[rockfan4]

We have 2 TV stations here in La Crosse, CBS and ABC. We get our NBC and Fox from Eau Claire, which is about an hour north of us.

I usually watch the ABC station a bit in the morning to catch the weather, and then I'll watch their news at 11:00 while I'm eating lunch.

Monday morning they announced they were ending the 11:00am news, and cutting the morning news from 2 1/2 hours to 2 hours. The second part doesn't really bother me. They really only have about 30 minutes of news, and just repeat stories over and over. But I do miss watching local news at lunch time. The CBS station has a program at noon, but I've been eating lunch at 11:00 for forever and I'm not going to change now. There also seems to be a noticeable decline in the quality of anchors from both stations. Maybe we're not a big enough market, but if you're good, you only stay about a year and then move to a bigger station in a bigger market. We now get "forecasters" rather than meteorologists. The evening CBS guy does the weather from his house in Colorado.

The local newspaper is still a daily, but it is printed in Madison and brought in overnight. The building is vacant and for sale. The only thing I read is one guy who does a story every Saturday about businesses opening, closing and moving. Their site is locked down to the point you can only read one story before a popup blocks your access asking you to subscribe. Sometimes you can't even read that one article without disabling javascript.

Now I've got to adjust the onion on my belt and go outside and yell at some clouds.