Jeff Hullinger gets late evening anchor spots on WATL-TV/WXIA-TV for February
By RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com, filed Feb. 1, 2011
Emmy-winning reporter Jeff Hullinger (right), who joined NBC affiliate WXIA-TV eight months ago as a reporter, will be working the anchor desk in late evenings for the month of February.
First, he'll anchor the 10 p.m. news on sister station WATL-TV, followed by 11 Alive with Brenda Wood at 11 p.m. Ted Hall, who joined the station five years ago from Knoxville, will continue to anchor the 6 p.m. with Wood. This shift will enable Hall to work on stories during the day. Hullinger will continue to do reporting as well.
Ellen Crooke, news director, said this experiment is a bit unorthodox but believes having Hall and Hullinger each report and anchor will enable the station to get the best out of both of them. She said she'lll test it out this month and see how it plays out.
"Jeff has been with us only a short time," Crooke said, "but his passion and energy and following in this market have proven him to be a great addition."
Hullinger had been unemployed for several months when I wrote a piece about him in February, 2010, wondering why Atlanta TV stations had not hired him since he left WAGA-TV in 2002 after 18 years. He has been a well-known sportscaster in Atlanta who also worked radio and CNN's "TalkBack Live." After WAGA-TV let him go, he free-lanced for ESPN, worked briefly on TV in Tampa, then came back to Atlanta to work at AM750 and now 95.5FM News/Talk WSB for three years. He and WSB parted ways in September, 2009.
"I've been mystified," Bill Hartman, retired WSB-TV sportscaster, said to me last year. "If I were one of the other TV stations besides Fox 5 and WSB, I'd hire him in a minute to be my newscaster – not my sportscaster, my newscaster."
My piece helped get his name back on the radar screen and Crooke took notice. (In a purely unscientific poll on this blog, he received an 81% positive rating.) She hired him four months later.
Hullinger specialized in politics leading up to the last election and did some anchoring with Wood during the winter storm a month ago.
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By Rodney Ho, rho@ajc.com, AJCRadioTV blog
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
