Word: wls
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...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...
...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...
LAST SUMMER, the gossip column in The Chicago Tribune reported that a news director at the city's ABC owned and operated station hall instructed his staff to pay close attention to USA Today for possible stories. The implication was clear: WLS-TV was looking for a new influx of light, superficial stories to bolster its sagging ratings. Several years ago, the station had pioneered the so-called "happy talk" style of local news featuring the likes of the ever-smiling and recently fired Good Morning, America weatherman John Coleman. But the item so angered the news director that...
...seemed a pity to waste that distinguished shock of white hair. So, as long as it did not seem destined to bob around the Oval Office, what better place for it than television? Or so, it seems, thought the folks at WLS-TV, the ABC-owned station in Chicago, when they hired defeated independent Presidential Candidate John Anderson, 59, as a political commentator. Recalling one criticism of his stump performance, the former Illinois Congressman once again pledged an Anderson difference: "I firmly promise that I won't preach." But no sooner did the cameras start to roll than Reverend...