News Operation
Despite its newspaper roots, WMAR's newscasts have been in last place among Baltimore's "Big Three" network affiliates since the early 1960s, and the station has not been a significant factor in the news ratings in over 30 years. It lags behind both WBAL-TV and WJZ-TV in the ratings by a wide margin, and has even trailed WBFF in some timeslots. For the past decade, WMAR and WBFF have formed one tier of local newscast ratings—significantly lower than the tier that's occupied by WBAL and WJZ. As such, it is currently one of ABC's weakest affiliates, especially in a top-50 market. By contrast, WJZ-TV dominated the ratings in the Baltimore market when it was affiliated with ABC before it switched to CBS.
However, WMAR formerly boasted one of the most respected sports departments in the region, thanks in large part to the presence of longtime anchor and former Baltimore Ravens radio play-by-play announcer Scott Garceau. Garceau has since left to host a show on WJZ-FM and sports director Rob Carlin now works for MSG Network, meaning WMAR's newscasts no longer have a separate sports anchor. Despite this, the station lays claim to the market's most aggressive coverage of local college and high school lacrosse, arguably the most popular sport in the area among young athletes. WMAR works in partnership with ESPNU to produce the ABC 2 Lacrosse Game of the Week during the college season, featuring prime matchups involving one or more Maryland lacrosse powerhouses, including Johns Hopkins University, Loyola College in Maryland, Towson University, the University of Maryland, College Park, and the U.S. Naval Academy. Garceau continues to do play-by-play for the station's lacrosse telecasts. Quint Kessenich, four-time lacrosse All-American with Johns Hopkins, is a major contributor to lacrosse coverage and appears sporadically as a fill-in anchor, host of the station's Baltimore Blast show and field reporter for select Ravens games.
All WMAR newscasts as well as other WMAR produced programming are streamed live on the station's website. WMAR is also one of ten television stations that airs the "Don't Waste Your Money" series of consumer reports from John Matarese, based at sister station WCPO-TV in Cincinnati.
On October 4, 2010, WMAR-TV became the last station in the market and the last Scripps-owned station at the time to air newscasts in high definition (Scripps has since acquired the television station group of McGraw-Hill; of those stations, one of them still airs newscasts in pillarboxed 4:3 standard definition as of January 2012).
WMAR operates a 24-hour local weather channel known as ABC 2 WeatherNet Digital. It can be see via streaming live video on the station's website, over-the-air on WMAR-DT3, and on Comcast digital channel 204.
On April 18, 2011 WMAR became the first television station in Baltimore to expand its weekday morning newscast to the 4:30 a.m. timeslot.
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Famous quotes containing the words news and/or operation:
“To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail.”
—T.E. (Thomas Edward)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)