News, talk and sports on TV-2 – next year
The Daily News ran a series of classified display ads a month or so ago seeking applicants for various editorial, sales and production jobs at TV-2. That’s the name of both a new television channel in the works and the newest Innovative Communication Corp. company, which is developing it.
In charge of making it all happen is general manager JoAnn Newhart Crebbin, once upon a time with the old Channel 10 on St. Thomas, owner of the award-winning production company, j newhart video, and for the last couple of years with St. Thomas-St. John Cable TV. The goal is to get TV-2 on air by the end of this year, she says, starting with mostly local programing four or five hours a day on weekdays. The channel will be carried live on St. Thomas-St. John and St. Croix Cable TV, both owned by ICC (read Jeffrey Prosser).
The centerpiece will be a nightly newscast from 7 to 7:30 p.m. originating live from the cable studios on both St. Thomas and St. John. St. Thomas residents haven’t had a live local TV newscast since Page Stull put them together – first at Channel 10 and then, briefly, at the old cable Channel 2. Other live, local programing will include call-in talk shows and sports coverage.
"We’ve got engineers coming from Sony in August to install our studios," Crebbin says. "And we will have two mobile trucks, one for St. Thomas and one for St. Croix, for sports coverage."
Her marching orders: "I was told we have to look good." It will be an all-digital, state-of-the-art operation, she said. "It is a large investment. . . in the community."
TV-2 is not a "public access station" in the sense that the old cable Channel 2 on St. Thomas was – or Channel 13 on St. Croix, which "is no longer functioning" and has "been restructured to prepare for TV-2," Crebbin said.
The company is "not at the moment" seeking Industrial Development Commission tax benefits, she said, although "I’ve been told by IDC people that we would probably qualify."
27 ways to get conversations going
Speaking of local TV talk shows and public access, both are on tap for the new St. Croix channel that’s broadcast on UHF over the airwaves and also carried on both of the territory’s cable systems – as Channel 27 in all cases. Its call letters are WCVI (that’s what you’ll see in the TV logs) but they call it "UPN-27," the letters referring to the fact that it’s a United Paramount Network affiliate.
Three and a half months in operation, "We are working our way into" local programing, vice president and program director Marty Adamshick says, and they just might have something on air by the end of this month.
The immediate plan, he says, is to get a variety of different talk shows going from 6:30 to 7 p.m. weekdays, with a different theme each night – health, tourism, entertainment, business, whatever.
"We will encourage local professionals to take the helm," he says, suggesting a veterinarian and a lawyer as prospects. "The deal is four commercial minutes of time for the purchaser of the half-hour clock, and we retain two minutes," he says. The half-hour rate is "very reasonable," he says, and he envisions a given host doing one show a month.
The station is also looking for religious groups to book half-hour slots on Sunday afternoon for just $100 each. "Basically, they would deliver a tape and we would play it," he says.
The station’s unique draw is that it carries two live half-hour segments of CNN Headline News daily, from 6 to 6:30 p.m. and from 11 to 11:30 p.m. "Basic cable subscribers get CNN news that way," Adamshick said.
Who’s left and who’s writing
Turn to the editorial page of The Daily News and look at the names listed at the top: Ariel Melchior Jr., publisher; Janette Millin, senior editorial writer; and Edwin C. Crouch, ICC vice president. So, who writes the editorials?
Not Millin, no. She has become the director of corporate affairs for the parent company, ICC – a job she describes as "public relations." But she hasn’t been the lead editorial writer since last January, when she went on extended maternity leave. When she returned to work in May, she was doing some editorial writing but not a lot.
Now, still a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, she reviews what others have drafted. "We all put in our two cents’ worth," she says of the board members. Insiders say – Millin wouldn’t – that most of the editorials are the work of Crouch, a onetime Daily News reporter whose beat in the pre-ICC days included the V.I. Telephone Corp. – which eventually made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The other most noteworthy move from the Daily News "down the street," as one executive put it, to the ICC headquarters in the office building behind the St. Thomas-St. John Cable TV structure, was that of J’ada Finch Sheen, the onetime attorney general picked by Jeffrey Prosser to be his chief executive officer at the newspaper. In February, Sheen was quietly named ICC vice president for legal and human services. The CEO position remained vacant for months until executive editor Lowe Davis in May was named to the post – which she holds in addition to continuing as editor-in-charge.
How many reporters do you need to be Independent?
The editorial staff at the V.I. Independent is back up to three – a reporter who's been in the territory for three months, a bureau chief who arrived two and a half weeks ago, and a college student who’s working as a summer intern.
When the paper started up in March 1998, it had an editorial staff of three, and at one point it reached four, plus a part-time sportswriter. The only one of those still on island is Michael Burton, who quit to take a p.r. job in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office and has been freelancing of late.
Christian Wade, the most recently departed bureau chief, left at the start of May for Shanghai – yes, China – where he’s working as a stringer (on-call assignment freelancer) for the Associated Press and part-time for an English-language paper. That left Jonathan Henry, who departed a month later, and Dan Kuemmel, who had arrived two weeks before Wade went. Kuemmel, 23, was holding the fort on his own until intern Marcela Putnam arrived last month from New York City College, and new bureau chief Steve Ramos came in late June. What brought Putnam here for an internship? Her friendship with Wade. They’re staying in touch by e-mail, she reports.
All editing and page layout for the Independent are done at the Avis plant on St. Croix, where the newspaper also is printed. Many pages in the two papers are identical except for different type faces and advertising. The Avis doesn’t circulate on St. Thomas or St. John, and the Independent isn’t distributed on St. Croix.
Half-time again for St. John paper
Don’t go looking for next week’s Tradewinds newspaper on St. John. There won’t be one. Nor was there one last week. With July, the publication reverts to a twice-monthly format that will carry it through November. The eight-months-weekly, four-months-semiweekly schedule has proven successful, editor and publisher Tom Oat says, noting that his late father, Warren Oat, who published the paper before him, "said it couldn’t be done."
Oat has been in the unique position lately of reporting on himself as a news story. While he could be accused of bias, his viewpoint is that coverage of the Tom Oat story in the other papers "has been totally inaccurate."
Last month, he was arrested – for the first time in his life – on St. John, transported in handcuffs on the ferry to St. Thomas and booked at Zone A Command in the Farrelly Criminal Justice Compl
ex. This was on a Friday, and he made bail just in time to avoid spending the weekend in the St. Thomas jail.
His version of what happened is "I was assaulted for trying to take pictures in connection with investigative reporting. And the police used the opportunity to express their editorial opinions at the same time."
The other version is from employees at the Susannaberg transfer station and the adjacent Public Works Department offices on St. John. That one goes that he tried to hit the transfer station weighmaster with his camera. They say he was trespassing. He says he was across the street and never set foot in the yard.
He says he went to the Zone D Command station in Cruz Bay first to file a complaint of assault against the weighmaster. While he was there, he was arrested on the government employees’ charges, he says.
"Whenever there are cross-complaints, police never make an arrest," he said. "In this case, they did." The trespassing charge against him "disappeared," he said, but he’s still facing an assault charge. He thinks the trial will be in August. Judge Ive Swan presided at the arraignment but won’t be hearing the trial, as he has just been assigned to the Family Court bench.
Case-by-case reporting
Getting sued by outsiders for libel is all in a day’s work for major newspapers. Anyone, after all, can file a civil suit. Winning – even winning an out-of-court settlement – is something else again.
Getting sued by former insiders for what comes down to alleged breach of one sort of contract or another isn’t so common. The Daily News, however, has at least three such cases on its doorstep. (Civil suits can take years to move through the courts.) Attorney Lee J. Rohn filed all three – for former Daily News executive editor Penny Feuerzeig, St. Thomas reporter Andy Gross and St. Croix-then-St. Thomas-then St. Croix-again reporter/editor Will Jones.
Feuerzeig, who was the paper's top editor for 15 years when it was owned by Gannett, quit as editorial page editor first and sued later. Gross, a recent hire, and Jones, a six-year employee, were summarily fired. Ironically, Jones was the editor who fired Gross. St. Croix photographer Gary McCracken was terminated the same week as Jones last December, immediately after submitting his resignation giving three weeks’ notice. Jones had earlier filed a racial discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The two firings came shortly before a union vote of the newspaper’s editorial employees that has not yet been resolved.
Jones is now a reporter for the St. Croix Avis/V.I. Independent. Feuerzeig is on the advisory board of the V.I. Source newspapers.
Tanning in the tropics
And then there’s the case of Edward "E.C." Jones (unrelated to Will), a weekend photographer at the Daily News for years on St. Thomas. He left a year and a half ago and says he was fired, although he had announced months earlier his intention to leave St. Thomas to pursue a doctorate degree in his full-time profession of nutrition. He hasn’t sued. He has, interestingly, made a difference in how things are done in the local print media – although not at the newspaper.
You could call his contribution "color photography" – or "black and white photography." E.C. wrote a guest editorial in the Daily News not long before he was terminated, taking offense as a photographer at the fact that virtually all of the camera images of happy, smiling tourists in the slick, colorful visitor guidebooks were of the Caucasian persuasion. With very few exceptions, the only persons of color depicted were "locals" – waiters, bartenders, fruit sellers, steelpan players, cute kids in carnival costumes, and the like. Late last fall, the year 2000 editions of the annual guidebooks came out and some significant tanning on the part of the tourists had taken place.
