KILBURY LEAVES KOLD FOR N.Y. ANCHOR GIG
Longtime KOLD/KMSB news anchor Scott Kilbury has left the station and accepted a position as the main news anchor for WHEC in Rochester, N.Y.
While Kilbury considers Southern Arizona home, he's familiar with the Rochester area.
"Between the ages of 10 and 15, I lived in upstate New York," Kilbury said. "When I went to Rochester it was so clean and nice. It's beautiful, has a great downtown. They treated me well at the station. People like it there and have been there for a long time."
Kilbury was at KOLD for more than 12 years, and during that span he seemed to be the station's go-to talent when it wanted to make a change or launch a new product. He left a successful stint on the sports desk to help stabilize transitional uncertainty in the station's morning news block. While in sports, it was Kilbury who helped to launch the station's well-known "Overtime" segments, the quirky skits that air as a lead-in to KOLD's Friday night high school football coverage.
"We won two Emmys for those," Kilbury recalled.
Once it lost Oprah Winfrey's 4 p.m. talk show ratings juggernaut, KOLD wanted to expand its news presence with an hourlong newscast. It reached out to Kilbury and asked him to act as co-anchor, which meant working double shifts—morning and afternoons—for seven months.
And when Raycom, which owns KOLD Channel 13, reached an agreement with Belo to produce the 9 p.m. news on KMSB Channel 11, it was Kilbury whom the station approached to take the reins. With Kilbury at the helm, the 9 p.m. newscast recently registered its best ratings numbers.
Kilbury moved from upstate New York to Benson at the age of 15. He attended college locally and worked at the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind for eight years—"I named my first child after one of the kids there," he said—before landing television gigs in Montana and Nebraska. He returned to the area when the KOLD opportunity presented itself in 2001.
"My family is here. My wife's family is here. I would call Tucson home, but the irony is that ... I lived in upstate New York," Kilbury said. "I'm talking to the news director and he's telling me my mom taught at the same middle school he went to in Utica. There are all these weird connections. For the kids, this is the perfect fit. My oldest is looking forward to fishing and skiing, like I did, and not having to worry about burning his feet on the asphalt in the summer. But I'm going to really miss the great people in this community for all their love and support."
Kilbury's first day on the air in Rochester is July 15.
POINTGUARDU.COM OWNER HIT WITH RESTRAINING ORDER
It's one thing to engage in an online flame war with other sites, as Ace Thakore, the owner of pointguardu.com has done in the past. It's another to get the website operator's wife involved.
As a result, Jason Scheer, the publisher of Arizona.scout.com, was granted a restraining order against Thakore over phone calls to Scheer's wife and comments online, including an unflattering tweet.
"On April 15, Ace called my wife," Scheer said. "She's part owner of the website because she's on the corporate commission for the website. He calls her, and when she discovered it was him, she gave me the phone. I gave him my numbers and told him never to call my wife again. If you have an issue, call me. Eleven days later he called my wife four times, and left a threatening voice mail that said he would put pictures of my kids and wife online. I also substitute teach. He posted the number of my boss at TUSD, and let them know that Jason Scheer is stealing information and not working. But when he threatened my wife, that's when we decided to get the restraining order."
Thakore contested the order at a hearing last week, but it was upheld by a judge.
Arizona.scout.com is one of a number of websites dedicated to coverage of UA athletics, with a focus on football and basketball recruiting. Pointguardu.com is focused solely on UA basketball and basketball recruiting. It has had run-ins with competing sites before, and generally over the same issue, an allegation that other websites are taking material broken initially by pointguardu.com without attributing the information.
"The judge ruled that whether or not he thinks I'm stealing info, it doesn't give him the right to harass anyone," Scheer said. The judge "didn't modify the restraining order at all. He has to stay 250 feet away. He can't call me, email me, tweet at me or be in the same place as me for a year."
The latter requirement includes some common-sense stipulations. Part of Scheer's and Thakore's job is to watch and analyze the effectiveness of high school recruits. To do so, it's likely Scheer and Thakore will be watching the same prospects at the same time at numerous venues during the July recruiting camp period.
"The judge said effectively, if (Thakore) is in the same gymnasium and not creating an issue, he'd probably just leave him alone if he was me," Scheer said. But "If Ace were to come up to me and say anything or stand near me when it's obvious there are other places he can stand, I'm free to call the police and have him removed because he's breaking the restraining order."
Said Thakore: "No one is trying to harass anyone here. If they called my girlfriend three times, even if it was done accidentally, I'd probably be doing the same thing to him. It was kind of a bitch mood (on my part), but it was a complete accident. Stop stealing my information. That's all I care about."
Said Scheer: "(This behavior has) been going on for years. He's done it to a lot of other people, but once he got my wife involved, it was over."
