Departed KCBS Anchor Rico Gives Her Side
In an open letter to viewers, former KCBS Los Angeles morning anchor Suzanne Rico gives her perspective on being “fired” from the CBS O&O.
Anchors all over the country are being pushed to do more reporting instead of merely reading the Teleprompter. Rico says she was eager to make a bigger contribution to the CBS O&O’s news product, and to make a break from mornings.
She wrote:
When the management changed at Channel 2 at the end of last year, I believed there was an opportunity for positive change. My desire to be more involved in our news product, coupled with my exhaustion from a grueling 3 a.m. schedule over the last 8 years, led me to ask for a move off of mornings to a role that would allow me to contribute better to both my work and my family, including two small children. I knew that such a request might opt me right out of a job, and indeed, I did end up catching the axe as it made its first wide swing through the CBS-2 newsroom on Friday, March 19th. There would be no positive change for me, at least in terms of my career with KCBS. Instead, I went from news anchor to news nobody in the three minutes it took for new News Director Scott Diener to fire me.
The most recent open letter from a miffed station staffer that comes to mind involved another L.A. station,as KTTV senior features editor Mark Sudock addressed none other than Rupert Murdoch in a September missive about the challenge of cranking out strong news product after heavy layoffs.
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Michael Malone, senior content producer at B+C/Multichannel News, covers network programming, including entertainment, news and sports on broadcast, cable and streaming; and local broadcast television. He hosts the podcasts Busted Pilot, about what’s new in television, and Series Business, a chat with the creator of a new program, and writes the column “The Watchman.” He joined B+C in 2005. His journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Playboy and New York magazine.