“If my girlfriend is watching, I love you. Please don’t break up with me,” Frank Marzullo pleaded as he adjusted his outfit on the WXIX newscast this morning.

Marzullo is nearing the end of “Dare Frank” week on WXIX, the Cincinnati Fox-affiliate. Each morning for seven days, the station has picked a viewer-submitted dare for the meteorologist to tackle, such as driving a race car and feeding a Komodo dragon. This morning’s task, however, involved significantly more practice … and significantly less clothing (video inside). Read more

WXIX morning meteorologist Katy Morgan got married this weekend, and her co-workers were at the party — with their dancing shoes on.

The morning team staff, led by co-anchors Rob Williams and Sheila Gray alongside meteorologist Dan Wells, celebrated the newlyweds with a flash mob choreographed to LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (watch the video above).

WXIX posted the video on their website, noting that the dance was choreographed by anchor Tracey Johnson‘s daughter and took two weeks of practicing, in the basement of the station, to perfect.

Thirty TV stations across Ohio have reportedly pulled a political ad off the air over its controversial use of footage featuring a great-grandmother from Cincinnati.

78-year-old Marlene Quinn recently signed on to appear in an ad opposing an upcoming ballot initiative.  The ad (embedded above)–in which Quinn recounts how a group of brave firefighters saved her granddaughter’s life–was apparently so effective at swaying voter opinion that a group supporting the ballot initiative used footage of Quinn in its own ad (video inside). Read more

WKRC meteorologist Jeff Creighton, who has been with the Cincinnati CBS-affiliate for 16 years, has signed on with rival station WXIX, the Fox-affiliate.

Creighton, who started at WKRC as a weather producer in 1995, will begin at WXIX on October 3. He replaces Pat Barry, who left WXIX to host a morning radio show.

“Jeff Creighton resigned from his position as weekend meteorologist with Local 12 on Friday, September 16th, to pursue another opportunity,” WKRC news director Kirk Varner said in a statement. “Because that opportunity is apparently with another station locally, he felt it was best that he make his resignation effective immediately. We have begun a search for his replacement.” Read more

Don Teague, who is a veteran correspondent of both CBS News and NBC News, will return to local television this month with an anchor position at KRIV, the Fox owned-and-operated station in Houston.

Teague started his broadcast career at KFXK in Longview and went on to KFMB in San Diego and WXIX in Cincinnati before making a move to the national stage. He joined NBC News as a correspondent in 2002 and was laid off in 2008 in a round of layoffs after the economic downturn that fall. He joined CBS News as a correspondent in 2009.

“It was almost 10 years of really tough schedules on my two daughters and my wife, and we decided it would be good to get back into local news and not have to live on an airplane,” Teague told The Houston Chronicle. “My wife and I would drive to movies or dinner in two cars, because there was always the chance that the evening would end with me racing to the airport and her finishing dinner alone.”

Teague was based in Texas for both CBS and NBC. He will anchor the 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. broadcasts at KRIV, alongside longtime anchor Melinda Spaulding. His first day will be August 15.

After four years a reporter for Cincinnati Fox affiliate WXIX, Sara Celi announced this week that she is leaving the station for a anchoring job in Oklahoma City.

Celi, who grew up in Cincinnati, did not disclose which Oklahoma City station she is going to. “It’s been a great four and a half years here in Cincinnati,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “It has been such a pleasure for me to have a chance to report the news in the city where I grew up.”

Celi got her start at KSLA, where she was a “one-man band” journalist who did all her own reporting, writing and shooting. She eventually graduated to a fill-in anchor at KSLA, the CBS affiliate in Shreveport, LA, before joining WXIX in 2007. Her last day will be September 4, The Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

WXIX announced today that it will expand its morning news coverage to begin at 4 a.m., the earliest live broadcast in the Cincinnati area. The Fox affiliate will produce a half-hour weekday show devoted to weather.

“Fox 19 First Weather at 4 a.m.” will debut July 25 with meteorologists Frank Marzullo and Katy Morgan. Current morning news anchor Rob Williams will also contribute with headlines.

“Having two meteorologists already in place makes it an easy transition,” WXIX general manager Bill Lanesey said. “We feel there is a strong appetite for weather first thing in the morning.”

WXIX was the first station in Cincinnati to begin their morning broadcast at 4:30 a.m. The addition of this show to the station lineup will give WXIX eight hours of local news on weekdays, more than any other stations in the market.

Cincinnati Fox-affiliate WXIX is touting a new approach to presenting the news with a slogan that sounds a lot like that of the Fox News Channel.

Over the weekend, WXIX unveiled “Balanced News,” a new campaign that the Raycom-owned station insists is more than just a marketing gimmick.

“We are balancing the content within our newscasts,” WXIX said in a statement to its viewers, “we still report on the news of the day but we balance it by also reporting on stories that focus on what is working in our community.”

The station says that it will set aside time within its newscasts to give anchors and reporters the opportunity to thoroughly report on all sides of specific stories. Anchor Ben Swann (above), who WXIX brought on in December to provide a spark to its evening newscasts, has introduced a new segment during the station’s 10 p.m. newscast called “Reality Check,” in which he dissects a certain topic of the day.

Swann explains the new approach inside… Read more

Fox-affiliate WXIX unveiled a new weapon in the Cincinnati weather wars this week: a camera mounted 313 feet off the ground at the center of the Kings Island amusement park.

Offering an impressive view of the horizon, the camera faces the park’s new WindSeeker ride (which sounds like a meteorology tool in itself) and news director Matt Miller is excited about the images that the station will capture when the park opens this year.

“It will be a fantastic shot during the summer with people on the rides,” Miller tells the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Pat Casey, the news director of Dayton’s WKEF and WRGT, died over the weekend after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was 54.

Casey was diagnosed with Glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, in February of 2010. WKEF-WRGT announced last week that Casey was close to death. He died at a Cincinnati hospice center on Saturday with his wife and three children at his side.

“If you met Pat, you met someone very special. He lived his life the right way,” said Bill Cunningham of Cincinnati talk radio station WLW last week.

Casey worked in southwestern Ohio for the past decade. He was the news director at Cincinnati Fox-affiliate WXIX for five years before moving on to Dayton’s WKEF-WRGT in 2005.  He began his broadcast career 30 years ago at Baltimore’s WMAR.