Wjz

WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods is leaving the CBS-owned station to join a non-profit firm in New Jersey focused on climate change, she said Wednesday night. Woods, who has been with WJZ for seven years, said she will remain at the station helping with the transition for the next month. After that, she, her husband and their two children will be moving to Princeton, N.J., where she will join Climate Central as staff meteorologist. "I'm very excited about the opportunity in Princeton," she said.

There was no doubt about which Baltimore station was the one to turn to in the immediate wake of the CSX train derailment Tuesday afternoon in Baltimore County. For the first 10 minutes or so, WBAL-TV, the Hearst-owned NBC affiliate, was the only station with live overhead helicopter shots of the wreckage along the tracks and the fires sending plumes of smoke into the air. Normally, breaking coverage on such major stories is a dogfight between WBAL and WJZ, which also owns a helicopter.

A click around the Web pages for new arrivals at Baltimore's television stations yields some cheerful tributes to their adoptive town: "I still can't believe I'm able to do a job I love in a city so close to home," burbles a Bethesda native who is now a reporter here. "Brian may have traveled 2,335 miles to get here, but he says Baltimore feels like home," the page for an anchor announces. "She is thrilled to call Baltimore her new home," explains the Web page for a new sports reporter.

WJZ reporter-anchor Adam May is leaving the Baltimore station at the end of the month to join Al Jazeera America as a national correspondent. May, who has been at the CBS-owned station for 10 years, will go to work for Al Jazeera in June. But he will continue to live in Baltimore. "It was a tough decision, especially saying goodbye to our viewers who have been so loyal over the last few years," May said in a telephone interview Monday. "I now consider many of them friends, and I hope when they still see me walking around Baltimore, they'll come up and say hi. " May, who is originally from Minnesota, said, "One of the most exciting things about this opportunity is that my family gets to stay in Baltimore.

Bob Turk is a nice guy. A very nice guy. Everybody says so. "I can't even remember what he reports -- he's just part of the fiber of the city," says Maggie Miceli, 30, a native Baltimorean who currently lives in Washington. "He's been on television as long as I've been alive." Chris Godwin, a 23-year-old security guard from Baltimore, describes Turk this way: "He's just a typical person like you or I." You don't have to take their word for it. Executives at several local stations say surveys consistently show the cheerful Turk -- WJZ's weather forecaster for the past 30 years -- among the most popular people on the city's airwaves.

Baltimore was just supposed to be a brief stop on the way to big-time TV success.Some brief stop. Two decades later, Marty Bass is still plugging away on WJZ, Channel 13, doing the weather, playing Costello to Don Scott's Abbott, firming up his reputation as one of the most irrepressible (some might prefer incorrigible) talents on Baltimore's airwaves.A native of Kentucky, Bass has spent the past 16 years as co-host of WJZ's morning show, a ratings champion that outdraws the competition by a greater margin than any other local weekday news show.

What was WJZ-TV thinking when they cut to "60 Minutes"Sunday evening ("How about them O's?" May 8)? Reminds us of the old "Heidi Bowl. " On November 17, 1968, the Oakland Raiders scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to beat the New York Jets - and no one sees it, because they're watching the movie, "Heidi," instead. With just 65 seconds left to play, NBC switched off the game in favor of its previously scheduled programming. Sunday, my family and I were on the edge of our seats with every pitch.

Nick Charles, a pioneering figure in cable TV sports at CNN and one-time Baltimore broadcaster at WJZ-TV, died Saturday at his home in New Mexico, according to the cable news network. He was 64 and had been battling bladder cancer since 2009. Mr. Charles, who worked as a sports anchor at WJZ-TV from 1972 to 1976, died "peacefully, looking out at the spectacular land that drew him to Santa Fe, New Mexico," his wife, Cory, a producer for CNN International, told the network. "As a journalist and sports personality, Nick Charles helped put CNN on the map in its early days," Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement Saturday.

Nick Charles is on the phone from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., a nurse and the hospice people working quietly in the background. "Mike Tyson came out to visit me last week," he says now. "He cried with me. Kept saying: 'I don't want to lose you!' We have a 25-year friendship that dates back to when he didn't trust anyone. The guy wouldn't let me go for 15 minutes. " Now it's Charles who doesn't want to let go of life, not just yet, not at age 64 with another birthday right around the corner.

Channel 13 (WJZ) continued its domination of the local news ratings in the important May sweeps month, at least doubling the ratings of its competitors every time its news came on the air -- other than at noon -- in both the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings.Channel 11 (WBAL) continued its slide in the Arbitron book, where Channel 2 (WMAR) had twice the number of viewers for its 5 o'clock newscast -- a 10 rating and 29 share to a 5 rating/14 share. The 5 p.m. numbers were much closer according to Nielsen -- 9/26 for Channel 2 to 7/20 for Channel 11.Only in the Nielsen numbers for 11 p.m did Channel 11 get out of third place in the afternoon and evening newscast, getting an 8/20 to Channel 2's 7/17.

WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods is leaving the CBS-owned station to join a non-profit firm in New Jersey focused on climate change, she said Wednesday night. Woods, who has been with WJZ for seven years, said she will remain at the station helping with the transition for the next month. After that, she, her husband and their two children will be moving to Princeton, N.J., where she will join Climate Central as staff meteorologist. "I'm very excited about the opportunity in Princeton," she said.

Sunday's Super Bowl telecast drew a record audience of 1.5 million viewers at its peak in the Baltimore market, according to preliminary Nielsen figures provided by WJZ-TV. The audience is believed to be the largest for any show on Baltimore TV since the introduction of household meters in Baltimore in 1992. The telecast earned a rating of 59.6, which means three out of every five TV homes in the area was tuned to the game. "We were excited to share the Ravens Superbowl victory with viewers throughout the region," Jay Newman, general manager of Baltimore's CBS-owned station said Monday.

Baltimore TV viewers tuned in big time Sunday for the last home game of Ray Lewis. The average audience of all viewers (age 2 and older) was 877,700. Viewership peaked at 4 p.m. with 974,100 viewers watching on WJZ-TV, Baltimore's CBS-owned station. That was the largest audience in the Baltimore market for any show on any channel since last year's Super Bowl on NBC, according to WJZ and Nielsen. That would cover some pretty big events like the Olympics. The total number of people 2+ in the market is 2,707,000, which means one out of every three people living in this market was watching the Ravens victory over the Indianapolis Colts.

Back in July, I wrote about Gov. Martin O'Malley becoming a staple of network and cable Sunday morning TV. Public affairs show hosts ranging from Bob Schieffer to Candy Crowley talked about the attributes Maryland's governor brings to the national conversation about the nation's civic life. This Sunday, he will do less familiar turn on Baltimore TV sitting down for an interview with Richard Sher on the former WJZ newsman's "Square Off" show. I am interested in hearing what O'Malley has to say when he's speaking to a local audience and isn't riding TV point for President Obama's re-election campaign.

The money, politics and passions surrounding Question 6, the ballot referendum on Maryland's same-sex marriage law, are big, hardcore and hot. Just the kind of story that can go beyond the promotional slogans and be used to measure a local TV station's real commitment to news and public affairs. The relationship between advertising money coming in and news coverage going out offers a snapshot of what a station does with its resources -- and, perhaps, how much or how little it cares about balanced coverage and civic life.

Christopher Gaul, former managing editor of the Catholic Review and reporter for The Sun and The Evening Sun and area television stations, died of lung cancer Thursday at his home in Essex. He was 72. He joined the Catholic Review as a writer in 1995 and worked there until he retired in 2005. George P. Matysek Jr., the Review's assistant managing editor, remembered Mr. Gaul as a mentor to the junior writers at the paper, taking time to carefully edit their work. "He really showed us what went into a good story," Mr. Matysek said, "He was very nurturing in how he dealt with younger writers.

Weijia Jiang, who came to WJZ-TV in June of 2008 as a reporter, is leaving to join WCBS-TV in New York City. Both stations are owned by CBS. New York is the top market in the country. Jiang came to WJZ from WOBC-TV in Salisbury. She has a bachelor's degree from the College of William & Mary and a master's in broadcast news from the University of Syracuse. Born in China, Jiang grew up in West Virginia where her parents immigrated when she was 2. Jiang, whose last day at WJZ is May 31, will be replaced by Rochelle Ritchie, a multimedia reporter from WPTV in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The July ratings period wrapped up last night, and the city's two leading TV stations - WBAL and WJZ - can each claim victories of sorts for their programs. For the late news at 11 p.m., WBAL-TV (Channel 11) and WJZ (Channel 13) are effectively tied, with roughly the same number of households in the Baltimore region tuning in from Monday through Sunday, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. (Monday through Friday, Nielsen shows WBAL with a bit of a lead at 11 p.m.) The ratings estimates show WBAL to be securing a slightly greater edge on WJZ for the 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. newscasts.

WJZ-TV, which angered many fans in May when it cut away from a dramatic 17th inning win by the Baltimore Orioles to go to "60 Minutes," found itself in the same kind of programming crunch Monday. The CBS-owned station cut away from the men's finals of the U.S Open tennis championship at 6:30 Monday night to go to its Baltimore Ravens pre-game show. The station started running a crawl about 6:10 p.m. telling viewers they could follow the men's finals by going online to the station's website, wjz.com.

Vic Carter's spacious Howard County home is filled with more than 300 original paintings, small sculptures and figurines by black artists - and every single one has a story that the gregarious WJZ news anchor is eager to tell. This one, Carter said, pointing to an impressionistic painting of a young girl, the artist painted upside down - as the topsy-turvy signature attests. A small metal statue of a horse stood on his grandfather's desk when Carter, now in his 50s, was a boy. And a wall across from a staircase features a colorful canvas depicting Shango, the Yoruban deity of fire, lightning and thunder.