A News Channel is Born

It's been fun sharing this space with you and the political questions so easily raised. Sharing stories that've crossed my path, and memories; whether from Bills games gone by or from my hometown.

But all of that will by synthesizing in a new experience I hope to share in this space. It is a new time in my career, and what better place to keep track of it as it happens.

And so, it begins.

Time Warner Cable's local news division will be launching its newest news channel in a few weeks in Buffalo, NY. The move completes TWC's commitment to serving its subscribers with local news 'round the clock across upstate NY.

And I get to be a part of it.

Last week, TWC's Vice President of News, Steve Paulus, asked me to move from an on-air, supervisory role at R News, the second oldest of Time Warner Cable's 24-hour news channels to a lead role in the news channel in Buffalo. After just short of 19 years at the "R," where so many people helped me to understand the mission of journalism and the power of it in the visual medium, I look forward to the challenge of building something

Something that can help.

We begin Monday, January 12, with a full schedule of candidate interviews. A staff must be assembled, and quickly. Veterans with decades of experience and backpack journalists raring to go have applied. Hundreds. It is not a bad time to be looking for people who believe in what television news can do for a community, and for the journalist. Plenty of quality journalists are shaking free from operations across the media spectrum who are responding to these difficult times.

We can't think of most of the things we'll need to get this off the ground. TWC News' VP of Operations has been steadily bringing the systems we'll need for the venture on line. Help is coming from seemingly every corner of the state, whether it be from the administrative aspects of the project, led by my News Director in Rochester, Ed Buttaccio, or from the division's human resource staff.

This opportunity is the perfect one for my career. Not a dream job, because I had never dreamed about this opportunity. It is more than that.

It is good fortune. The luck of being in the right place, with the right people, building the right experiences, with the right skills.

I've been through the launch of a start up before. Nineteen years ago, Pete Dobrovitz convinced the president of then Greater Rochester Cablevision to start a local news operation. It was more than an underdog. Yet seizing the right opportunities (owning the big story), coming to the office every day giving it a fair day's work... it all paid off. That little engine that could became R News, a news operation that's changed a lot about local news in its market.

But that was before Skype and Twitter and Youtube and the endless possibilities that exist in the Information Age.

Buffalo will be much more difficult.

It is a place that saw a start up rise and quickly fall in recent years. All three local affiliates are experiencing cutbacks to one degree or another. Even The Buffalo News, the region's dominant daily newspaper, wants to drastically reduce its ranks.

All of this at a time when the economy seems destined for even darker days.

So you want to start a news channel, huh?

Yes. For many reasons, which over the course of this ride, I look forward to sharing with you.