After 30 Years Pennsylvania Anchorman isn't Slowing Down
Often times in TV news, if you work 4 or 5 years at one station, that is quite an accomplishment.
How about 30 years? In the Town you grew up in?
Lancaster, PA Anchorman Ron Martin is celebrating his 30 years at WGAL by adding yet another newscast to his daily schedule.
Martin, who already co-anchors the TV station's half-hour newscasts at 5, 6 and 11 p.m., recently began co-anchoring a 10 p.m. newscast on WGAL's This TV channel.
"There's an audience for it, and we had an opportunity to provide it," Martin said. "Some people have been going to bed earlier, and have indicated the desire to see a 10 o'clock newscast."
Martin, 57, lives in York, where he grew up. He has seen a lot of technological changes in his nearly 40 years of working in broadcast journalism.
"When I began in the news business, we had film," he said. "It was a tedious process of developing film, which could take over an hour. And then the editing process was done manually, where you were physically splicing the film together.
"It's evolved from videotape to the digital format, where a story can be put together, essentially, on the computer."
Martin said he always aspired to be a journalist.
When he went to Howard University, he was hired as a desk assistant at NBC News in Washington, D.C., by an early mentor, a former York County newspaperman who had become an NBC desk editor.
"So, a month after I arrive at Howard University, I'm in the newsroom, in 1973, working as a copy boy, where I was for my four years of college," Martin said.