Mike Woolfolk, former anchor and managing editor at WACH Columbia (SC), thinks the hiring of Bree Boyce as WACH anchor is a bad move. Boyce is a former Miss South Carolina who lost 110 pounds, and became a figure on the talk show circuit to talk about women and body issues.
That doesn’t make her a TV anchor, says Woolfolk, who is president of media relations firm The Woolfolk Group. He says:
It seems to feed the notion that it’s okay for a main co-anchor of a newscast to have no other credentials but a pretty face, a pageant title and the fact that she lost a life changing 100 pounds.
Boyce starts tonight at 10. Here’s another take on her hiring from a local SC paper.
Woolfolk says he’s never met Boyce, but he believes her hiring sends the wrong message to aspiring journalists:
My frustration is rooted in the poor messages this hire sends to the community and to all of the aspiring young broadcast journalists spending tens of thousands of dollars of their money, their parents’ money, scholarship dollars and grants to get formal training for a career that apparently requires only a certain level of celebrity and beauty to obtain. Students, forget about all that crap your college professors and other professionals who visited your classes told you about “paying your dues” or “having to cut your teeth in Podunkville, USA” before you get the chance to anchor a newscast in a place like Columbia, or better. Don’t worry about learning the craft or gaining experience. Just go out and do something that garners you major attention because those are the people television station general managers favor for anchor slots- one of the most high profile and significantly important jobs in the newsroom– over formally trained and experienced journalists.
