The life of a TV news director is often a nomadic existence, moving from city to city in a business that's ever-changing, especially in the current media environment.

New WPXI news director Mike Goldrick, who began at the station on Dec. 2, approaches the prospect of a move as an entree to a new enterprise. His three children, ranging in age from 10 to 17, take the same perspective.

"They like the adventure of it, living in a new place and seeing how the world works in different places," Goldrick, 46, said this week. "Even for my son who's a junior, it's not the tragedy of tragedies that we're moving him in high school."

Until their house sells, Gold­rick's wife and children will remain in Rochester, N.Y., where he worked for three years as news director at NBC affiliate WHEC. That was his first job as a news director but he's been working in the broadcast news business since graduating in 1985 from the University of Florida (also WPXI anchor David Johnson's alma mater).

Growing up in Nutley, N.J., before moving to Delray Beach, Fla., as a high school sophomore, Goldrick said he didn't know early that TV news would be his career field of choice. He read newspapers and watched TV news to brush up on current events for his high school college bowl team but he entered college with plans to be an engineering major.

"I was a math and science guy. Then I took college calculus and decided I needed to reassess," he said, laughing. "I thought I'd wind up going to law school and decided to major in journalism, thinking it would be a cool major to get me prepared to go to law school."

That plan changed once he began taking journalism classes and working at the campus radio station.

"The thing I like about the TV business is how much you get to work as part of a team," Gold­rick said. "No newscast ever gets on the air with one person. It's always in concert with all these other folks, both technical and creative, who make it happen. That's what was fascinating to me."

His first job out of college was at a West Palm Beach TV station where he worked first on the studio floor crew, where he met his wife, Willa, before moving into the newsroom for a job on the assignment desk. Willa opted out of the TV business and went to a law school in Florida two hours from Goldrick's second job at a TV station in Tampa, where he first produced the noon news.

Then the moving began in earnest as Goldrick took a job in Detroit as a 5 p.m. producer at WDIV. Detroit was followed by stints at stations in Houston, Charlotte (at a Cox-owned station, like WPXI) and Seattle, where he was executive producer for four years before the move to Rochester. (His wife left the law profession to become a stay-at-home mom but has recently returned to school to study library science.)

"I was so glad I waited as long as I did [to become a news director]," Goldrick said. "A lot of people get on the fast track to becoming news director and do it in 10 years or less. It was more like 20 for me. I really felt like I was ready for the job on day one. I had so much experience and had encountered everything I thought I could encounter as a news director."

Goldrick was a known quantity to Channel 11 general manager Ray Carter because he'd interviewed for the managing editor job (AKA assistant news director) at WPXI eight years ago when Pat Maday was named news director. He didn't get the job then, but Goldrick said Carter approached him about the 2009 news director job opening to gauge his interest. Now its Goldrick's turn to hire someone for the station's now-vacant managing editor job.

So far what's striking to him about Pittsburgh is the competition, the willingness of station owners "to spend the money to get the job done" and the focus on local news.

"I'm kind of curious to see how traditional it is," Goldrick said. "There are things stations in other markets have moved away from because they couldn't afford it anymore and it wasn't what they thought people wanted. Sports is still huge here and in a lot of markets that's going away."

With fierce competition, Gold­rick has noted a monkey-see, monkey-do approach among Pittsburgh stations.

"Each station watches the other with a very, very close eye and it's hard for anybody to get an advantage on a story," Goldrick observed. "If we break something at 5, I can guarantee you you'll see it on the other guys at 6 or 11 at the latest. It's challenging to create some sort of understanding among our viewers -- and WTAE and KDKA have the same situation -- of any kind of ownership of a story. It starts to become critical that enterprise and investigative [reporting] has to become a real part of our mix."

To that end, Goldrick plans to fill at least three and possibly four open on-air positions in the next six months, including a consumer investigator, a position vacant since the departure of Becky Thompson two years ago. He's also keen to add a reporter dedicated to covering Westmoreland County.

At his Rochester station, Goldrick added a 7 p.m. local newscast, which he said did "OK" as a viewing alternative but faced the challenge of years of conditioning by viewers who expect syndicated fare ("Wheel or Fortune," "Entertainment Tonight") in the time period. He hasn't had a chance to assess whether a 7 p.m. local newscast on WPXI would make sense for this market.

Goldrick said Pittsburghers get more local news from newscasts than viewers in other TV markets where "staffing has gotten to the point that they don't have the bodies to fill all the local news."

He's a proponent of breaking news coverage, a Cox hallmark, but he said it has to be "meaningful."

"If there's a car accident where nobody gets hurt and it doesn't cause any traffic tie-ups, it doesn't necessarily qualify as breaking news," Goldrick said. "But obviously if you've got the L.A. Fitness [shooting] situation or the police officers shooting from earlier this year, that's what we're here for. People want to know and our job is to get the information out as quickly as we can."

So far he's done little tinkering to Channel 11's newscasts in large part because it's the time of year when staffers are on vacation.

"I will say I'm very comfortable with what I'm seeing so far," he said. "Cox has a reputation for doing a lot of research to get an understanding about what viewers want and executing a plan every day to try to accomplish those goals. We're close to being on track with a lot of stuff.

"We have to make sure we're doing what we need to do every day to deliver clean shows [free of technical glitches], breaking stories the other guys don't have and making sure every newscast is one viewers feel they can't afford to miss so they'll come back the next day to see what we come up with."

I put off attaching my Comcast digital adapters until Dec. 20. I didn't think it would be that time consuming but I should have known better.

We've previously reported on Comcast's plan to move many standard tier channels (e.g. TCM, TLC, FX, HGTV, History, TNT) to digital in the City of Pittsburgh on Jan. 26 as part of its "World of More" initiative. By the end of 2010, this process will have extended to all Western Pennsylvania Comcast cable systems. Customers can call 1-877-634-4434 or visit comcast.com/digitalnow to request the free equipment necessary to receive the migrating channels.

I requested and received my digital adapters more than a month ago and attaching them to two TVs was easy. The problems arose when I attempted to activate the devices online. After connecting the boxes, customers much register them at Comcast.com/digitalnow and when I attempted that, the Web site said it could not comply and I ended up waiting for 15 minutes in an online chat room.

Then I tried calling the 1-800 number provided in the installation guide. I got through to a real person pretty quickly. I could hear him tapping on a keyboard while I waited more than 30 minutes to get channels to show up on my TV sets. (When I first installed the boxes and turned them on there was a "We've detected an interruption in your service" message on screen, which seemed like an expected interim step in the installation process.)

Anyway, the thing to know is I planned about 20 minutes to install the digital adapters and it took almost an hour. Consider yourself warned.

As for the devices themselves, they seem to work fine. Setting the remote provided to operate my TV sets was easier than any past experience with programming a universal remote control. The only disappointment is that having the digital adapters limits the flexibility of recording. The digital adapter must be set to the channel you're watching, so you can't tape one channel on an attached VCR or DVD recorder while watching a different channel.

Also, due to the same issue of only being able to tune in one channel at a time, the picture-in-picture function on my one TV is now pretty much useless.

Comcast announced last week that Syfy, Syfy HD and Bravo will move down from the digital classic tier to the digital starter tier on Jan. 26 throughout its Western Pennsylvania systems. In the City of Pittsburgh, PBS Kids Sprout will follow a similar migration from the more expensive digital classic to less costly digital starter. Despite these moves between tiers, channel numbers will remain the same.

Kelly Frey returns to WTAE's morning newscasts from her maternity leave on Monday. ... New WPXI morning anchor Todd McDermott is expected to begin on the air sometime next week. ... PCNC will air live coverage of the inauguration of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl Monday at 2 p.m.

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TV Q&A takes the week off -- it's possibly suffering from a hangover -- but will return next Friday. Tuned In Journal includes posts about MTV's latest "Real World" set in Washington, D.C., and BBC America's "Demons." Read online TV coverage at post-gazette.com/tv.

In this week's Tuned In podcast, online features editor Sharon Eberson and I discuss advances in cable pay-per-view, the Top 10 TV shows of 2009 and the best of the past decade. Listen or subscribe at post-gazette.com/podcast.

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