Headed Back to Maine
In 2013, Mike Redding was named the News Director at Tegna’s WCSH in Portland, Maine.
He left that job and popped up as a News Manager at Tegna’s WUSA in DC, where he hired a comedian to anchor the station’s morning newscast.
The show “Get Up DC” has been a flop in the ratings and the “comedian doing news” has not worked out to say the least.
For some reason, WUSA has not pulled the plug on “comedian doing news”experiment and now plans on trying to add a live audience to the newscast. The Tegna station continues to try and retool the newscast, instead of just blowing it up, have News Anchors do the news and send the comedian back to the club.
As for Redding, he is getting out while the getting is still good.
Sources say that a memo went out to the staff at WUSA saying that Redding is leaving the station and headed back to his old job at WCSH in Portland, Maine.
It looks like he might have the get the last laugh as ‘Get Up DC’ continues to crash and burn.
As for the live audience during the newscast. We will bet that this experiment will fail as quickly as it started. Unless WUSA is going to pay people to show up, they are going to have a difficult time filling the seats in the morning.
Maybe it can be a place for some homeless people to gather and grab a cup of coffee.
Stay tuned…