TV Talk: Where are these former Pittsburgh TV news personalities now?
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Every now and then I like to check in with TV news folks who were once mainstays on local newscasts. This time I caught up with Jim Lokay, Sheila Hyland and Ellen Gamble.
Jim Lokay
A 1998 East Allegheny High School grad, Jim Lokay worked at KDKA-TV from 2005-11 as the station’s first in-studio, on-air morning news traffic reporter. He later covered the transportation beat, subbed as a morning fill-in anchor and turned in consumer stories for evening newscasts.
“I wanted to work there and had no inclination to say, ‘This is just a stepping stone,’” Lokay said of KDKA. “I got to the end of my time there where I was still doing the traffic thing in addition to other assignments and I didn’t want to do that anymore. We had an opening for weekend anchor and they had passed me over for that.”
He left KDKA to join WCVB-TV, the Hearst-owned station in Boston where he worked as a weekend morning news anchor and weekday breaking news anchor. (Hearst also owns Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV.)
“The summer I left KDKA I’d been [substitute] anchoring the morning news and our ratings went up and I got a call from Hearst saying, ‘You guys are really sticking it to WTAE, would you be interested in coming and working for us?’” Lokay recalled. “I had a contract up, so I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
In 2015 Lokay took a job at WTTG-TV, the Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C., as a weekend sports anchor. When news anchor vacancies developed, Lokay worked more in that capacity, eventually becoming a news anchor of the station’s 5 and flagship 10 p.m. newscasts. (The Western Pennsylvania diaspora is strong at WTTG and includes former WPXI reporter Steve Chenevy and former WTAE reporter David Kaplan.)
Lokay moderates a 7 p.m. weeknight pop culture panel show, “Like It or Not” (think: “The View’s” hot topics).
“It’s the highlight of my day,” he said. “It’s one of those things that I wasn’t sure if I was gonna be a good fit for and then when I did it, it made sense.”
It’s the one show Lokay’s mother in Western Pennsylvania consistently watches through the Fox Local app: “I get a deep debrief from her every night at 7:40 about what she liked on the show what she didn’t like.”
Lokay also hosts WTTG’s “The Final 5” (11:30 p.m. weeknights), a rundown of the top political news stories of the day with interview segments and an opportunity for Lokay to deliver a commentary at the end of each broadcast.
The WTTG job also puts Lokay closer to home. He often makes the three-and-a-half-hour drive back to Pittsburgh on weekends.
Sheila Hyland
Unlike the current arrangement where WPXI-TV produces a 10 p.m. newscast for WPGH-TV, from 1997-2006 Channel 53 fielded its own upstart newscast, a scrappy underdog that punched above its weight thanks to news director John Poister and a talented on-air staff led by anchor Sheila Hyland, previously a weekend anchor on WTAE from 1988-98.
Comcast subscribers can still see Hyland as an anchor on the regional edition of “Comcast Newsmakers.” She left WPGH when the station’s news department was dissolved and aside from a short stint as a fill-in anchor on KDKA-TV, Hyland’s primary work has been behind the scenes.
“I was offered a job [at KDKA] but at the time my kids were school-age and the hours weren’t working for me,” she said. “I would have liked to have stayed in television but after 22 years, it was time to move on.”
In 2006 she joined with Debbie Foster, former senior vice president of media relations at Heinz Corp., to launch FosterHyland & Associates, a media training company. Foster died of breast cancer in 2013 but Hyland retains Foster’s name on the company.
“She had done global media training at Heinz and all their crisis communications so she really taught me a lot,” said Hyland.
What is media training?
“We help people with what to say and what not to say if they’re interviewed by any form of media, so mostly executives who can be with for-profit or nonprofit companies,” Hyland said. “We even media-trained the Steelers rookies at one point.”
Hyland has since added executive coaching, which is “more about image and presentation, coaching interoffice communications. How to negotiate. How to persuade. And I also coach some TV talent as well.”
Ellen Gamble
Like Lokay, Ellen Gamble was her station’s first in-studio traffic anchor during her 1998-2004 stint at WTAE-TV. She’s still doing some work in media, occasionally showing up as a fill-in traffic reporter on KDKA-AM.
A York, Pa., native, Gamble came to Pittsburgh to study broadcast journalism at then-Point Park College and never left. Her first job out of college was reporting airborne traffic for Metro Traffic, assigned to KDKA-AM. Later she was morning show news director on WDSY-FM before joining WTAE where she ended up working shifts as a reporter and weekend morning anchor in addition to her weekday morning traffic duties.
“It was Jerry Martz and for a time even Stephen Cropper doing the weather and they would be in front of the green screen and they’d step out one side and I’d step in front from the other side because we did weather and traffic together,” Gamble recalled.
She left WTAE to work in communications and fundraising for several Pittsburgh non-profits, including the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh.
In addition to working part-time for a physician’s practice within Allegheny Health Network, Gamble keeps busy with her four grandchildren under the age of 6 and does that fill-in traffic work for KDKA-AM.
“It makes you chuckle how life can be full circle and how things come back around,” Gamble said. “There’s so much turnover and so much churn in the broadcast business, so I’m always very humbled and amazed when people will comment about my time on radio or on Channel 4. After all this time that people still remember, that’s always very meaningful.”