Admit It, Folks. You'll Get Over "Our Jeanette".

I just saw Neal Justin's interview with former WCCO anchor Jeanette Trompeter on his blog at http://www.startribune.com/. not long after she was unceremoniously dumped by the station. It wasn't nearly as interesting as the 90-or-so e-mail responses that followed. They were mostly "I'm never gonna watch Channel 4 again!", "We love you, Jeanette!", or "Fire Don Shelby/Frank Vascellaro/Amelia Santaniello/whoever that idiot in management is instead of Our Jeanette!".

Get a grip, folks. As I told you in the last post, Trompeter was let go because the station must have thought she was getting paid a lot to do little more than read news at 5 and doing lifestyle features. To me, she came across as vapid and naive, anything but a serious journalist.

As for the remaining WCCO anchors, Santaniello can be a bit condescending at times, and makes her husband Vascellaro look like a wimp on the air. Shelby is the Elder Statesman of local TV news, but his nightly pontifications from the mountaintop should be called something other than the cringe-inducing "Good to Know".

Taken as a whole instead of the sum of its personalities, WCCO simply produces a better newscast than the other guys. KSTP has a no-nonsense news format with no-name anchors, but they need to put the brakes on ambulance-chasing journalism. I'm having trouble separating "KARE 11 News" from the station's "KARE Bear" image. And KMSP is owned by the same people who brought you the Fox News Channel. Enough said.

To all of those respondents on Justin's blog, dry your eyes. You'll get over Jeanette Trompeter in no time, as she finds another job somewhere else. And no matter how many stupid mistakes management makes, people will continue to watch WCCO because it's WCCO. Old habits die hard around here.