News Channel's Worth Rises With The Region's Waters

We're as sick as anyone of those commercials for the Gerber Grow-Up Plan.

"Available to parents and grandparents only - 97 percent qualify." Geez, who are the other 3 percent?

As for the news content of NorthWest Cable News, it is quite easy and even cool for the Seattle media elite to shake their heads.

No, it ain't "World News Tonight" or "The Compton Report."

They need a spell-checker. (What TV station doesn't?) Content can get pretty thin.

But the infant regional news channel is walking. It has fewer miscues than it did at birth.

If nothing else, NorthWest Cable News is functional. During the weird weather of late and the Saga of the Seawalks, NWCN was a reliable place to see if the world or the NFL had come to an end.

As the Portland flood unfolded yesterday, the channel went dike-to-dike, carrying coverage from affiliate KGW-TV.

If you had business or other connections to the region's second-largest city and needed to know what was going on, you would have found the Seattle stations mostly broadcasting the usual daytime fare. (Late in the day, KIRO-TV, Channel 7, joined in flood coverage.)

At some point, we hope NWCN will look more professional and be more enterprising, mooching less off its four co-owned TV stations: KING-TV (Channel 5) here, KGW, KREM-TV in Spokane and KTVB-TV in Boise.

Meantime, more information is better than less. Cut 'em some slack.

Exclusive interview: As this newspaper reported exclusively first earlier this week in an exclusive investigative report published first in this newspaper - sorry, but it is sweeps month - Kevin Hale is returning to Tacoma to assume again the title of vice president and general manager of CBS affiliate KSTW-TV (Channel 11).

He left a few years ago to become general manager of The Nashville Network, another property of Gaylord Entertainment Co. Back then, KSTW was independent.

Now, in an exclusive interview with our reporter, Hale says he liked his TNN job but missed the Northwest, where he still has friends and family.

He's got his work cut out for him here. He has a station to turn around.

"It's going to be a matter of trying to sit down and work with the staff and study the competition and find out where the network is headed and what kind of promotion is necessary," Hale said.

"No question job one for me is to increase ratings," Hale said, "and that's a process that takes a while."

So we asked him what is probably a $200 million question: Is KSTW going to be sold to Westinghouse/CBS?

"I wouldn't leave the situation I'm in in Nashville if I thought the station in Seattle was going to be sold anytime soon. Management has assured me they are interested in this TV station and want make it successful again," Hale said.

Well, there's some wiggle room there, but we'll take his word for it in the face of relentless buzz to the contrary.

Hale starts Monday. Has he been doing any homework?

"I've got a November '95 Nielsen book that's pretty much dog-eared."

Somewhere man: Jeff McAtee, former anchor at KOMO-TV (Channel 4), and his Nashville-found wife, Joanna Simmons, have returned to the Northwest and are doing freelance work and raising a family on Bainbridge Island.

You can see them - very briefly - in Monday's episode of "Nowhere Man" at 9 p.m. on KIRO-TV (Channel 7). In a scene early in the show, the couple play talk-show hosts on a TV in the background - a show within a show.

"Don't blink," McAtee said. The program is filmed in the Portland area, where McAtee and Simmons have an agent.

McAtee left Seattle in 1986 during a management change at KOMO-TV (Channel 4). In Nashville, he was main co-anchor at WSMV-TV.

TV-Radio Beat appears every Friday in The Seattle Times. Electronic-media reporter Chuck Taylor can be reached at (206) 464-8524 or on the Internet at ctay-new@seatimes.com.