CBS News Detroit to debut 2 local weeknight newscasts, with plans for more

• A little more than a year after announcing plans to get back into TV news, the Motor City's CBS station is rolling out broadcasts with a new strategy.

A year and one month after announcing plans to become a major player in local TV news, Detroit’s CBS station is ready to roll out two newscasts.

Starting Monday, CBS News Detroit — as the WWJ-TV (Channel 62) team is branded — will be airing half-hour newscasts at 6 and 11 p.m. on weeknights and simulcasting them online.

The anchor team will include news anchors Jeff Skversky and Shaina Humphries and sports anchor Ronnie Duncan, all three of whom previously worked in local news in Philadelphia, and a metro Detroiter, meteorologist Ahmad Bajjey, who grew up in Dearborn and previously was on the air in Flint and Saginaw.

Mostly missing from the local news scene for more than 25 years, CBS News Detroit says it will use strategies that are different from those of the Motor City market’s current big three: Fox 2 News (WJBK-TV, Channel 2), Local 4 News (WDIV-TV, Channel 4) and 7 Action News (WXYZ-TV, Channel 7).

What will be new about this news? The station says it will embed reporters in communities throughout metro Detroit and in Lansing, the state's capital, to delve deeper into what’s happening at a hyper-local level.

”Detroit news viewers are very loyal. They’re very intense. They like who they like and they stick with them. What’s going to stand out about us is that community aspect and the people who are there in that area, working for (the communities) every day,” says Amyre Makupson, executive producer of community impact for CBS News Detroit. “That’s going to create those relationships and … create the loyalty that Detroit viewers have.”

And Makupson knows something about loyalty, particularly because her mother is a popular Detroit broadcast legend also named Amyre Makupson. Although the senior Makupson ended her long run as a WKBD-TV (Channel 50) anchor in 2002, her daughter says she still gets recognized by fans every time she goes out of the house.

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Also different at CBS News Detroit is the decision to have a streaming-first mentality. As Brian Watson, president and general manager of CBS Detroit (and its sister station, WKBD, now better known as CW50) said in a pre-launch memo to staffers: "We always say we’re a streaming news organization that also happens to broadcast, providing viewers constant news, weather, sports and other relevant information whenever and wherever they watch. We’re there for them when they need us."

One more way to stand out from the crowd? The station is choosing to do its news broadcasts not from an isolated set, but from what Watson describes to the Free Press as “a live, hot-mics, red-lighted newsroom.”

Says Watson: “It’s a working newsroom, meaning everybody, except for the control room, is in this one room. … We wanted to convey the sense of authenticity of the news happening at the moment, that this isn’t getting prepackaged and produced down the hall.”

Back when it was located on the dial at WJBK-TV (Channel 2), Detroit's CBS affiliate was a force in local news with iconic on-air teams like Jac LeGoff and John Kelly in the 1960s and, later, Joe Glover and Beverly Payne in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, however, WJBK became Detroit’s Fox affiliate and CBS wound up buying Detroit's WGPR-TV (Channel 62), the first Black-owned television station in the nation.

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After officially becoming a CBS-owned station in 1995, the renamed WWJ-TV got out of the news business, except for a few limited forays. It had an 11 p.m. newscast in the early 2000s that was produced by WKBD. There also was an early morning newscast from 2009 to 2012 done in collaboration with the Detroit Free Press and WWJ Radio

In December 2021, CBS Detroit News outlined an ambitious plan to stream local news 24 hours, seven days a week and also to air live TV newscasts in morning, midday, evening and late-night time slots. During the initial rollout, the CBS News Detroit website will be showing the national CBS News streaming channel when it’s not simulcasting the two local weeknight news shows.

In coming weeks, the weeknight newscasts are expected to expand to weekends and be joined by daytime newscasts. Eventually, in addition to the 24/7 news streaming, the plan is to have 40 hours of live news broadcasts each week.

Over the past year, the station's executives essentially have created a news department from scratch and assembled a team that, without giving an exact number, they say is comparable in size to others in the market.

There are 21 on-air news staffers pictured on the CBS Detroit website, many with Detroit or Michigan ties. Regular Channel 62 viewers may be most familiar with Carol Cain, the host of Sunday morning’s “Michigan Matters” public affairs program (she’s also a Free Press columnist) and Karen Carter, who has been doing the station’s Next Weather updates.

Among the newcomers are:

• Reporter Cryss Walker, a Cass Tech High and Wayne State alum who was born and raised in Detroit and started her TV news in Lansing before joining CW50's 10 p.m. newscast in 2020.
• Gino Vicci, another Detroiter who previously worked as an associate producer at Local 4 News, a reporter-anchor at WNEM-TV in the Flint-Saginaw market and a reporter on the air at 7 Action News.
• Anchor-reporter Terrell Bailey, who's from Virginia and was a morning anchor in Macon, Georgia.
• AJ Walker, who hails from Lansing and most recently was with the CBS News Network as a documentary producer.
• Leading the coverage will be news director Paul Pytlowany, a Detroit TV veteran who has been both WWJ and WKBD’s director of local production and community affairs since 2017.

The station set out to hire what it calls multiskilled journalists, a requirement that has become increasingly common across the news media landscape. Watson says most of the staffers can write, edit and shoot for TV news, depending on the timing and specifics of their assignments.

But Watson thinks the community embedding is what really distinguishes the station’s approach from the competition. With embedding, “it’s not a different reporter showing up only when something bad happens, the carousel of different people that they’ll send in to report on negative news. Because we’re always there, we’re the ones that will be able to establish relationships on a one-to-one basis with the civic leaders, the community leaders, the neighborood leaders.”

The embedding process is in keeping with CBS News Detroit’s coverage style, according to CBS Stations president Adrienne Roark. “We don’t follow the model of it bleeds, it leads,” Roark says. “Our journalism is truly community focused and driven and often solutions oriented. … We’re going to do something that’s more impactful and meaningful to our community.”

 Watson says CBS News Detroit is targeting viewers who aren’t being fulfilled by what’s available to them currently. The task now is reaching those viewers and retaining them.

Makupson is confident that people will like the station’s news team once they get to know its members. ”People love who they love. We’ve got some lovable ones.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.