Less than two years after she joined Channel 6, reporter Sarah Platt has left the Fox affiliate for a job as a communications specialist for Time Warner Cable in Milwaukee.
People come and go all the time from Milwaukee TV, but what's unusual here is that Platt's departure comes before the end of the usual three-year contract.
It's clear that Platt left on her own, rather than being shown the door.
Time Warner reports that she'll be working on internal communications strategies to reach the cable giant's 2,100 employees in eastern Wisconsin, and will be involved in outreach to media outlets in the Milwaukee and Green Bay markets.
A Marquette University grad and a native of the Chicago area, Platt joined the Channel 6 news team in July 2009. Most recently, she was the live reporter for the morning news show that airs from 4:30 to 9 a.m. weekdays. She'd previously been an anchor reporter at WNDU-TV in South Bend, Ind., and had been a reporter in La Crosse.
Here's a sample of Platt's on-air reporting for Channel 6:
On TV: The overnights from Nielsen Media Research show the best Grammy Awards audience in 10 years, with CBS reporting more than 26.6 million viewers.
- The Milwaukee Jewish Day School is holding a fundraiser with "Dancing with the Stars" performers include Edyta Sliwinska and her husband, Alec Mazo, and the show's choreographer, Christian Perry. It's scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on March 10 at Hilton Milwaukee City Center. Ticket information and other details are available at the event website.
- Oprah Winfrey has lined up Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick, which will air Thursday at 4 p.m. on Channel 12.
- IFC has ordered a second season of Fred Armisen's "Portlandia."
- Stephen Spielberg is making a pilot for musical drama called "Smash" for NBC, about the maing of a Broadway musical. American Idol veteran Katharine McPhee is the latest to sign on. Debra Messing has already been cast as a lyricist.
- David Muir has been named solo anchor of the weekend editions of ABC's "World News."
- TMZ reports that of the eight scheduled "Two and a Half Men" episodes still to be filmed this for this season, four have been cut. The scaling back of the season is thanks to Charlie Sheen's rehab. Sheen called Dan Patrick's radio show and complained that he wasn't being allowed to go back to work.
- Roseanne Barr is getting a Lifetime "reality" show following her current persona as the owner of a farm in Hawaii. It's a nut farm -- a Macadamia nut farm.
Joe's "Aha Moment": Milwaukee "rock and roll guru" Joe Heuer's "Aha Moment" commercial for Mutual of Omaha debuts Wednesday between 8 and 8:30 on Channel 12, during ABC's "Modern Family."
Heuer reports that the 30-second spot -- part of a campaign by the insurance company -- was boiled down from a 12- to 15-minute session.
"I thought they captured my essence very well," he tells me. "This is not my gig -- this is who I am."
Heuer notes that this is his first national TV exposure. "It's the first time I've been recognized nationally as the rock and roll guru."
Heuer is a speaker and author. Among his books: "Business Daffynitions" to "The Rock and Roll Guide to Customer Loyalty."
Here's the spot:
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.
