- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, the Regional Science Consortium, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

This is WQLN.

- You can't get into the journalism business with the idea that you're going to be a star and that it's all for show.

If you want to be serious about what you're doing and you want to follow the mission and be the watchdog and understand what a privilege it actually is to be in that position where you get to go out and you get to ask anybody who's in power, okay, what are they doing with the tax dollars?

Because it all comes back to following the money.

- News is all about geographical location.

We want to know what's going on in our community.

And unless if it's a major story without local news, no one is gonna cover stories that might matter to people living in a place like Erie or its surrounding communities.

So it's really important that we have local journalism that people can rely on and people can trust.

- What's happening on Parade Street, what's happening on State, what's happening on West 12th has a lot more to do with your life than, you know, some kind of Washington DC policy.

- [echoing] We the people.

- I think journalists, we have always thought of ourselves as, as watchdogs, the fourth estate, that we know that things are gonna happen if there isn't someone keeping track of what's going on.

- This is no joke.

This is serious business - As early as 1808, Erie, Pennsylvania had newspapers popping up left and right.

Their owners were typically members of local influential families, like Joseph Sterrett, who started the Erie Gazette in 1820.

His printing office became known as the "Poor Man's College", with some apprentices going on to careers in journalism themselves.

- Horace Greeley, he was a printer and a compositor, and the paper was on State Street, Ninth and State at that time in the 1800s, 1880s.

- He came from Corry area and then came to Erie and worked here briefly, but kind of learned the printing trade years later.

He's a famous New York publisher.

It is a, a, a very, very acquired skill and perspective.

That's a conversation we've had the very earliest days of the Reader is, we are only able to do this because there was new software programs, we could sit there, four guys with four laptops, could sit in somebody's upstairs apartment and start a publication.

To do all of that work, I can't imagine the amount of time and effort.

It would've been interesting times to have a paper back then.

I would like to have been able to publish some of the stories coming outta Erie then.

- The public may not fully know that the primary job of a reporter is to reflect the community, whether that's learning the skills to go in and cover a meeting quickly or to double and triple check details of an accident.

- You're a journalist, Hildy.

- A journalist, and what does that mean?

Peeking through keyholes?

Chasing after fire engines?

- It's about evidence gathering.

It's about doing more than talking with people.

It's about getting facts and in, even in the days before email chains, the people who were in it, they have a vocation.

And this was its own niche, - I know all about reporters, Walter.

A lot of daffy buttinskies running around without a nickel in their pockets and for what?

So a million hired girls will know what's going on?

Why I, oh... what's the use?

- By the turn of the 20th century, Northwest Pennsylvania had dozens of newspapers.

Companies merged and splintered to form new papers like the Erie Daily Times, where nine employees from other publishers left their jobs to form their own paper.

The Dispatch and Herald merger created the Erie Dispatch-Herald under the ownership of Ed Lamb, a labor lawyer and industrialist from Toledo, Ohio.

- The Dispatch-Herald was owned by the Lamb family, Edward J. Lamb, who also owned WICU and a radio station.

So this was before there was controls and regulations nationally on the media.

John Mead, Sr., He was from Ireland and came over here when he was a boy, like, seven years old or eight years old, and he became a printer and they went on strike.

- He was one of nine printers who were on strike from a local paper and they started the Erie Times.

- We always knew the biggest cost for the newspaper were people and then newsprint.

And if you're talking about a print product, that's expensive and it's still a union operation, but we knew that there was that kind of financial pressure.

- The Mead family, they were great for the town.

They let things play out, but they were entrenched in the community and took a lot of grief from people trying to get their own way.

Stalwart.

Tough.

So it was a pleasure for me to work for 'em.

- The Times and the old Erie Dispatch-Herald, they had real, I mean real battles on their front pages and they, you know, wrote stories about each other's publishers and, and editors.

So they had these two media giants in Erie, you know, you know, were, were fighting it out.

And finally, January 7th, 1957, the Times was able to purchase the Dispatch-Herald with a, with a loan from a Chicago bank.

- Though both Erie's leading papers were now owned by the same publisher, the news teams stayed separate.

The Daily Times staff kept their afternoon news beat and the Dispatch-Herald staff was assigned the new moniker of Erie Morning News.

- We were fighting siblings because we were both owned by the, the Mead family.

Their business model was to have two competitive newspapers and they encouraged us to compete and we did compete.

- There were morning newspaper families and there were afternoon newspaper families.

I mean, they define themselves by those news sources, a sense of - Urgency to be the other was very, very keen.

- They had separate editorial staff, separate managing editors and separate society departments, separate sports, and very rarely even talked to each other.

- We had, in each side of each desk, you had your own side that you kept locked and, and had to leave like little marks so that you knew if somebody played with your drawer that, and you were smart enough not to leave too much important stuff in your drawers.

Well the truth is, they competed by day, but they drank beer together at the press club or elsewhere at night.

- Larie Pintea, who was the editor of the Morning News, Larie looked like Lou Grant.

He had these big bushy eyebrows and he was kind of scary like that.

What he taught all of us at the Morning News is not just connection, but the importance of localizing stories, about knowing what the neighborhoods were.

- I broke in under Larie Pintea, one of the hardest bitten newsmen around, and I started when there were a hundred printers at the newspaper, a full room of pressmen, mailers, who helped get the paper out, advertising departments.

It's a team within a team.

- It was a union shop.

You could not work there unless you belonged to the union.

Unless, of course, if you were management.

And there was stereotypers.

Who ever heard of stereotypers, you know, today?

Well.

they were the people that made those big round half dome thing that went on the press that were made out of lead.

And there was the printers, the journalists in the newspaper guild.

And we were, you know, very progressive, ahead of the times.

If you talk about the difference in pay for the men and women, if you, you know, you're in the union and you and you were a reporter, you were on scale and men and women got the same pay.

- The new building opened in June of 1970 and it was this offset press and Erie may have been like the second newspaper in the country to have this cold type press.

- When those press had started, I mean there were, you just heard the rumbling, the whole building was, like, shaking.

- It was the first offset printing press in this region.

Really an expensive thing.

And it was, I think three stories high.

- Three stories high and three stories into the ground.

- I bet it was 200, 250 feet and it had different parts to it.

- To see a, a machine that could actually sort sections of a newspaper and cut 'em and print 'em on both sides and on the right side and all broad, do broad sheet and also do tabloid size sheets.

It was absolutely amazing.

- You bring a plate to it and print it on a blanket and then the presses go like this and you have the giant toilet paper rolls sending the press down and it would come down into the mail room.

A really exciting thing.

The press was so good, but in the end it was part of the problem of keeping a press because they couldn't get parts for it.

'cause there weren't that really that many, but it was spectacular press.

- Edward Lamb's new WICU-TV started broadcasting in 1949 and the Nuber family bought Erie's first television that same year.

The fifties and sixties saw WJET, WSEE, and WQLN join WICU.

TV was the media of the future.

- The Thanksgiving snowstorm of 1956.

People couldn't go out for over a week.

They were snow bound, totally.

The mayor at that time was Art Gardner, and he moved City Hall, with City Hall operations, to Channel 12, up on 34th and State Street, and that's where he ran the city from.

And they announced everything, you know, every hour or so they can, what was going on, where the plowers were going to be, where the food was gonna be delivered.

People couldn't get out to get food and such.

And that was the first realization of what, really, television news could do at that time.

- As Erie's TV presence grew, local programs aired alongside national syndicated shows.

With limited options, many viewers developed loyalties to their favorite channels, just like they chose their favorite newspaper in the decades prior.

There was an appealing convenience to having entertainment and information sent right to your living room.

- Certainly by the 1970s, news was really inside of everybody's home.

That there was a half an hour local news every day, and there was a half an hour national news and that stayed that way probably until the hostage crisis, and that's when ABC made the decision to start doing an hour-long national newscast at 11:30 every day.

- The special report that we planned to bring you tonight was about domestic politics, the battle among the Democrats.

But we think the crisis in Iran is more urgent right now than the campaign here at home.

- It seems to me that that might have been a singular moment that kind of exploded the news that you get over the air on television set.

- The Iranian students have the initiative.

- The situation in Iran has left a lot of young Americans fighting mad.

- Anything that you see on a 24-hour news cycle and any kind of news that is packaged up for very quick and easy digestion, whether you're talking about Facebook, TikTok, you know, whatever.

That's not journalism.

Too many people get these types of tiny snippets of news, I guess I would say, without having to read or, or deal with any of the other issues around it.

I mean, that's my definition of of infotainment.

- Infotainment, right, is a certain thing and it is television, so there is a certain amount of production value that is required.

It is television.

But the switch to, you know, these news programs that aren't news programs, it's like reality shows.

They aren't real.

They're there to tell a story in a specific way for a specific outcome.

And that hurts journalism when that is, when, when news is treated that way.

- By the 1980s, Erie's television market was saturated, with WFXP taking the last major network affiliation in 1990.

The Lamb family's NBC-affiliated WICU, even with its headstart, faced serious competition from Myron Jones and John Kanzius' ABC affiliate, WJET in the local ratings.

While both Lamb and Jones were Ohio natives, their influences on Erie's media scene cannot be underestimated.

- They're legendary, both in their own way, you know, they both have very different personalities, but a couple of things stand out for me about both of them.

And that was, they were very committed to the greater Erie community.

And for them, everything was local and they really served the community well for all the years that they operated.

But they were fiercely competitive.

Fiercely competitive.

But at least it was local ownership.

Because when you have local ownership, you have local control.

- Good example, one night I'm having dinner and I got a call from Myron and he's talking about the news set that we just put on the air and he said, the color, even though it looks right in person, it's not right and we need, we need to change that as soon as possible.

Well, without him saying, I knew what that meant.

So I was off to Busy Beaver, I got the paint, I was up there and repainted it by the 11 o'clock news.

And he called me during the weather part of that show.

He said, I think that we've got the color right this time.

So Myron Jones was a force of nature.

He would put money into equipments like these, like these brand new cameras.

We had a helicopter for a short time.

I mean, Erie, Pennsylvania at the time was a 143 market, and we had a helicopter.

We did broadcasts in China, we did broadcast in Poland, Vietnam.

We created news events and he had no problem putting money behind this.

He also did something else.

He never was a harsh man, but he would always remind you that if you are not giving your best all the time, why are you here?

- All the stations brought something a little different to the table.

A city the size of Erie had five television stations.

It was unique and it was, it was good.

- I wanted to be on TV, but you know, what was open for me at the time was to be a director.

And our news was on film.

So we went out and shot film.

If you shot too much film, you tried to hide that because people would yell at you because it was made with silver and it was expensive.

Every story for the news was one little reel that got spliced all together with magnetic stops in between.

And I had to say, roll it with a seven second roll when I felt like the news people were about to go to a break because we didn't even have a script then.

And it was a buzz saw of activity, learning how the whole newscast comes together.

Watching that as a young person and getting it made me a much better reporter.

I understood all the things that have to work together to make it, it go off flawlessly.

- I chose TV over newspapers because I wanted to be out and about and meet people, shake their hands and look 'em in the eye and interview them because you can't just do it by phone.

But back then you had to go where they were.

And that to me was way more appealing than, yes, I miss it because it's a drug.

- In that environment, you really have to love the hunt.

It's about the hunt, it's about getting the top story of the day.

It's about making sure you get that story and your competition doesn't.

- With all this competition, some journalists went above and beyond in a constant fight for the top.

- Channel 12 was a monster, and their newscast would come on at seven o'clock and they just owned that time period.

I mean, they just absolutely owned it.

If you took all of their news numbers, the other two stations, which was Channel 35 and WJET, they just never came close to that.

- Hyle Richmond was on the air when I was like in fourth or fifth grade.

We became, you know, good friends.

- Vance McBryde doing the weather.

Shirley Ramsey doing the weather.

Ned McGrath.

- Mike Ruzzi, and Paul Wagner.

Man it, you know, iconic.

- I worked with Evan Lovett and Frank Rizzone, young reporters who I, I learned from.

- People like Lisa Adams.

They're just terrific reporters.

- This may go down in history as the election day when the voting booths were as empty as the saloons.

The saloons, you know, are closed on election day, probably to guarantee that the tipplers get out and vote.

And then on Wednesday, all can breathe a boozy sigh of relief that they won't have to go through it again until next spring.

- WJET started doing newscasts in the late 1960s and they brought a guy from the newspaper, Bob Sutherland up here, but they were never able to capture any numbers.

- TV news came along and they basically read the stories that were in the newspaper.

Radio news at that time, you would hear them rattling the pages of the newspaper when they, when they read the, the stories on, on the air.

So that was much different.

And it was before broadcast journalism really became, came into its own.

- And then WICU did something that I've never seen in broadcasting before.

They had a lot of veteran anchors on the air and reporters and they let them go.

WJET, very quickly in the mid 1980s, started to win the numbers at, at six o'clock.

And then we hired Eric Johnson, probably the best newsman in Erie.

- We all owe such a debt to everyone that really got this station off the ground.

Don Shriver and, and Joey Stevens and John Evans and the people behind the scenes.

You know, I think of director Ron Nuara and John Kanzius was running Jet Broadcasting on a daily basis.

- By 1995, in the rating books, you could add up all the news numbers on WSEE and on WICU and they never came close to what WJET had.

It just became a dominant news organization, - Don Shriver and you make Action News 24, number one.

I mean, it was appointment viewing for news.

- You didn't have a lot of options.

You know, some of the stuff, there wasn't the morning news.

There wasn't the glut of information that you have today.

It was whatever came on at six o'clock and we were always in front of that TV to watch it.

- It was much more competitive when I was a younger reporter, I mean, there was a morning paper and afternoon paper, there were more television stations that weren't all under the same ownership.

More radio stations that did radio news too.

- Were you beaten?

You know, and if you were, how do you fix that?

- I got all the names I worked with.

I looked at it the other day and it's over 140.

Our thing was trying to beat the other, the other stations, beat the competition.

- One of the people that I watched every night was Carol Pella.

As far as I'm concerned, Carol was the standard in reporting in the TV reporting in this town.

- Carol Pella.

I mean, she was a big to do, and I know she was with a competition, but she was, she was hardcore and we were always looking to beat car - Print-trained journalist from Penn State, and she became one of the best journalists that I ever saw, had some of the greatest sources that I ever saw.

And instead of them playing, you know, catch up with me, I found myself playing catch up with them.

So that's when broadcast journalism and started to get really good.

- If something wasn't right or fair and Carol Pella was in the room and I was in the room, she'd ask a question.

I'd ask a question.

Cyndy Patton would ask a question.

I mean, we kind of would gang up to get at a kernel of what's really true here, what's really going on.

- What's a great part of the news media responsibility?

Watchdog, and what's the watchdog for?

The watchdog has to be the public's interest.

It has to be the public's money, follow it, understand it, expose embezzlement, and it has to really be the public's greatest ally.

- It's a very much a bittersweet day because I'm doing what good business and, and prudence dictates to do.

And yet I'm, I'm, I'm naturally hesitant about doing it.

- Outside interests started to take over Erie's, venerable media families.

WSEE was bought from the Meads in 1978 by Gillett Broadcasting.

Lily Broadcasting purchased WICU from the Lamb family in 1996.

Nexstar bought WJET in 1998, acquiring the Fox affiliation in the process.

Few of these corporate investors maintained the historical public allyship of local media.

- You're not a number here.

You're not a number.

I think that's probably the biggest thing that I can say is you're just not a number.

And I walked into this place and I think a little bit of it reminded me of what journalism kind of used to be like when you walked into a station.

It had such an old school feel.

And I thought, there can't be people who still do it this way.

And it starts at the top.

It starts with Brian Lilly, it starts with our CEO John Christensen.

And it's a great partnership where you work with them and they believe in that too.

They're good to the people that work for them, especially the people that they have that type of tenure.

They get that.

I've worked for some of the other bigger companies.

This isn't saying that they're bad.

This is just different.

This is just different, you know, I think, huh, maybe it's a golf analogy, where you're playing more of the long game down the road.

- When you think about the status of ownership, okay, of media outlets, their bottom line is to pay their shareholders.

They are going to find savings wherever they can find it.

They are going to get rid of people who make more money than somebody else.

They're going to hire at the lowest level possible to get the job done.

It's the same old story.

- I was working as the marketing director at WJET and it was, it was a, it was a very rewarding job and I loved it.

And it was also the job that I thought that I would retire from.

But the station was sold in 1995.

The FCC lightened the rules on how many stations a single company could own in one market.

And the station was sold to a startup called Nexstar that eventually became an enormous company.

- We didn't know what Nexstar was going to bring.

And we were used to this homey, more family oriented kind of thing.

The wall between the advertising department, the sales department, the front office, and the newsroom, it needs to be strong.

And again, and I know the stations need money, right?

The, the newscasts cost money, but you're gambling with the credibility of that news department by doing that.

- I could speak more to newspapers than any other media, but the newspapers were always a profit-making enterprise.

There was always tension between the business side and the editorial sides of newspapers.

And fortunately in, in my career with, in Erie, with the Mead family, there wasn't pressure that, oh, let's do a story on this advertiser, or let's be kind to this person, or let's be extra mean to that person, or didn't pay his bill.

What's happened?

The chain businesses, yes, they, they are for profit.

It actually could be worse.

The group that the Times was sold to, Gatehouse, they were probably a little bit more mercenary than Gannett who they merged with in 2021.

- Erie was always a really good newspaper town.

Gannett has basically gutted the local reporting.

The guys and gals that are still there, they're amazing people and they're my friends.

They do yeoman's work, - My colleagues who are still working there, they're really working hard to get stuff done.

It's just that the staff is probably about one fourth of what it was when the Erie Times News was, was at its height and winning Pennsylvania Newspaper of the Year Awards three different times.

What do you do when there's fewer bodies?

- It's just a shadow of what it used to be.

And it's heartbreaking to me.

So that's one of the issues, is that they just don't have the manpower.

They do enterprise reporting and still every week you're gonna learn something by reading the newspaper.

Okay?

Meanwhile, they basically have eliminated their columns.

And so again, being that historian, you used to be able to read one, two, three local columns a day in the newspaper, if you go back 60, 70 years.

- You know, not having that editorial voice, and as long as they were expressed as an editorial, as long as they were identified as an editorial, not as news, that was what, what was very important.

That's just another strike.

It's just another black mark again, in the community that it used to, that's, that's diminishing.

And I'm, I'm sorry about that because I remember how it used to be.

- But it gets back to those connections.

When people saw somebody's picture of the paper, there was a value in that.

And then people would say, I know that person.

I can contact that person.

I might have a news tip, I might have heard something that I'd like to have them check out.

And I think, I think that we've lost that.

And you need to educate citizens about what Pennsylvania's "Right to Know" law involves.

If you don't get the information you need, who do you go to?

- There's a big danger if we let local media die, because who is going to cover these stories of, of your community?

- Well, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania was once a hub of manufacturing, but after years of plant closures and layoffs, the city's become a shell of its former self - Is Erie County, as the swingiest county in the most important swing state of this campaign?

There's no question.

- Erie Pennsylvania is close to my hometown.

It, it's no longer the transportation hub.

It was when we had the Erie Canal and, and water transportation as an central... - Erie is definitely second ship, and... - If it's just somebody who's, you know, drive-by storytelling, it's, it's going to be surface level.

And we're not gonna get the details of important stories for us to, to know what's really going on in our community.

Local news is the last bastion of people's trust.

- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, the Regional Science Consortium, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

- We question and learn.