WTAE weekend morning anchor Chris Lovingood will leave the station at the end of July after three years with the ABC subsidiary.
Lovingood joined WTAE in 2018 from a position in Fort Myers, Florida.
In a Facebook post, Lovingood said he would be joining WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC
“They have a great team down there and it rightly feels like a dream to be able to say that I will be with them,” he wrote. “This respected station does fantastic journalism and storytelling and I am eager to go there in August.”
He described his first six months at WTAE as “some of the most intense ones of my career and I stumbled quietly away but stayed because I wanted to tell stories from our local communities – * your * stories”.
In a telephone interview on Monday, Lovingood said at the beginning of his work at WTAE that he had reported on the shooting protests of Antwon Rose II, a train derailment and the shootings in the Tree of Life synagogue.
“It was a big market, I really had to prove myself here and I like to think that I rolled with the blows, but emotionally, especially when talking to family members who were affected by the shooting in the synagogue, it was a lot”, said Lovingood. “After the synagogue shooting, I had to call families and confirm that their loved ones were there. These are real people; it’s not just numbers and names. ”
Lovingood said WTAE has been a great place to work for him, but he couldn’t miss the opportunity offered by WRAL, where he will work a Monday-Friday shift and report first before finally standing behind the anchor desk .
“It’s known, it’s respected, it’s like being called to the majors,” said Lovingood. “I can’t miss that.”
Another Mister Rogers statue
After sculptures on the North Shore and in his hometown of Latrobe, it appeared that the next statue of the late PBS children’s show host Fred Rogers would be erected at his alma mater, Rollins College in Florida, this summer and inaugurated this fall.
But another statue of Mister Rogers crept in front of the Rollins play. A statue of Mister Rogers was unveiled on June 22nd in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Rogers owned a summer home.
Michelle Keeler never met Fred Rogers, but other members of her family did.
“Nantucketers love to tell about their Fred encounters on the island,” she says. “He was just a normal guy who went to restaurants and stuff. He loved how he escaped the television world by coming to Nantucket. ”
Keeler began raising funds for the sculpture in 2018 after watching a Mister Rogers documentary while her father died of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I’m not sure if I was called from above to be an ambassador for what Fred believed in or if it was a gentle nudge from my father to do something that would make everyone smile,” said Keeler at the unveiling on the 22nd of Fred and Joanne Rogers’ son John. “Most likely it was a combination of both that drove me to such a wonderful project.”
The statue was one of the last works by artist Seward Johnson, who completed work on the clay bust used to cast the statue’s head in September 2019 before his death in March 2020. (Seward’s art team at the Seward Johnson Atelier completed the statue to Johnson’s specifications, Keeler said.) Johnson is best known for hyper-realistic sculpture, including a replica of the famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse at the end of World War II.
Keeler said the Mister Rogers statue cost $ 140,000, with more than $ 100,000 raised at a party hosted by Wendy Schmidt, the wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in August 2019. The statue is located in Dreamland, a theater and cultural center in Nantucket.
Emmy love for “Odd Squad”
On Friday, PBS’s Odd Squad, produced by Pittsburgh-based Fred Rogers Productions, won two of the three Daytime Emmy Awards for which it was nominated in the lighting design categories (ahead of Sesame Street, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and The Talk “) And art direction / set decoration / scenic design (before HBO Max’s” Craftopia “,” The Kelly Clarkson Show “, Netflix’s” The New Legends of Money “and National Geographic Kids'” Weird But True “).
On Monday, Fred Rogers Productions’ shows received additional nominations for the Children & Animation and Lifestyle categories of the 48th Daytime Emmy Awards. “Odd Squad” was nominated for an outstanding preschool, children’s or family program.
“Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” executive producer of Mt. Lebanese Dave Filoni received nominations for an outstanding team of authors for an animated program, outstanding musical genre and composition, and sound mixing / editing.
The winners of the Daytime Emmy Awards Children & Animation and Lifestyle will be announced in live streaming events on July 17th and 18th on theemmys.tv.
Film tax credit
In March, Senator Camera Bartolotta (R-Washington) passed a bill to raise the Pennsylvania film tax credit cap from $ 70 million to $ 125 million annually, but Pennsylvania lawmakers did not include that expansion in the budget of the Commonwealth 2021-22 and included the incentive program at. leave the current level of $ 70 million.
You can reach television writer Rob Owen at rowen@triblive.com or 412-380-8559. Follow Rob on Twitter or Facebook. Ask TV questions by email or phone. Please enter your first name and your place of residence.
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