The Milwaukee news scene is experiencing its most high profile personnel churn in years.
The latest change is the news that Craig McKee is leaving WISN-TV (Channel 12) to join WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, the station confirmed Tuesday. He starts June 8.
Also Tuesday, the station announced that Joyce Garbaciak will replace McKee at 10 p.m., and Patrick Paolantonio will join the 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts in an “expanded role” and will co-anchor at 5 p.m. with Toya Washington.
McKee joined WISN in 2012 to replace Washington when she went part time and co-anchor the station’s 10 p.m. newscast with Kathy Mykleby. His serious demeanor added to the station’s no-nonsense news image and to Mykleby’s affable familiarity.
He is the second high profile local news anchor to be leaving the market, after Mike Jacobs. But by comparison Jacobs worked at the same station, WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) for almost 38 years, during which time he saw his 10 p.m. newscast drop to fourth place.
Will WDJT-TV (Channel 58) anchor Paul Piakoski, demoted to weekends, become the third shoe to drop?
All this follows the dramatic acquisition earlier this year of Journal Broadcast Group, by E.W. Scripps Co. which now operates WTMJ-TV and WTMJ-AM (620) and the spinning off of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel into a separate Journal Media Group.
McKee’s road here ran through Kosovo, Macedonia and the war in Bosnia, reporting for the Armed Forces Network in the Air Force.
He also reported from the Netherlands and the republic of Georgia.
In an interview when he came to Milwaukee McKee said he was “basically a one-man band,” producing, reporting and editing stories and sending or bringing them back to network offices in Heidelberg, Germany. Kosovo, he said, “was eye-opening.” Serbian troops leaving the city “broke gas lines open and were tossing in grenades.” It was sobering to “see what the human element was capable of,” he said.
McKee grew up in Joplin, Mo., had family members with jobs in TV and radio, and worked at the high school TV station. He joined the military after high school and was stationed in England when he discovered the Department of Defense had a school of broadcasting. “The very next day, I literally talked to my commander” and sent an audition tape to the school in Fort Meade, Md.
After leaving the military in 2000, McKee moved to Phoenix, hometown of his wife, Lynne, and worked at a local station. He worked briefly at a station in Ohio, and in 2009, he became a reporter-anchor at KFMB-TV in San Diego, where WISN-TV found him.
Tags: Craig McKee, Joyce Garbaciak, Mike Jacobs, Patrick Paolantonio, Paul Piaskoski, WISN Posted by