John Jagler gave a good clue Friday of a big change coming when he changed his Twitter handle from @wtmjohn to @johnjagler, and he confirms this morning that he's leaving WTMJ-AM (620) after a decade and a half.
Jagler is signing off this coming Friday from "Wisconsin's Morning News," as the 5 to 8:30 a.m. show is called.
Word is that his morning show duties were being changed so that he was more a news reader than a co-host, and that he decided to leave and pursue other options.
There's also talk that he has a job lined up in Madison.
Jagler's not talking about any of that. But he did confirm his imminent departure.
"I'm open to opportunities outside the business," Jagler tells me. But radio is his love, and he wants to stay in front of the microphone.
"Provided I can do the kind of radio that I want to listen to -- and that's personality-driven. There's so many opportunities and availability to get info -- it always meant so much that people came to us to get it."
The 41-year-old Jagler has been doing mornings for 10 years, and has been at WTMJ for over 15 years. He's enjoyed his pairing with Gene Mueller, which he says is the kind of "personality-driven" radio that he's talking about.
"That kind of radio may be gone forever," he says, citing the change to portable people meters in measuring radio ratings. In the information format, the model is less personality and more dry news reading.
As for the effect of the change on his life, Jagler says, "It's going to be good for my health, not getting up at 1 a.m."
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
