WBZ Veterans Say Goodbye

My favorite memories of Bob Lobel are from WBZ’s coverage of the Boston Marathon. Watching the barely-awake sports reporter make small talk with jittery runners is just as much a part of Patriot’s Day for me as drinking on my friend’s stoop in Brookline.

This year’s Marathon Monday will be bittersweet. While we’ll still have the marathon and the Red Sox game, we won’t have Lobel to keep us entertained as the day goes on.

The rumors were flying around Boston Daily HQ yesterday afternoon and were confirmed this morning by the Herald and Globe. Longtime entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik was also offered a contract buyout, and TV 38 anchor and ‘BZ reporter Scott Wahle will go too.

Boston’s CBS affiliate isn’t the only one being hit with massive layoffs, but it did lay off the most employees. The New York Times reports that the broadcast needs to trim jobs nationwide. Dan Kennedy expressed his surprise that an affiliate with two local stations and a powerful talk radio station was unable to whether the storm, but the Times reports that the number of layoffs was proportionate to a station’s performance.

The cuts at the local stations owned by CBS were related to the financial performance of the station group in the first quarter of 2008, a CBS station executive said.

This is the latest in another dark day on the Boston media scene, but let’s try to remember the good times, shall we? Here’s a 20-year-old commercial featuring a young and hungry Lobel doing what he does best. At the end of this clip, we see Kulhawik rocking some serious 80s hair.