Twenty-seven years ago, CBS programming traded broadcast facilities with the FOX affiliate serving Detroit and its surrounding communities. As a result, WJBK-2 and its newscasts eventually rebranded as “FOX2.” For the facility that had been WGPR-TV, local news wasn’t in the plans, given the competitive landscape of the Motor City broadcast scene.
In December 2021, Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark revealed that a change of tune had finally come with new leadership at CBS News and Stations, today part of Paramount Global, local news would be coming to CBS Detroit.
That day has finally arrived, after a short delay.
“CBS News Detroit,” based at WWJ-62 in Detroit, officially launches this evening with 6pm and 11pm newscasts. The newscasts will also be seen live on the CBS News Detroit streaming channel.
Who will be watching is the No. 1 question. In Detroit, Graham Media Group flagship WDIV “LOCAL 4,” the market’s NBC affiliate, dominates. Then, there is FOX O&O WJBK-2 and The E.W. Scripps Co.‘s ABC affiliate, WXYZ-7.
Thus, CBS has its work cut out in luring viewers from those newscasts while also seeking to keep those tuned to its prime-time programming from changing the channel at 11pm.
Serving as news anchors are Jeff Skversky and Shaina Humphries. They are joined by meteorologist Ahmad Bajjey and sports anchor Ronnie Duncan. Humphries and Bajjey were hired in July 2022. Skversky joins CBS News Detroit from WPVI-6, the ABC Owned Station in Philadelphia, where he was a sports anchor, reporter and host.
Paul Pytlowany, from 2017 the Director of Local Production and Community Affairs for WWJ-62 and The CW Network-affiliate sibling WKBD-50, was appointed News Director for the stations one year ago.
“CBS News Detroit” was originally expected to launch in the late summer or early autumn in 2022. Live local news coverage between 4am and 11:35pm, seven days a week, was also noted in the original announcement. “On CBS62, newscasts will total 40 hours per week and air in the traditional early morning, midday, early evening and late news time periods,” CBS said. Rachelle Graham is officially the midday anchor, although a debut date remains unknown.
That’s still forthcoming, as the four-person PM team settles in for the first time at what CBS News and Stations is billing as the “Newsroom of the Future.” How so? The studio on 11 Mile Road in suburban Southfield, Mich., was designed and built “with a streaming-first mentality.”
CBS News and Stations notes, “The backbone of the organization is a team of multi-skilled professionals who will write, shoot, edit and report their own stories. The reporting staff consists of a diverse team of journalists who are embedded full-time in communities across the Detroit area, as well as at the state capital in Lansing.”
The launch of CBS News Detroit brings to 14 the markets where local news streaming channels for CBS News and Stations are now operational.
While this marks the first time CBS 62 will have its own full-scale local news department, WWJ did air an 11pm newscast from 2001-2002. it was produced by WKBD, which saw its news department closed at the end of 2002. A second stab at local news aired on WWJ between 2009 and 2012. This saw the production of a 5am-7am newscast offering weather, traffic and news sourced from WWJ-AM 950, the all-News station owned at the time by CBS, and from the Detroit Free Press.
More recently, local content was simply weather reports.
However, with a resurgence taking shape in the downtown core, the timing could be perfect in a resurgent metropolis seeing new life in areas that had been begging for urban renewal for decades.
Roark said in December 2021, “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,” she said.
