartikoff began to prove he could do better when, at 23, he went to work as director of advertising and promotion at WLS-TV in Chicago. He impressed his boss, Lewis Erlicht (now president of ABC Entertainment), with successful gimmicks like "Gorilla My Dreams Week," a festival of ape movies. Fred Silverman, then ABC'S programming chief, soon hired him, but Tartikoff left after a year to join NBC. Silverman later became president of NBC and promoted Tartikoff to the top programming slot in January...