INC’s 5 p.m. news hour disappoints.

Duplicating the first half-hour in the second half-hour (and again at 6 p.m.) is redundancy of a banal kind. If INC is going to make a mark in TV news, it has to eschew viewer choices for the news punch-line – those last items that news media tries to lighten a newscast or newspaper report with – and, more importantly, do some actual journalism.



INC picked a few things Monday [2/8] that viewers could select for the newscast wrap-up: sword–swallowing, a Facebook instigated snowball fight (not in Fort Wayne), and one other inane item. Viewers picked, by voting online, the snowball fight.



As for journalistic effort, the new news-hours was replete with the same-old, same-old stuff: half-hearted news briefs about things that aren’t pertinent to viewers or the community as a whole.

If a station is going to do an hour (plus) of news, it better be news, and not fluff. Fort Wayne needs journalistic scrutiny -- which JG is doing half-heartedly, and WANE skirts with its headline approach to news, and INC doesn’t do at all, preferring insipid asides by lazy reporters (Jeff Neumeyer, for one). The News-Sentinel is out of the running as we expect that paper to fold, sadly, before the third quarter of 2010.

Nope, INC’s foray into extended news programming was lame and a duplicate of its pathetic morning news hours. No hoopla here for the effort. Nor none from viewers either.