Channel 4 was the winner in the 10 p.m. news race for the four-week July ratings sweeps that ended Wednesday night, averaging more than 80,000 southeast Wisconsin homes, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers.
That's up from some 67,000 homes in July 2009.
Also up in this ratings period was Channel 12, with 73,000 homes. The ABC station averaged nearly 59,000 homes in July 2009.
Channel 6 had 51,000 homes, down from July 2009's 54,000 homes. Channel 58's late news pulled in 34,000 viewers, down from July 2009's 41,000 homes.
Historically, the July ratings period is the least important of four "sweeps" months, because the network invests less in in new programming during the summer.
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.
