SYRACUSE — Central New York’s largest cable-television provider has returned local anchors to its news channel. Spectrum, the company created when Charter Communications purchased Time Warner Cable in 2016, is reversing a move made by Time Warner in 2005. Then, Time Warner moved anchoring operations to its station in Albany. (At the same time, it […]
Get Instant Access to This Article
Become a Central New York Business Journal subscriber and get immediate access to all of our subscriber-only content and much more.
- Critical Central New York business news and analysis updated daily.
- Immediate access to all subscriber-only content on our website.
- Get a year's worth of the Print Edition of The Central New York Business Journal.
- Special Feature Publications such as the Book of Lists and Revitalize Greater Binghamton, Mohawk Valley, and Syracuse Magazines
Click here to purchase a paywall bypass link for this article.
SYRACUSE — Central New York’s largest cable-television provider has returned local anchors to its news channel.
Spectrum, the company created when Charter Communications purchased Time Warner Cable in 2016, is reversing a move made by Time Warner in 2005. Then, Time Warner moved anchoring operations to its station in Albany. (At the same time, it moved its meteorologists to Syracuse.)
From that point, local news broadcasts were anchored from Albany with reporters based in Central New York doing the newsgathering.
“It was done to make all our stations more efficient,” says Ron Lombard, news director for Spectrum Networks in Central New York, Northern New York, and the Southern Tier. “It’s a very efficient model.”
However, by 2017, Lombard and his fellow news directors in Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany proposed bringing back a locally anchored news show. The idea got the OK from Spectrum management and starting in March 2017, Iris St. Meran began anchoring a 4:30 newscast from Spectrum’s facility on Erie Boulevard East in Syracuse.
“That was just an experiment,” Lombard says. “The workflow worked out very well.”
So starting May 29, the day after Memorial Day, Central New Yorkers began seeing locally anchored newscasts from midday until 5 a.m.
To meet the expanded hours, Lombard brought in Tammy Palmer, a veteran newscaster who was with what is now Spectrum News — then News 10 Now — as it was just getting on the air. She was the reporter who delivered the first story on the fledgling channel.
“It was about a woman who was missing,” she recalls, 15 years later. She remembers the woman’s name and that after days of searching, the woman was found alive.
Palmer rose to an anchor position and was one of those transferred to Albany.
A native of Central New York, she graduated from Fulton High School and SUNY Oswego and traces her ancestry to some of the first settlers in Lysander — Palmer was offered a job in 2011 by WSYR, Channel 9. She moved back and worked at the station until this spring.
At Spectrum News, she is returning to the same studio and the same anchor desk she left 13 years ago to go to Albany.
As for her work desk, Lombard explained that Palmer is working at the desk at which Bill Carey had worked for years. Carey, a legend in local broadcast news, died in 2015. Since that time, his desk had been left vacant out of respect.
Lombard decided that it was time for the desk to be put back to work and that Palmer was the right person to sit at it.
While ownership has changed, much has remained the same at the station, Palmer says. “There are quite a few charter members,” she says of staffers who have been with the station since the beginning — including Lombard. “It’s a little like stepping back in time.”
Some things have changed, like some of the computer equipment. And, Palmer notices, “people are a little younger across the board.”
Lombard agrees, adding that news people are younger and “are able to move up more quickly than in years past.”
Another change Lombard and Palmer note, is that social media plays a much larger role today. “Social media changed the way we gather news,” Lombard says.
Both Palmer and St. Meran celebrated the return of local anchors with posts on social media. One, from St. Meran, noted, “You may have noticed something different today about @SPECNewsCNY & @SPECNewsSTier. I’ll be on for longer than the 4:30 show. Happy to share I’ll be the midday anchor. That’s not all, I get to share the desk w/ @TammyPalmerNews. It’s a homecoming as she helped launch the channel!”
In addition, Palmer has been finding a lot of warm reaction on social media. She said the “supportive feedback and well wishes,” help her feel she had made the correct move. “This is right. This is how it was meant to be,” Palmer says.
Palmer will be seen on Spectrum News from late afternoons until 5 a.m., Lombard says, with the newscasts in the wee hours being pre-recorded — except when news is breaking. St. Meran has the midday newscasts and, Lombard says, another person will join the staff to anchor local newscasts in the morning.
Lombard declined to say who the morning anchor would be, but expected the person to be at the anchor desk before the State Fair starts.
Having local anchors allows them to focus more on local issues, Palmer says. As an example she points to local elections as an subject that benefits from local focus.
Likewise, she says that being a local anchor gives her more opportunities to take part in events in the region, something that was difficult when she had to drive the more than two hours from Albany.
Plus, viewers like it. “They seem genuinely happy for us,” Lombard says.
“Everybody likes to see more local reporters and anchors on the ground,” Palmer says.