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NEWSPRO
Competitive market's TV news outlets have
new rules to play by with switch in CBS affiliation
When in 1975 Tom Wills, sporting fashionably long hair and packing a canary yellow suit, saw the St. Johns River for the first time, he knew that there in Jacksonville, Fla., he'd found his boater's paradise.
Later he would realize he had also found his professional paradise.
When Mr. Wills, who had reported for WTOP radio and TV in Washington, arrived at Post-- Newsweek-owned CBS affiliate WJXT-TV on the northeast shore of Florida, he planned to be gone in "two years and a cloud of smoke."
Twenty-seven years later he's still there, and he and his energetic 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. co-anchor Deborah Gianoulis, with whom he's worked for 24 years, are the longest-running TV anchor team in the country. "She's like my wife, but she's not," said Mr. Wills. WJXT is a highly profitable station known for several things: its outsize local and network ratings ("The CBS Evening News" averaged a 14 rating/25 share in the May sweeps and "Late Show With David Letterman" averaged a 5/12), taking news seriously, having helped shape "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft, and for its meteorologist of four decades, George Winterling. He's as well-known for growing gigantic vegetables in a postage-stamp-- sized vegetable garden on the station's front lawn as he is for 40 years of weather forecasts. And the station has shaken things up in the nation's 53rd-largest Nielsen market-it's a sort of TV Brigadoon on what locals call the First Coast.
Two years after Post-Newsweek and CBS drew their lines in the sand over issues related to compensation and control, WJXT is going independent July 15. The decision set off a pinball ricochet that will bounce the CBS affiliation to Clear-Channel-owned WTEV-TV and possibly redirect eyes that had been on that station, since WTEV-TV plans to shift its UPN programming to late-night on sister station WAWS-TV, a Fox affiliate.
Expecting to be able to capitalize on the inevitable confusion are the Gannett-- owned duopoly of NBC-affiliated WTLV-- TV (WJXT's chief competitor) and ABCaffiliated WJXX-TV as well as Media General-owned WJWB-TV.
The copper-toned Mr. Wills confesses to initial shock at the news that WM was severing...