Hyper-Local News Coming to WWJ-TV in 2022
WWJ-TV (CBS 62), the ViacomCBS-owned station in Detroit, will build from scratch a full-scale, hyper-local news department in 2022. The announcement was made December 14 by Wendy McMahon, President, and Co-Head, CBS News and Stations; Adrienne Roark, President, CBS Stations; and Brian Watson, Vice President and General Manager of WWJ-TV and sister station WKBD-TV (CW50).
CBS News Detroit is currently expected to launch in the late summer or early fall of 2022. It will feature a 24/7 streaming service with live local news coverage from 4:00 a.m. to 11:35 p.m., Monday-Sunday, for a total of 137 hours per week. In addition, CBS 62 will broadcast live CBS News Detroit newscasts 40 hours per week in early morning, midday, early evening and late news time periods.
CBS News Detroit will be recruiting and hiring a full staff of multi-skilled professionals. The process will begin shortly with the hiring of a news director. The reporting staff will consist of a diverse team of journalists who will be embedded full-time in communities across the Detroit area, as well as at the State Capital in Lansing, Mich.
This marks the first time CBS 62 will have its own full-scale local news department. WWJ (formerly known as WGPR-TV) became a CBS Television Network-owned station in 1995. From 2001-2002, WWJ aired an 11:00 p.m. newscast produced by WKBD until that station’s news department was shuttered in December 2002. From 2009-2012, WWJ produced a weekday 5:00 – 7:00 a.m. newscast that offered weather, traffic and headlines from the Detroit Free Press and also WWJ Radio. In recent years, the station has aired local weather reports several times a day.
“We view this as an unprecedented opportunity to start from scratch at a large-market, network-owned station and build the newsroom of the future – where we focus first on streaming and then have our content flow like water across our linear broadcast, digital and social media platforms,” McMahon said. “When Brian and his team presented their vision for CBS News Detroit earlier this year, I thought to myself ‘This never happens. Until now.’”
Roark, who has worked closely with CBS 62 on developing the plan for creating CBS News Detroit, added: “The time has come for our Detroit employees and the communities served by CBS 62 to have a full-fledged news department that utilizes the latest advances in newsgathering and streaming technology and a team of multi-skilled journalists who will be embedded in neighborhoods across the market.”
“This is a landmark moment in the history of our station and, for that matter, local news,” Watson said. “I don’t believe there is another station in a large market like ours that has done anything like this, so we are excited to help write a bold new chapter in the history of local news. My colleagues and I are deeply grateful to Wendy McMahon, Adrienne Roark and everyone else on the CBS News and Stations and ViacomCBS leadership teams for their incredible support and belief in our mission.”