Breaking in the new: Local TV stations

Today I read in the online Boston Globe that Natalie Jacobsen is retiring after 35 years at the WCVB anchor desk, and it got me thinking about how we come to prefer, then stick with, one local TV affiliate over the other.

Nat has been a mainstay for most of my Massachusetts life -- I was never a Liz and Jack fan, and Channel 7 changed formats and faces so many times over the years (R.D. Sahl? Robin Young? Zip Rzeppa?) that loyalty wasn't possible. (I'm betraying my age here -- the younger set will notice that Fox and the other newbies aren't even considered.) But -- and forgive me if I sound like the retrospective promo that is no doubt filling every bit of spare ad time on CVB -- Natalie as the face of news during dinner time was always a given, and something Kim and I agreed on no matter who she was teamed with.

Morning news, of course, is vastly different, but it was during those morning broadcasts, while we were in temporary housing, that we found ourselves "auditioning" the different local affiliates. What we discovered was that morning news is probably not the best criteria for picking a preferred outlet -- the personalities here are even more annoyingly goofy in the morning than are their Boston counterparts.

(ASIDE -- for our friends in Boston, you should see the morning traffic reports here in Minnesota: "Unfortunately, there's a pullover on 35W that has traffic slowed to only 35 miles per hour . . . " is about as bad as it gets.)

When we moved into our house and got into a regular routine, we returned to the dinner hour news and found that a couple of coincidences seemed to be steering our choice without our knowing it.

First, the channels had familiar numeric assignments -- the Twin Cities CBS affiliate is Channel 4, as in Boston, and the ABC affiliate is Channel 5, as in Boston (NBC resides further up the dial at Channel 11). But more importantly, the Channel 5 news team features one Cyndy Brucato, who at first glance looks as though she's Minnesota's answer to Natalie Jacobsen -- been around a while, good gravitas without being a downer, appears to be well-respected. A bit of research shows that her career has taken a number of detours through public relations and government work, so it's not as if she's been sitting in the same seat every night for 35 years.

But I strongly suspect subliminal forces at work, because Channel 5 has become our default for news. As in Boston.