Amanda Porter at WOOD TV

[Localnewsisdead]

If she's continuing in broadcasting let's hope, for other viewers, she's not an anchor.

[dwp49423]

If she's continuing in broadcasting let's hope, for other viewers, she's not an anchor.

As much as I hope the same, her signoff post had the hash tags "#onwardandupward" and "#thebestisyettocome" which make me thing anchor job in a larger market station. Her agent must managed to find some decent things for a demo reel to fool her new employer, who apparently neglected to stream a weekend News 8 newscast to see the trainwreck of an applicant.

[Newsyarentwe]

This thread is shocking because if the public had true insight on WOOD TV8 and how the people there operate, I don’t think there would be this misplaced hate for Amanda Porter. I worked at WOOD TV for several years even before Porter arrived and the station was truly going downhill even before the national LGBTQIA+ discrimination scandal due to internal B.S. and the lack of quality work and employees.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/media/mi ... e-coverage

WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids fires 4 after memo on Pride ...Detroit Free Presshttps://www.freep.com › story › television › 2023/06/30

Amanda Porter is a true Journalist who came into WOOD at the worst possible time. Two key white male producers were fighting with new management (an Asian news director) and they literally staged a coup.

The Boys Club was/is in full swing there and a certain executive producer (who had an affair with a subordinate producer and was caught cheating on his wife kissing his subordinate producer on the jumbo tron at the Tigers game…allegedly) really wanted to be the News Director. The Boys Club was upset that a minority manager (Stanton Tang Asian male) were hired even though he put in years there and basically ran the newsroom (in a very toxic and cliquey way).

There was a lot of shifting of news management, producers and talent around that time. The weekend evening newscasts lost a 5 year producer (who produced for Whitney Burney) to the weekdays. Amanda was hired under the guise that this was a middle market and the new producer would have at least two years experience.

Truthfully Amanda Porter and the weekend newscasts were neglected and set up to fail.

Even though Porter was a lead reporter and did some tough stories on communities WOOD couldn’t (or didn’t want to) reach, I saw her get the worst equipment, photographers taken from her (never saw this done to white reporters, they were actually forcing the photogs to do their stories when they should have been MMJing (one man band so the station has more content)), no lights in the field (even when she broke a leading news story in the market), photographers shot her in terrible conditions for her live shots (super yellow lighting, broken or flickering lights, blurry and out of focus, etc.), and when she went to management to discuss this, she was then targeted.

The team often ignored her story pitches then stole them.

Her investigative pitches were often taken by other reporters or units in the newsroom. She was left out of awards when she was the first reporter from WOOD TV8 Grand Rapids at the Michigan State University shooting in Lansing and held down two scenes including press conference reporting until 5 A.M.

They did everything they could to hide Amanda in promos, parades, awards, etc. even though she came through time and time again reporting and anchoring through the B.S. at WOOD for the west Michigan communities.

Amanda has actual fans in the city and is well known and recognized in west MI for her journalism. You can’t say that about many of the others.

The biggest issue was the news management and team members would not let her (Black woman) write the weekend news scripts even though she was the most experienced on the weekend and had an Emmy for producing in college. She even went to Julie Brinks the former GM and asked if she could write because the producers were not getting the shows done on time. They instead wanted to train a new producer (white male) from the assignment desk with absolutely no experience. News started at 6 and the show was still being written most days up until 5:30PM and sometimes later, even while the producer was in the booth. Amanda would come in early and ask if they needed help and they would give her the “West Michigan nice” “No, I’ve got it, thank you.” She would sit in the news room as a resource in case the new producer had a question or needed help, but they never tapped her talents. When she did start to write scripts they would ask, “who wrote this? I was working on this.” And delete her script. That producer eventually got better, but viewers already started attacking her. Again, Amanda spoke to management about the weekend newscast issues and was retaliated against.

That producer left the station so the weekends were without a producer again and of course they didn’t want Amanda to produce it. The week day producers (The Boy’s Club) did not want to fill-in on the weekends until management found an experienced producer so in the middle of the LGBTQIA+ scandal to add more diversity they hired a minority producer fresh out of college with no producing experience. Amanda was literally tasked and gas lit into helping this new minority talent by Joe LaFurgey who was aiming for a new position in management.

So as you can imagine, things went from bad to worse. The Producer Lauren not only had misspellings, she did not even understand what news was. Her scripts were terrible with so many dashes, typos, run on sentences, complex sentences, missing words, added words, killing people in the scrips that weren’t dead and the worst part is that Amanda would fix the scripts and lock them so they would turn green to let the whole team know it was good to air. Lauren would go back into Amanda’s script, unlock it and add whatever. Sometimes she would add in new stories without letting anyone know. Most of the times it was gibberish. Covering breaking news with her was a whole other story (As the lead station this is unacceptable)… Amanda documented everything and went to management about this weekly.

She would often pause her reads or hesitate because the scripts Lauren wrote were incorrect or so chopped up, she was copy editing them on-air because the news producer just finished the show. There was no time for her to go over her scripts because the producers who finish them (maybe) as TV8 was going on-air. I remember being in the studio and Amanda would be asking the producers in her IFB if the next Vo’s and teases would be written.

Pretty hard to practice when there is no script. This was extremely unfair and negligent to Porter and the west Michigan viewers.

Even after more training (if you could even call it that) Lauren the producer was demoted to an associate producer during the weekday shows. Now all of these issues and inexperienced hires were brought in by management, Julie Brinks, Joe LaFurgey and Brad Kessie.

(Side note: Because the WOOD TV LGBTQIA+ scandal brought such bad light on WOOD, they lost a lot of people, funding, advertisements, and most of all their reputation due to the clique and the Boys Club staging a coup that resulted in the news director, assistant news director, and two producers being fired. More veteran producers and an anchor Michele DeSelms left because of this. (Also Nexstar really fired the producers for their illicit affair but that’s another wild wood story!))

The new news director Brad Kessie from Market 180 something asked Amanda how to fix the weekends as he placed her on a performance improvement plan which again was extremely unfair and wrong. *The door to the news directors office is glass so the newsroom can hear everything.* Amanda asked Kessie how can she rehearse a newscast if the scripts aren’t written? Everyone in the newsroom was silent waiting for an answer I remember. She asked again to produce the weekend news cast or asked them again to hire a producer with more experience. (Because they weren’t going to force the white producers boys club to work weekends…) Two women producers were hired into the weekend shows, but by that time Amanda’s contract was running out. Amanda also implemented meetings on the weekend so the team could discuss the issues and fix them. All of this greatly improved the newscasts, but of course they didn’t thank Amanda for anything (Bearing through the B.S. of the station and the racism of west Michigan). People would write into the station attacking her when the anchor is the tail end of the news team.

Another major issue was WOODS engineering, producing and overall product was shit. Missing video, wrong video, not enough news to fill the shows, the list goes on and on. Amanda was boxed out of her show and given the cold shoulder by the team and station. I remember the weekend news cast once went to black for like 2 minutes. This was when Stanton Tang was the ND. The producer didn’t know how to fill the newscast with enough stories and so there would be extra time on the shows. Do you know when there is extra time that needs filling it usually goes to the weather person? Blake Harms not once filled time. He would just sit in the weather center looking at Amanda who was on the anchor desk with no more news to read. You cannot make this stuff up! It was crazy to watch. It was literally put on Amanda to fill the extra time on-air. How was she supposed to fill the time on-air with no stories?? I don’t know if they wanted her to sing or do stand up comedy, but news was not going on there because everyone besides Amanda was basically fresh or had no experience! It was crazy to see WOOD from my childhood now move how they were. The director would literally float around on sky cams around west Michigan because Harms would not fill the extra time. And Marlee Weirda would over produce her sports casts, so there wasn’t enough time for closing weather. Amanda had to address that too and Marlee BLEW up on her in front of the whole newsroom as Amanda was trying to work out the issue. She handled it like a pro though and eventually Marlee calmed down because she truly bucked up on Amanda because she was Black. Amanda went to Stanton Tang about this and Brad Kessie. These are producer issues, not the anchor.

And the teleprompter operators and production crew including management were not the friendliest to begin with, but they definitely treated Amanda a lot different than the other talent that they worked with. I noticed that they would often assist with microphones with all other talent, but not Amanda. She was told once to get her own mic and put her own batteries in it by Sam S. I often wondered if it was because she was Black, because all of the other talent was white, but that’s a conversation for later.

Some of us were talking about how bad Lauren was and we were getting many complaints from fabulous commenters just like all of you in this thread every weekend because of her lack of training.

That’s also one thing that I did not mention, we really did not do a good job training the weekend producers. We just kind of worked with them for two weeks, then threw them into the water hoping that they could swim, but that’s another issue altogether.

All of us knew about it (the bad producing), but really didn’t say much, because it wasn’t our show, which kind of forced Amanda to have to speak up about it to management again, which I kind of feel bad about. I could’ve said something myself looking back at it now.

Surprisingly, they thought it was Amanda fault, and not Lauren’s bad writing. This goes back to management not caring about what happens on weekends, because it doesn’t make the station any money like the other shows during the week.

So instead of fixing the problem, they blamed it on Amanda again, and we started hearing rumblings about how they might be trying to get rid of her and how they had put her on a kind of work evaluation  plan to determine if they were going to keep her on staff based on her performance.

But after so many bad complaints from viewers like all of yourselves, management decided to take a look and see if it was really Amanda like all of you have been sayin or if it was the producer who writes the show like Amanda was saying and many of us others had started saying.

So management came and sat in on some of the sessions on the weekend, lo and behold they found out that Amanda was telling the truth. The teleprompters were giving her bad pacing by not operating their machines right, Lauren’s writing was terrible and both of these things combined caused Amanda to stumble, stop, and sometimes fact check while reading the bad scripts live on air.

When Amanda anchored weekdays, Brad wondered why she wasn’t having the same issues that the weekend newscast always had, and they discovered it was from a bad weekend news team, not Amanda. If Amanda was such a bad anchor, why was she the go to anchor for Brian Sterling and Michele DeSelms? Because she was a serious Journalist and anchor. They tested Amanda on the 7PM newscast for months with no complaints, but due to the issues on the weekend it was given to undeserving talent who eventually after WOOD invested in her left the station for higher pay in a PR job. They also wanted to keep the anchor team reflective of the lake shore as Julie Brinks put it.

Station management did not want to listen to Amanda because they already had it out for her because they really didn’t like a lot of the stories she was doing. A lot of the stories she did were highlighting issues in west MIs Black community and we’ve had a lot of conversations in the newsroom about how WOOD TV does not care about those people’s issues. I mean from what Julie Brinks our former station General Manager said WOOD TV8 caters to the lakeshore and those stories did not get a lot of clicks on the webpage so it was easier to just not cover them as much and just stick to the standard news coverage if you catch my drift.

We actually ignored a really big story involving a Black kid that was later found dead out in Lowell. Our assistant News Director Joe Lefurgy said that it wasn’t a big deal and the kid was probably just another runaway. We initially did not cover it because he wanted to play it down. We kind of got in trouble for that one… It was worse than the whole LGBTQIA+ incident and the community really laid into WOOD for that.

But getting back on topic, after management discovered that Lauren’s bad writing was the main cause of Amanda having issues while reading the newscast, Lauren was demoted, and Wood Tv took Amanda‘s advice and hired two people that actually had years of experience, instead of pulling the usual and being cheap hiring someone fresh out of college.

As a result, the newscast drastically improved. But by the time all of that was happening her contract was up, and she definitely did not want to stay at station after they pretty much admitted there was racism at Wood TV 8, this goes back to the incident with Wood TV 8 not covering the story of the young black kid. You can search it if you want to read more. We lost several black talent and staff members after that incident to be honest. But Wood TV 8 really did not treat her right. They didn’t like her story ideas, but after she did her stories, they did so well that they took those stories from Amanda and gave them to other reporters, but initially thought they were bad ideas.

We didn’t care about stories in the black community, but we started caring after Amanda covered them so well. It was really strange seeing how everyone was talking bad about West Michigan‘s black community and then trying to do the stories after Amanda covered them.

They told her she was wrong and that she was the problem when she brought up issues that she was having on the weekends, only to come back later and tell her that she was right and try to fix things.

And she was bullied a lot by some of the other reporters, like Megan Buchman, and Taylor Morris, those two were always getting into confrontations with her, trying to make her look bad in my personal opinion. I think that they were jealous because she was a better reporter and covered stories that they would often try to take from her. Those two in particular were probably the worst reporters Wood TV 8 has ever seen. 

I’m not trying to single them out, but their ideas were really bad fluff pieces and they would often spread gossip about Amanda through the entire station. Toxic people like that are what made our news station a bad place to work. The old EP that got fired in the LGBTQIA+ incident was also really toxic and made the newsroom a living nightmare. The current assistant News Director Joe Lefurgy is carrying on that toxic tradition very well. Come to think of it Megan and Taylor, those two also leaked a lot of the information that started the controversy that caused the LGBTQIA+ incident when Stanton Tang was the News Director.

Other major issues: Wood did not want to hire any women or minorities until women at the station spoke up about the lack of representation. This was a major hurdle for the new news director Brad Kessie who is out of touch and extremely sexist. His door was open and he called Susan Samples into his office and asked her, “Who she slept with” to get interviews for her investigative story. He also tried to bribe the week day news producers to fix their typos with a drinking game - link so that just shows you what the environment was like at WOOD for women and especially hard for Black women.

I’m glad that most of them are out of news. But It was sad to see Amanda leave. She was a great asset to our station. We lost another black woman giving us the news cast in West Michigan just like Whitney Bernie. Whitney also got a lot of comments like what all of you are saying in these threads.

Western Michigan isn’t very accepting of black women in news I guess. It’s very sad to see to be honest. I hope that the community and the news station she goes to next sees the value that she truly brings to a community.

All anchor positions were kept from Amanda. They forced promoted talent who didn’t even want to anchor like Rick Albin who stuttered worse than Amanda even with a “good script.”

Brad set Amanda up to manage the weekend even though he knew the reporters did not listen to Amanda. Byron Tollefson missed a national story where two kids and their father drove into a lake and he refused to go and cover the story. There was a lot of ganging up on people in the newsroom. Byron went and got a photographer Dan to come into the newsroom to support his decision to not go to the story. They blatantly didn’t listen to Amanda and the producer who said the story was extremely important. WOOD missed a national story due to lazy reporters who had no true news sense like Amanda does. Later, Brad Kessie forced Amanda to cover a vosot about a Black organization coming to Michigan and told Amanda it was mandatory. He told her to figure out how to cover it, even though she told him the weekend crew was not receptive to her. He just shrugged and told her I’m sure you can figure it out. Amanda worked with the photographer the night before to coordinate their coverage. The next day Taylor Morris emailed the team and started a fight. It was insubordination, and she verbally attacked Amanda in front of the whole newsroom. Amanda walked away saying she was just doing what she was told, but Taylor had a white girl tantrum.

Later, Amanda was promoted to week day reporter and Taylor Morris quit and left the industry.

Emily Linnert never assisted producers with the shows or scheduled interviews. She would only come into the newsroom to gossip. She also questioned why Amanda was promoted even though Amanda was a lead reporter in the entire market. Emily Linnert made no comment during the LGBTQIA+ debacle and also left the business. I’m happy because she contributed nothing to west Michigan besides white privilege and an image.

They found out that all the problems they tried to blame on Amanda were actually from a poor news team and management. All of the changes she suggested to make the news casts and the station better, they did and they walked her out of the station and didn’t even let her finish her last day. I do remember hearing Brad tell Amanda that they now respected her though…

WOOD TV News 8 is not respectable or reputable.

If we know that WOOD TV8 is homophobic, is racism unbelievable? Look at this thread and the past treatment of Black journalists even if they were from GR.

[IndustryIsDead]

This thread is shocking because if the public had true insight on WOOD TV8 and how the people there operate, I don’t think there would be this misplaced hate for Amanda Porter. I worked at WOOD TV for several years even before Porter arrived and the station was truly going downhill even before the national LGBTQIA+ discrimination scandal due to internal B.S. and the lack of quality work and employees.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/media/mi ... e-coverage

WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids fires 4 after memo on Pride ...Detroit Free Presshttps://www.freep.com › story › television › 2023/06/30

Amanda Porter is a true Journalist who came into WOOD at the worst possible time. Two key white male producers were fighting with new management (an Asian news director) and they literally staged a coup.

The Boys Club was/is in full swing there and a certain executive producer (who had an affair with a subordinate producer and was caught cheating on his wife kissing his subordinate producer on the jumbo tron at the Tigers game…allegedly) really wanted to be the News Director. The Boys Club was upset that a minority manager (Stanton Tang Asian male) were hired even though he put in years there and basically ran the newsroom (in a very toxic and cliquey way).

There was a lot of shifting of news management, producers and talent around that time. The weekend evening newscasts lost a 5 year producer (who produced for Whitney Burney) to the weekdays. Amanda was hired under the guise that this was a middle market and the new producer would have at least two years experience.

Truthfully Amanda Porter and the weekend newscasts were neglected and set up to fail.

Even though Porter was a lead reporter and did some tough stories on communities WOOD couldn’t (or didn’t want to) reach, I saw her get the worst equipment, photographers taken from her (never saw this done to white reporters, they were actually forcing the photogs to do their stories when they should have been MMJing (one man band so the station has more content)), no lights in the field (even when she broke a leading news story in the market), photographers shot her in terrible conditions for her live shots (super yellow lighting, broken or flickering lights, blurry and out of focus, etc.), and when she went to management to discuss this, she was then targeted.

The team often ignored her story pitches then stole them.

Her investigative pitches were often taken by other reporters or units in the newsroom. She was left out of awards when she was the first reporter from WOOD TV8 Grand Rapids at the Michigan State University shooting in Lansing and held down two scenes including press conference reporting until 5 A.M.

They did everything they could to hide Amanda in promos, parades, awards, etc. even though she came through time and time again reporting and anchoring through the B.S. at WOOD for the west Michigan communities.

Amanda has actual fans in the city and is well known and recognized in west MI for her journalism. You can’t say that about many of the others.

The biggest issue was the news management and team members would not let her (Black woman) write the weekend news scripts even though she was the most experienced on the weekend and had an Emmy for producing in college. She even went to Julie Brinks the former GM and asked if she could write because the producers were not getting the shows done on time. They instead wanted to train a new producer (white male) from the assignment desk with absolutely no experience. News started at 6 and the show was still being written most days up until 5:30PM and sometimes later, even while the producer was in the booth. Amanda would come in early and ask if they needed help and they would give her the “West Michigan nice” “No, I’ve got it, thank you.” She would sit in the news room as a resource in case the new producer had a question or needed help, but they never tapped her talents. When she did start to write scripts they would ask, “who wrote this? I was working on this.” And delete her script. That producer eventually got better, but viewers already started attacking her. Again, Amanda spoke to management about the weekend newscast issues and was retaliated against.

That producer left the station so the weekends were without a producer again and of course they didn’t want Amanda to produce it. The week day producers (The Boy’s Club) did not want to fill-in on the weekends until management found an experienced producer so in the middle of the LGBTQIA+ scandal to add more diversity they hired a minority producer fresh out of college with no producing experience. Amanda was literally tasked and gas lit into helping this new minority talent by Joe LaFurgey who was aiming for a new position in management.

So as you can imagine, things went from bad to worse. The Producer Lauren not only had misspellings, she did not even understand what news was. Her scripts were terrible with so many dashes, typos, run on sentences, complex sentences, missing words, added words, killing people in the scrips that weren’t dead and the worst part is that Amanda would fix the scripts and lock them so they would turn green to let the whole team know it was good to air. Lauren would go back into Amanda’s script, unlock it and add whatever. Sometimes she would add in new stories without letting anyone know. Most of the times it was gibberish. Covering breaking news with her was a whole other story (As the lead station this is unacceptable)… Amanda documented everything and went to management about this weekly.

She would often pause her reads or hesitate because the scripts Lauren wrote were incorrect or so chopped up, she was copy editing them on-air because the news producer just finished the show. There was no time for her to go over her scripts because the producers who finish them (maybe) as TV8 was going on-air. I remember being in the studio and Amanda would be asking the producers in her IFB if the next Vo’s and teases would be written.

Pretty hard to practice when there is no script. This was extremely unfair and negligent to Porter and the west Michigan viewers.

Even after more training (if you could even call it that) Lauren the producer was demoted to an associate producer during the weekday shows. Now all of these issues and inexperienced hires were brought in by management, Julie Brinks, Joe LaFurgey and Brad Kessie.

(Side note: Because the WOOD TV LGBTQIA+ scandal brought such bad light on WOOD, they lost a lot of people, funding, advertisements, and most of all their reputation due to the clique and the Boys Club staging a coup that resulted in the news director, assistant news director, and two producers being fired. More veteran producers and an anchor Michele DeSelms left because of this. (Also Nexstar really fired the producers for their illicit affair but that’s another wild wood story!))

The new news director Brad Kessie from Market 180 something asked Amanda how to fix the weekends as he placed her on a performance improvement plan which again was extremely unfair and wrong. *The door to the news directors office is glass so the newsroom can hear everything.* Amanda asked Kessie how can she rehearse a newscast if the scripts aren’t written? Everyone in the newsroom was silent waiting for an answer I remember. She asked again to produce the weekend news cast or asked them again to hire a producer with more experience. (Because they weren’t going to force the white producers boys club to work weekends…) Two women producers were hired into the weekend shows, but by that time Amanda’s contract was running out. Amanda also implemented meetings on the weekend so the team could discuss the issues and fix them. All of this greatly improved the newscasts, but of course they didn’t thank Amanda for anything (Bearing through the B.S. of the station and the racism of west Michigan). People would write into the station attacking her when the anchor is the tail end of the news team.

Another major issue was WOODS engineering, producing and overall product was shit. Missing video, wrong video, not enough news to fill the shows, the list goes on and on. Amanda was boxed out of her show and given the cold shoulder by the team and station. I remember the weekend news cast once went to black for like 2 minutes. This was when Stanton Tang was the ND. The producer didn’t know how to fill the newscast with enough stories and so there would be extra time on the shows. Do you know when there is extra time that needs filling it usually goes to the weather person? Blake Harms not once filled time. He would just sit in the weather center looking at Amanda who was on the anchor desk with no more news to read. You cannot make this stuff up! It was crazy to watch. It was literally put on Amanda to fill the extra time on-air. How was she supposed to fill the time on-air with no stories?? I don’t know if they wanted her to sing or do stand up comedy, but news was not going on there because everyone besides Amanda was basically fresh or had no experience! It was crazy to see WOOD from my childhood now move how they were. The director would literally float around on sky cams around west Michigan because Harms would not fill the extra time. And Marlee Weirda would over produce her sports casts, so there wasn’t enough time for closing weather. Amanda had to address that too and Marlee BLEW up on her in front of the whole newsroom as Amanda was trying to work out the issue. She handled it like a pro though and eventually Marlee calmed down because she truly bucked up on Amanda because she was Black. Amanda went to Stanton Tang about this and Brad Kessie. These are producer issues, not the anchor.

And the teleprompter operators and production crew including management were not the friendliest to begin with, but they definitely treated Amanda a lot different than the other talent that they worked with. I noticed that they would often assist with microphones with all other talent, but not Amanda. She was told once to get her own mic and put her own batteries in it by Sam S. I often wondered if it was because she was Black, because all of the other talent was white, but that’s a conversation for later.

Some of us were talking about how bad Lauren was and we were getting many complaints from fabulous commenters just like all of you in this thread every weekend because of her lack of training.

That’s also one thing that I did not mention, we really did not do a good job training the weekend producers. We just kind of worked with them for two weeks, then threw them into the water hoping that they could swim, but that’s another issue altogether.

All of us knew about it (the bad producing), but really didn’t say much, because it wasn’t our show, which kind of forced Amanda to have to speak up about it to management again, which I kind of feel bad about. I could’ve said something myself looking back at it now.

Surprisingly, they thought it was Amanda fault, and not Lauren’s bad writing. This goes back to management not caring about what happens on weekends, because it doesn’t make the station any money like the other shows during the week.

So instead of fixing the problem, they blamed it on Amanda again, and we started hearing rumblings about how they might be trying to get rid of her and how they had put her on a kind of work evaluation  plan to determine if they were going to keep her on staff based on her performance.

But after so many bad complaints from viewers like all of yourselves, management decided to take a look and see if it was really Amanda like all of you have been sayin or if it was the producer who writes the show like Amanda was saying and many of us others had started saying.

So management came and sat in on some of the sessions on the weekend, lo and behold they found out that Amanda was telling the truth. The teleprompters were giving her bad pacing by not operating their machines right, Lauren’s writing was terrible and both of these things combined caused Amanda to stumble, stop, and sometimes fact check while reading the bad scripts live on air.

When Amanda anchored weekdays, Brad wondered why she wasn’t having the same issues that the weekend newscast always had, and they discovered it was from a bad weekend news team, not Amanda. If Amanda was such a bad anchor, why was she the go to anchor for Brian Sterling and Michele DeSelms? Because she was a serious Journalist and anchor. They tested Amanda on the 7PM newscast for months with no complaints, but due to the issues on the weekend it was given to undeserving talent who eventually after WOOD invested in her left the station for higher pay in a PR job. They also wanted to keep the anchor team reflective of the lake shore as Julie Brinks put it.

Station management did not want to listen to Amanda because they already had it out for her because they really didn’t like a lot of the stories she was doing. A lot of the stories she did were highlighting issues in west MIs Black community and we’ve had a lot of conversations in the newsroom about how WOOD TV does not care about those people’s issues. I mean from what Julie Brinks our former station General Manager said WOOD TV8 caters to the lakeshore and those stories did not get a lot of clicks on the webpage so it was easier to just not cover them as much and just stick to the standard news coverage if you catch my drift.

We actually ignored a really big story involving a Black kid that was later found dead out in Lowell. Our assistant News Director Joe Lefurgy said that it wasn’t a big deal and the kid was probably just another runaway. We initially did not cover it because he wanted to play it down. We kind of got in trouble for that one… It was worse than the whole LGBTQIA+ incident and the community really laid into WOOD for that.

But getting back on topic, after management discovered that Lauren’s bad writing was the main cause of Amanda having issues while reading the newscast, Lauren was demoted, and Wood Tv took Amanda‘s advice and hired two people that actually had years of experience, instead of pulling the usual and being cheap hiring someone fresh out of college.

As a result, the newscast drastically improved. But by the time all of that was happening her contract was up, and she definitely did not want to stay at station after they pretty much admitted there was racism at Wood TV 8, this goes back to the incident with Wood TV 8 not covering the story of the young black kid. You can search it if you want to read more. We lost several black talent and staff members after that incident to be honest. But Wood TV 8 really did not treat her right. They didn’t like her story ideas, but after she did her stories, they did so well that they took those stories from Amanda and gave them to other reporters, but initially thought they were bad ideas.

We didn’t care about stories in the black community, but we started caring after Amanda covered them so well. It was really strange seeing how everyone was talking bad about West Michigan‘s black community and then trying to do the stories after Amanda covered them.

They told her she was wrong and that she was the problem when she brought up issues that she was having on the weekends, only to come back later and tell her that she was right and try to fix things.

And she was bullied a lot by some of the other reporters, like Megan Buchman, and Taylor Morris, those two were always getting into confrontations with her, trying to make her look bad in my personal opinion. I think that they were jealous because she was a better reporter and covered stories that they would often try to take from her. Those two in particular were probably the worst reporters Wood TV 8 has ever seen. 

I’m not trying to single them out, but their ideas were really bad fluff pieces and they would often spread gossip about Amanda through the entire station. Toxic people like that are what made our news station a bad place to work. The old EP that got fired in the LGBTQIA+ incident was also really toxic and made the newsroom a living nightmare. The current assistant News Director Joe Lefurgy is carrying on that toxic tradition very well. Come to think of it Megan and Taylor, those two also leaked a lot of the information that started the controversy that caused the LGBTQIA+ incident when Stanton Tang was the News Director.

Other major issues: Wood did not want to hire any women or minorities until women at the station spoke up about the lack of representation. This was a major hurdle for the new news director Brad Kessie who is out of touch and extremely sexist. His door was open and he called Susan Samples into his office and asked her, “Who she slept with” to get interviews for her investigative story. He also tried to bribe the week day news producers to fix their typos with a drinking game - link so that just shows you what the environment was like at WOOD for women and especially hard for Black women.

I’m glad that most of them are out of news. But It was sad to see Amanda leave. She was a great asset to our station. We lost another black woman giving us the news cast in West Michigan just like Whitney Bernie. Whitney also got a lot of comments like what all of you are saying in these threads.

Western Michigan isn’t very accepting of black women in news I guess. It’s very sad to see to be honest. I hope that the community and the news station she goes to next sees the value that she truly brings to a community.

All anchor positions were kept from Amanda. They forced promoted talent who didn’t even want to anchor like Rick Albin who stuttered worse than Amanda even with a “good script.”

Brad set Amanda up to manage the weekend even though he knew the reporters did not listen to Amanda. Byron Tollefson missed a national story where two kids and their father drove into a lake and he refused to go and cover the story. There was a lot of ganging up on people in the newsroom. Byron went and got a photographer Dan to come into the newsroom to support his decision to not go to the story. They blatantly didn’t listen to Amanda and the producer who said the story was extremely important. WOOD missed a national story due to lazy reporters who had no true news sense like Amanda does. Later, Brad Kessie forced Amanda to cover a vosot about a Black organization coming to Michigan and told Amanda it was mandatory. He told her to figure out how to cover it, even though she told him the weekend crew was not receptive to her. He just shrugged and told her I’m sure you can figure it out. Amanda worked with the photographer the night before to coordinate their coverage. The next day Taylor Morris emailed the team and started a fight. It was insubordination, and she verbally attacked Amanda in front of the whole newsroom. Amanda walked away saying she was just doing what she was told, but Taylor had a white girl tantrum.

Later, Amanda was promoted to week day reporter and Taylor Morris quit and left the industry.

Emily Linnert never assisted producers with the shows or scheduled interviews. She would only come into the newsroom to gossip. She also questioned why Amanda was promoted even though Amanda was a lead reporter in the entire market. Emily Linnert made no comment during the LGBTQIA+ debacle and also left the business. I’m happy because she contributed nothing to west Michigan besides white privilege and an image.

They found out that all the problems they tried to blame on Amanda were actually from a poor news team and management. All of the changes she suggested to make the news casts and the station better, they did and they walked her out of the station and didn’t even let her finish her last day. I do remember hearing Brad tell Amanda that they now respected her though…

WOOD TV News 8 is not respectable or reputable.

If we know that WOOD TV8 is homophobic, is racism unbelievable? Look at this thread and the past treatment of Black journalists even if they were from GR.

That's a whole lot of word salad for trying to cover up the fact that...if you are unable to accurately pronounce routing English words, you are fair game to be let go. It's real simple, anchors are hired to "deliver the news"...so when an anchor is unable to do that in a clear and accurate manner, they are not successfully fulfilling their job requirements.

[Plucky]

This infamous quote applies:
"The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low"
Or, in this case, the politics of local TV news.

[Nightfly 2.0]

And the teleprompter operators and production crew including management were not the friendliest to begin with, but they definitely treated Amanda a lot different than the other talent that they worked with.

Teleprompter operators????? This alone makes the entire piece suspect, which isn't to say the entire operation appears to be a shitstorm

[Newsyarentwe]

“if you are unable to accurately pronounce routing English words, you are fair game to be let go. It's real simple, anchors are hired to "deliver the news"...so when an anchor is unable to do that in a clear and accurate manner, they are not successfully fulfilling their job requirements.”

By “routing” did you mean to type “ROUTINE”? See how easy it is for a typo to makes a person look silly?

Porter was not let go. She was set to extend her contract, but she decided to step away from the position because of the quality of WOOD TV and racism from the station which deeply impacts minority communities.

The news station has a due diligence to provide quality training, equipment and fair treatment to all employees. This was not done and you can clearly see it still impacting WOOD’s editorial reporting and footprint in the market. That’s why 3 Black journalists all left within the same year as Amanda Porter including Britany Flowers, Donovan Long and Demetrios Sanders.

Lauren the producer was demoted to associate producer.

Porter beat the PIP, fixed the weekends, and helped the new minority reporters get hired including Adriana Doria, and Josh Sanchez. These hires are directly related to Porter going to bat for minorities communities and the journalism they deserve from WOOD TV News 8.

[Newsyarentwe]

And the teleprompter operators and production crew including management were not the friendliest to begin with, but they definitely treated Amanda a lot different than the other talent that they worked with.

Teleprompter operators????? This alone makes the entire piece suspect, which isn't to say the entire operation appears to be a shitstorm

Yes, there are people who scroll the teleprompters for the anchors. I’m sorry this is news to you . But yes, shitstorm.

[TonySpaghetti]

She left to start a successful YouTube news channel that garners nearly 6 viewers per video.

[IndustryIsDead]

“if you are unable to accurately pronounce routing English words, you are fair game to be let go. It's real simple, anchors are hired to "deliver the news"...so when an anchor is unable to do that in a clear and accurate manner, they are not successfully fulfilling their job requirements.”

By “routing” did you mean to type “ROUTINE”? See how easy it is for a typo to makes a person look silly?

Porter was not let go. She was set to extend her contract, but she decided to step away from the position because of the quality of WOOD TV and racism from the station which deeply impacts minority communities.

The news station has a due diligence to provide quality training, equipment and fair treatment to all employees. This was not done and you can clearly see it still impacting WOOD’s editorial reporting and footprint in the market. That’s why 3 Black journalists all left within the same year as Amanda Porter including Britany Flowers, Donovan Long and Demetrios Sanders.

Lauren the producer was demoted to associate producer.

Porter beat the PIP, fixed the weekends, and helped the new minority reporters get hired including Adriana Doria, and Josh Sanchez. These hires are directly related to Porter going to bat for minorities communities and the journalism they deserve from WOOD TV News 8.

Ahhh the ol' Racist Card. Well done. If you know anything about the shit LH and the weather giant got away with FOR years in that newsroom....you'd realize that using the racist card on Wood is desperate at best. As for a "typo"...that's one time on a thread in which I peruse in my "free time" very quickly with ZERO proof reading. If it was my FULL TIME job, AND i MADE the same mistake over and over....you darn right I'd be vulnerable to be called out/fired.

[MWmetalhead]

Porter was not let go. She was set to extend her contract, but she decided to step away from the position because of the quality of WOOD TV and racism from the station which deeply impacts minority communities.

I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale. You interested?

Porter was a very below average news anchor for a top 50 market. Her pacing was terrible; her reading off the prompter was filled with random, awkward pauses.

She should consider print journalism perhaps.

I will say the weekend news anchors, especially in morning, I've seen at WOOD during my last couple visits were rather impressive.

[MWmetalhead]

It's always the same crap; you will talk about their appearance if you can't talk about how they pronounce things. All of them are actually great at what they do;

All of them? Give me a fucking break.

[IndustryIsDead]

LH is a Leon Hendrix, a black man who got away with things in that newsroom that any other person NOT of color would have been fired for IMMEDIATELY....YEARS earlier. "I wouldn't have chance at dating her". I literally have no idea who this woman is, nor do I have any clue what she looks like...I am just here to call out BS excuses. If you can't pronounce words/names/towns properly, you are failing to do your job as a news anchor, period.
Spare us the "it's so hard as a woman of color". How about "it's so hard when you are person with below average reading skills". No sexism, no racism...just good ol' competency...or lack of.

[georgetownt]

Watch her YouTube news channel. Tells you what a talent (or lack thereof) WOODTV Exagger8 let go.... I haven't watched any local news TV in many years. I do see social media posts and see why I pass the local TV news.

[IndustryIsDead]

LH is a Leon Hendrix, a black man who got away with things in that newsroom that any other person NOT of color would have been fired for IMMEDIATELY....YEARS earlier. "I wouldn't have chance at dating her". I literally have no idea who this woman is, nor do I have any clue what she looks like...I am just here to call out BS excuses. If you can't pronounce words/names/towns properly, you are failing to do your job as a news anchor, period.
Spare us the "it's so hard as a woman of color". How about "it's so hard when you are person with below average reading skills". No sexism, no racism...just good ol' competency...or lack of.

So you're just some random internet troll reacting to random threads on the internet about people you don't know? You folks are proving my point, LMAO. Dude, life is too short to be on a forum bashing someone you don't know. Go enjoy life; there's so much you could all accomplish if you put your time and energy into more constructive things.

But you'd rather spend your time talking about Porter? If it's that important to you, go get a job in news and become the anchor you've always wanted to be. You can do it, buddy; this thread believes in your passion! They will support your dreams. Literally all of your dreams. Here, WOOD is hiring; apply while it's hot: https://nexstar.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/n ... d%20rapids All of you are perfect for news. Come on now, you all want to work in news at WOOD TV 8, so you know what's happening behind the scenes right? Step on up, don't be a shy boy now! I want to see you on air killing it in that dress you have always wanted to wear so badly! Make sure to wear red and put on lipstick! If you don't, they'll make another thread about you

I spent 26 plus years in the industry... and a majority of those years as an anchor, and a majority of that in West Michigan. I have a vested interest in this market/industry. I recall a bad anchor on Wood but have no idea what she looked/looks like at this point...but I do recall she was African American. I am not certain if her name was Amanda.
Why do I dare "comment" on this thread? Probably because I never once was called out on air, on this site or thru email complaints into the newsroom for bad pronunciation, bad behavior in the newsroom, or being sexist or racist etc. I got out of this industry...on my own...by choice after achieving everything (and then some) I had set out to accomplish. I now enjoy life with better hours, in a better industry and actually better money (which is icing on the cake).
But it sounds like all is well according to you...Amanda is thriving in a new career, she is no longer subjected to a "racist newsroom/company" and we viewers are no longer subjected to bad anchoring? Sound about right? Great, we ALL win!
P.S. Looks like Amanda....I mean....some random guy opened up a new account YESTERDAY to defend Amanda "Mr News Gem" Joined: Aug 15, 2026