Edwards, Other News Staffers Out at WQOW
award-winning anchor apparent victim of ‘cost-cutting measures’
Tom Giffey, photos by Andrea Paulseth |
One of the Chippewa Valley’s longest-serving and most-honored broadcast news anchors is apparently off the air.
Keith Edwards, who has been a staple of the local airwaves since 1981 – most recently as the 5, 6, and 10pm anchor at WQOW News 18 – is one of a number of staff members who vanished from the station this week.
As recently as Monday, Edwards was reporting the news on the local ABC affiliate, but as of Wednesday his biography was absent from the website of the station, where he has worked for more than a decade.
WQOW News Director Kristen Shill directed inquiries about staff changes to the station’s general manager, Anna Engelhart, who did not respond to an email from Volume One.
Before his television career, Edwards – a Chi-Hi graduate – worked as a reporter, anchor, and news director, first at WAXX-WAYY radio in Eau Claire and later at B-95/Moose Country/Z-100/Rock 92.1. Since joining WQOW, Edwards has been voted the No. 1 Best News Writer in the Chippewa Valley three times and the No. 1 Best TV News Anchor twice in Volume One’s Best of the Chippewa Valley Reader Poll.
As of Wednesday, the webpage with biographies of WQOW staffers been scrubbed of nearly half a dozen staff members. In addition to Edwards, they included news team members Katrina Lim and Caitlin Boyle, sports anchor Breanna Reinhart, and production team member and Dayton Feldt.
WQOW and its La Crosse-based sister-station WXOW have been owned since 2021 by Allen Media Group, which purchased them from Gray Television. (Earlier that year, Gray, which already owned Eau Claire’s WEAU-TV, bought WQOW’s former owner, Quincy Media, and had to sell the smaller stations because of Federal Communications Commission rules.)
Allen Media Group, which was founded by businessman and entertainer Byron Allen and owns 36 broadcast TV stations, has reportedly fallen on financial difficulty recently. According to a Nov. 25 Deadline.com report, Allen Media Group was undertaking “extensive cost-cutting measures” by shuttering a number of media holdings, such as The Weather Channel en Español. The company also went through rounds of layoffs in October and May.
Edwards’ departure was met with ire on local social media. “Unfortunate news in local media as we’ve learned of a massive round of layoffs impacting WQOW,” Eau Claire Hometown Media posted on Facebook. “Allen Media Group, which has been laying off staff nationwide for months, has decided to consolidate Wisconsin much of their operations at their Wausau, La Crosse and Eau Claire ABC stations to Madison. Many in the community began to notice formatting changes last week before significant on-air differences started to appear this week. Locally a number of individuals have been let go including both behind the scenes and on-air talent. We send our best to these individuals while simultaneously hoping a reversal is made at some point to invest BACK into our area's media.”
Former WQOW anchor Evan Hong wrote on Facebook that he was “crushed” by the news. “Now, some of the faces who have brought us the news for years and years are out of work and we're seeing new faces on our screens from a city that is 175 miles away,” he wrote. “The viewers do not want to see Madison anchors, they want to see the faces that live and breathe the Chippewa Valley. It's extremely disappointing that Allen Media Group is going in this direction, and it's evident that many of the viewers agree.”
In evident reflection of the shift in WQOW’s coverage, one change was visible Wednesday on its website: The slogan “Eau Claire’s Own” has been replaced by the more generic “We’ve Got You Covered.”
Editor’s note: WQOW production supervisor Andler Sekel recently departed the station for a different job. The original version of this article implied she was part of a recent round of layoffs.
