Weathercaster Bart Adrian will be leaving Channel 6 at the end of August in what news director Jim Lemon described as a "mutual decision."
Adrian joined Channel 6 on June 22, 1982 -- just four months after lead forecaster Vince Condella started there.
While no specifics were given for the departure -- Adrian's not saying anything right now -- Lemon was full of praise for the veteran.
"For us, it's been the benefit of having a really solid team," Lemon said. He also praised Adrian for his community work, including a tradition of bringing Cub Scout groups into the station on weekends to tour the operation.
"There are generations of young people who came through and got a taste of a TV station because they were part of a cub scout group who came through on a tour group led by Bart Adrian," Lemon said.
Adrian's position will be filled, but Lemon said, "we will never find anybody to replace him."
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.
