We were leafing through the latest issue of B&C, as we tend to do on Monday mornings, when something in the tail end of the mag caught our eye. It was a Help Wanted for KSWB San Diego, which switches from a CW to a Fox affiliate August 1.
"Welcome to Speedoville," the ad begins.
The listing says the new affiliate "will make Outward Bound look like a picnic…You’ll beg for mercy over the next year and only the strong will survive but if you got the guts and the drive to be the very best and want to live next to heaven in San Diego [Editor’s Note: Does that mean Mexico is heaven?], we may have a job for you."
KSWB is of course a Tribune station, and the above language is of course the way once-staid Tribune does business under Sam Zell and Randy Michaels.
This isn’t the first time Tribune has invoked the image of the much-feared Speedo this spring. In a press release issued in March announcing KSWB’s affiliation switch, new VP/GM Ray Schonbak said:
“The #1 television network, the chance to build a news department from the ground up, and on top of all that I get to live in a city that’s totally awesome—80 degrees, sunny all the time and right by the ocean. I’ll just wear a Speedo under my clothes and be ready to hit the beach at a moment’s notice.”
