WFTC drops newscast at 10; KMSP adds it

After limping along with low ratings for more than three years, WFTC, Channel 29, will pull the plug on its 10 p.m. news June 30, the Fox-owned station confirmed Thursday.

Instead, sister station KMSP, Channel 9, will add a 10 p.m. newscast after its hour-long 9 p.m. news later this summer.

Anchors have not been announced, but Fox general manager Carol Rueppel said the show will not feature 9 p.m. anchors Robyne Robinson and Jeff Passolt, nor will it include WFTC's anchor team, Chris Conangla and Jordana Green, who will leave the station June 30.

"I can read the numbers as well as the next guy," said Conangla, who went through this before when he was demoted by KSTP, Channel 5, in 1999. "This decision had to do with the health of [Fox's] 10 o'clock news and where it would thrive better." He added that Fox had been "extremely generous and gracious about the whole thing."

Anchors aside, 23 staff positions from the WFTC news team will be transferred to KMSP, Rueppel said.

KMSP used to have a second newscast at 10 p.m. but dropped it in 2002. Since then, Rueppel said, it "has grown into a station that viewers now turn to for news at various times of the day. WFTC was hard to regard as a news station when it only aired a half-hour of news a day."

John Rash, director of broadcast negotiations at the Campbell Mithun ad agency in Minneapolis, said WFTC's news was largely a casualty of weak lead-in shows.

"It was already a challenge to move from UPN programming to syndicated programming to a newscast,"Rash said. "With [Channel 29] turning to an even younger audience when it launches MyNetworkTV programming later this year, it only would have exacerbated the difficulty" of finding viewers for that newscast.

Deborah Caulfield Rybak • 612-673-4996