Easing into the morning
TV | WCIU quietly starts new show with unusual format
'You & Me This Morning" launched quietly on Monday on Weigel Broadcasting's WCIU-Channel 26. And that's just the way Weigel Executive Vice President Neal Sabin wanted it -- until the staff attached to this attempt at crafting an innovative local morning show has a chance to work out some of the inevitable start-up kinks.
"We're not perfect yet," said Sabin, adding "we're a work in progress that's exploring new ways of doing content."
One thing can be said with certainty about "You & Me This Morning." It is indeed like no other morning show produced by other local TV outlets. Rather than running continuously between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. each weekday, "You & Me" airs in segments of between four and 11 minutes over the course of the allotted three hours, which also will be filled with the mix of syndicated programming that usually airs mornings on WCIU.
Each "You & Me" segment contains a mix of short feature pieces, along with news and weather. The feature content will include bits such as "Living Lux on a Budget with Jetta Bates," "Daily Horoscopes with Christopher Witecki," "The Manny Diaries with Bob Wiltfong" and "The Weekender with Jason Heidemann."
Jeanne Sparrow, formerly of NBC-owned WMAQ-Channel 5, is the morning show's host and the connective tissue that will bind together the various components. News headlines will be pulled from the Sun-Times' wire service, STNGWire, and CNN. Sabin also hopes to sell up to three minutes of ad time during each segment, depending on how long it runs.
Unlike most local stations, which have been busy jettisoning staff in months, Sabin actually has been hiring. He's brought in nearly a dozen full-time staff to work on producing "You & Me" behind the scenes, including Dick Tracy, a former DDB/Chicago creative who is now Weigel's director of content. That's in addition to the free-lance talent that appear on air on "You & Me."
Is there a possibility "You & Me This Morning" could take off and expand to fill all three morning hours? Sabin doesn't rule it out, but he emphasizes he isn't interested in replicating what happens on other morning shows. "We want to be credible, but we want to do it differently," Sabin said.
And in this instance, "different" means Sabin and Tracy haven't created their new morning show and its content just to fill air time. They also plan to post their original content on a new Web site set to launch in the near future and disseminate it via mobile devices.