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Thursday, July 18, 2002

Beginning Monday, KDKA-TV will air three hours of news each weekday afternoon/evening, and only a guaranteed three-and-a-half minutes of that will be sports.

Look at it another way. That's a maximum of 2 hours, 56 1/2 minutes nightly of everything but sports. Counting commercials.

What makes this move so surprising -- "you got to be kidding me," bellowed a sportscaster from a competing station -- is KDKA-TV's long-time commitment to sports. Anchors John Steigerwald and Bob Pompeani have been staples at Gateway One for a combined 3 1/2 decades. Their sportscasts usually received the longest time slots, the biggest budgets, the most figurative rope of any broadcast-news operation in this market. This, after all, is the Steelers station we're talking about.

Beginning Monday, the philosophy changes temporarily.

"We're going to consolidate our sports programming," said station news director Al Blinke. His station is cutting its normal newscast sports slot almost in half and altogether removing the regularly scheduled 6:25 p.m. sports installment. Instead, it will air those 3 1/2 minutes toward the end of its final hour of news, between 6:45-6:55 p.m.

Before I get on a rant, let's hear out Blinke.

"What you're going to find is, we're going to do more sports stories that will become stand-alone stories. Like in Steelers camp, we might have a couple of stand-alone stories throughout the news. The reality of it is, what we're trying to do now is treat sports more as news. There are so many sports channels out there that do hits, runs and errors. We want to do the stuff that transcends sports."

Interestingly, KDKA-TV's new world of sports, in that 6:45-6:55 p.m. block, will directly butt into the hits, runs and errors of Fox Sports Net's "SportsBeat." Blink in the face of competition, this news director doesn't. "Our sports guys are the best sports guys, anyway," Blinke said. "Too often, we look at sports and kind of pigeonhole it in a three-minute block. This is an opportunity for us to use it elsewhere." Plus, he said, the station generally attracts a larger viewing audience in the last half of its 6 p.m. newscast (by nearly 30,000 households one night this week).

He is issuing a challenge to his sports staff to think outside the old boob-tube box and conjure stories that demand newscast time. Even though the first of the three hours of news will be aimed at the female audience opposite Oprah Winfrey's show, KDKA-TV will use sports stories in that 4-5 p.m. broadcast if they merit airing, Blinke said.

If that notion plays out, then the station could conceivably devote as much airtime on sports as it does now and even more than most of its competitors. WTAE-TV gives 3:15 of its weeknight 90-minute newscasts to sports, WPXI-TV 2:30 and WPGH-TV -- which shows only a 10 p.m. news hour -- 6:30. Sports bulletins don't count toward any such totals, though: All stations burn extra minutes when there is breaking news in the realm of games.

Less usually doesn't mean better. Let's reserve final judgment until September, when the Steelers, college and high school football seasons fully get under way and deserve ye olde KDKA-TV treatment. We'll see then if the station airs more stand-alone sports stories. Or if it errs in games clock management

Credit-card charge cleared

Major League Baseball fessed up yesterday: The messed-up Bill Mazeroski moment was their its, not MasterCard's.

It was some MLB Productions types who put together the credit-card-sponsored pregame show at last week's All-Star Game on Fox. With MasterCard's logo in the screen's upper-right corner, the pregame festivities promoted the company's contest to pick the greatest moments in baseball history -- and Mazeroski's moment turned out to be the highlight of Hal Smith's Game 7 home run in the 1960 World Series.

"Obviously, the error was made, and we feel bad about it," Kathleen Fineout (no way could I make up that), manager of business public relations for MLB, said yesterday. "Somebody just pulled the wrong footage."

Of Edzo and Tony K

The New York Rangers' pocketbook cannot woo everyone. Apparently, color commentator Ed Olczyk, courted by the Rangers, is in the final stages of negotiations to remain with the local Fox Sports Net affiliate as a Penguins broadcaster.

The Mickey Mouse organization is at it again. ESPN Radio slapped a one-week suspension on midday sports-talk host Tony Kornheiser because of his impassioned defense of his fired producers -- among other barbs directed at Disney co-workers -- on the air and amid commercial-break repartee heard on the Internet. Wasn't this the company that chased away Tony Bruno and Keith Olbermann? And how come its network morality doesn't withstand such a test at its own local-radio level?

Kornheiser is scheduled to return to the air Monday.

You can reach Chuck Finder at cfinder@post-gazette.com