By Frank Macek There's something genuinely exciting about welcoming new talent to a newsroom. After nearly four decades in this business, I can tell you that the energy a new hire brings — the hunger, the fresh perspective, the different set of life experiences — has a way of lifting everyone around them. So it's my pleasure to introduce two journalists who are about to make their mark here at Channel 3. Tyler Madden Let's start with Tyler Madden, who joins us first. Tyler's first day is Monday, June 29, and he's bringing with him a résumé that speaks for itself. Most recently, he spent several years as a reporter at WKRC in Cincinnati, and before that, he was a reporter and weekend anchor at WTOV in Steubenville. It was there that Tyler found himself on the front lines of one of the region's most significant stories in recent memory — the toxic train derailment in East Palestine. Covering a story like that isn't just a professional test. It demands accur...
By Frank Macek I remember the moment streaming felt like a genuine revolution. It was sometime around 2013, and I had just finished watching an entire season of a show in a single weekend. No commercials. No waiting. No cable bill with 300 channels I'd never watch. Just me, a laptop, and unlimited content for the price of a couple of fast food meals a month. It felt like the future had finally arrived. That feeling is gone. And the more I think about it, the more I believe we — the viewers — were never really in control of any of it. Streaming was sold to us as liberation. Liberation from the tyranny of network schedules, from cable bundles crammed full of garbage, from the indignity of watching commercials for the same truck four times during a two-hour movie. And for a while, it delivered on that promise. But somewhere between the rise of a dozen competing platforms, the death of the DVD, and the quiet disappearance of shows we loved, streaming stopped working for viewers. It sta...