Local Sinclair newscasters signed off for the last time Friday night
By Buffy Pollock, Rogue Valley Times
Hours before the final local newscast on Channel 10 was set to air Friday, a group of familiar faces from KTVL’s recent past stopped by the station’s former home on Rossanley Drive to reminisce.
Former anchor and executive producer Trish Glose rallied the group, which included former anchor/producer Shannon Young, recently retired chief meteorologist Milt Radford, and Demi DeSoto, who wore a slew of hats at KTVL for more than two decades.
Glose said a Facebook group had formed recently boasting more than 150 former KTVL folk, all sharing stories and reconnecting to grieve the loss of what KTVL had been since the station first aired as KMED in 1961.
Sinclair Broadcasting, which bought the CBS-affiliated station in 2011, announced April 27 that it would cease to operate a local news team in Medford starting this month.
The company’s statement read, “Beginning May 15, The National Desk, which provides real-time national and regional news from Sinclair’s television stations across the US, will air during KTVL’s regularly scheduled news time periods.”
While current KTVL news team members were reportedly ordered not to give interviews, the alumni group Friday reminisced about their years at KTVL and voiced support for the current news team.
They wandered around and peeked into windows, recalling Jerry Lewis telethons, nightly newscasts and community involvement. Radford said the station had long been a grad school of sorts for newly minted young journalists who cut their teeth at KTVL before moving on.
DeSoto teased Glose that he remembered a wide-eyed and eager reporter with permed hair and plans to “change the world.” Glose acknowledged her youthful exuberance.
“I was brand new. I remember one time they were like, ‘There’s a murder trial happening in Klamath Falls.’ And I was like, ‘Yes!’” she recalled.
“And then they were like, ‘Oh, we don’t need you to shoot it. We just need you to run and get the copy of the tape.’ So, I ran down the hall and tripped down the stairs of the studio. I remember someone asking, ‘Are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘I’m great.’ And then I ran to my car and drove all the way to Klamath Falls to get the copy of the tape, and I was so happy to get to do it.”
The group laughed as they remembered learning the ins and outs of looking the part.
“I had a wardrobe in my trunk. I told all my new reporters. Jeans, T-shirt and boots in your car at all times,” Glose said.
“I remember walking down the hallway once, and Susan Kelley, when she was general manager, she was like, ‘Trish, you’re doing a fabulous job.’
“I had been here two months, and she was like, ‘But your hair is all wrong and we need to talk about your wardrobe. Do you have pearls at your desk?’ I was like, pearls?’ And she said pearls would dress up any outfit. Then she said, ‘And we need to get you a hair appointment. But great job.’”
DeSoto, who worked in positions ranging from anchor and “Friday Night Fastbreaks” to weather, from 1999 to 2021, remembered rolling into the studio in his best “guy from New York” attire, being “handed $1,000 to go buy some lighter clothes.”
He added, “I had a goatee, and they made me shave it.”
DeSoto, who spearheaded franchises such as “Walk on the Wildside with Wildlife Images,” “PC NewsCenter,” and “Pet on the Set,” was assignment editor on 9/11.
“I remember Alan Levy called me at 5:30 a.m. and told me to shave, put on a suit and get down to the station, I was going on air. I was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ He said, ‘Have you turned on the news?’” DeSoto said.
“September 11 was my first time on-air.”
DeSoto teased that you could determine a newscaster’s timeline by figuring out the format in which they’d worked; DeSoto recalled dealing with everything from beta machines to VHS tapes to digital.
“I always like to joke that you can tell those of us who had to shoot beta, because one shoulder sits lower than the other,” he said.
Young, who now works for a rafting company, worked at KTVL in varying capacities from 1991-2000 and 2005-2009, both during college and afterward, doing weather and news.
“I was taking a climatology course from Leon Hunsaker, and he called and said, ‘You need to come work for me.’ I was this close to joining the Coast Guard, and I ended up with a 20-year career in television instead,” Young recalled. “I was 19 when I started working here.”
Young said seeing the old station was like “going back to the house you grew up in as a kid.”
“The best memories are the people and the community and the stories. I made so many lifetime friends. My husband worked … next door,” she said.
“This was an industry where you had to want to be here. We were all broke. You had a college degree, so we were paying college loans, you made minimum wage, and you were working stupid hours and every holiday. Your family was 3,000 miles away,” she said.
“You had to want to be here, and I would say that 98% of the people wanted to be here 99% of the time.”
Radford chuckled to think of the well-worn old station.
“The year they moved over, in October, it was raining every day inside the weather center. I thought, ‘Man, it’s a race for time to get out of this dump,’” he said.
Young recalled a summer with a broken air conditioner and manure fertilizer spread across a nearby field that filled the station with flies.
Glose said the recently formed Facebook group showed that many KTVL alumni are working in markets all across the country, including the station’s best known alum, Ann Curry.
“We have so many former reporters and producers who are now in … Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and New York. I just feel like this station, the focus was always, ‘Where do you wanna end up?’ And, ‘OK, let’s get you there.’”
The group recalled pizza on election nights and a police standoff in the parking lot one year. Radford, who retired in November and still serves sometimes as a meteorologist for JPR, said he was sad for what the closure would mean for the community and for journalism overall.
“I remember the day before I retired in November. I went in and we had a little gathering, a goodbye party. They asked me — the old grampa of the newsroom — to say a few words,” Radford said.
“I told them, ‘Always make sure you have a Plan B.’ I said I have been here long enough that I have seen several Sinclair initiatives go under. … I felt like I saw this coming. I can’t say I was enough of a prophet I saw it coming in six months though.”
Young teared up thinking of her history with the station and all of her community ties that came from her time at KTVL.
“We grew up here. I am who I am today … because of this place,” she said, wiping tears.
“Sinclair may have killed us, but we left a huge mark on this community, and they cannot take that away from us.”
DeSoto agreed.
“Absolutely. … Sinclair can go. But that stays.”
Ann Curry: We need more local news, not less
Veteran journalist Curry, one of KTVL’s best known alumni, said Friday she was sad to hear of the loss of KTVL’s local news team.
Curry got her start in journalism at KTVL in the late 1970s and went on to assemble a resume that included more than 30 years as a national and international news reporter, anchor, co-host of the “Today Show.”
Curry started at KTVL as an intern, where she picked up the mail and ran the studio cameras, before working her way up to reporter and becoming the station’s first female anchor.
“I’m saddened for the KTVL news team and also for the people of the Rogue Valley, which can’t afford to lose yet another source of local news,” she said Friday.
“People have no idea the impact that local news can have. … The loss of this local news coverage means that people in power, in the state and specifically in Southern Oregon will face less scrutiny and be held less accountability for their actions. And it’s happening nationwide.”
Curry, who still has strong ties to the Rogue Valley, recalled bygone local media outlets such as the Ashland Daily Tidings and the Mail Tribune. A story in the Tidings in the late 1970s convinced her father to move his family to Southern Oregon, just after Curry’s sophomore year of high school.
“The story, on the front page of the Ashland Daily Tidings, was about the mayor’s wife’s bean soup recipe. My father, who was retiring from the military after a long career, had decided to subscribe to local newspapers to decide where he was going to move his family after he retired,” she said.
“When he saw that there was a town in America that would put the mayor’s wife’s bean soup recipe on the front page of the paper, he knew that was where he wanted to live. We drove all the way from Norfolk, Virginia, across the country in a station wagon, to get to Ashland, Oregon.”
She added, “My dad used to read the Medford Mail Tribune and the Daily Tidings every night and then watch Walter Cronkite. Then, at the dinner table, we would debate what was happening in our community and in the world.”
Curry said loss of any local news source has an impact on a community.
“America needs more local news, not less. Citizens need to know what is happening so they can do something about it. I think that communities need and want to feel more connected, and local news is critical for that,” she said.
“It lets you know what other people in your town and in your valley are doing and gives you an opportunity to care about something and weigh in on it and talk about it at your dining room table.”
Curry said she hoped that local news outlets would “beef up their operations” as a result of the loss of KTVL “and that the people of the Rogue Valley demand more local news, not less.”
“This is the very thing across America that has contributed to a rising inability to hear each other,” she said.
“We’re going to have to fight for our right to know what’s happening and our right to do something about elected officials and other people in power who need to be held accountable,” she added.
“There are remaining local news operations, but every time you take one down, every time one folds, it’s just one less source and that many fewer reporters who are charged with asking hard questions of people in power or shining a light on the things that are happening in our communities.”
Reach reporter Buffy Pollock at 458-488-2029 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @orwritergal. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.
