Cheryl Scott and Dante Deiana (Photo: Cheryl Scott/Instagram)
Robservations on the media beat:
Dante Deiana and Cheryl Scott
A romantic sunset atop a Hawaiian volcano was the setting of a marriage proposal over the weekend to Cheryl Scott, 33, meteorologist at ABC-owned WLS-Channel 7. Chicago DJ Dante “Dante the Don” Deiana, 35, popped the question at the summit of the Haleakala volcano on Maui. “THIS MOMENT!! Makes me feel like I’m on top of the world!” Scott posted on Instagram along with photos of the couple. “Are you kidding me??? 10,000 feet high . . . above the clouds . . . at sunset! A dream for anyone but especially for this Meteorologist!” Calling it the “best day of my life,” Deiana wrote: “It all came together on top of a volcano above the clouds at sunset with the girl of my dreams.”
Mike North
Retired sports radio personality Mike North will turn up for two days this week on ESPN Radio sports/talk WMVP 1000-AM. Filling in for midday hosts Carmen DeFalco and John Jurkovic from noon to 2 p.m., North will appear Monday with Fred Huebner and Tuesday with Jesse Rogers. Huebner and Rogers, both staffers at ESPN 1000, previously worked with North at Entercom sports/talk WSCR 670-AM. Look for other familiar Chicago sports radio voices to pop up as ESPN 1000 celebrates its 20th anniversary in the coming months. The big bash will be October 12 when every show on the station's lineup will broadcast live from Austin’s in Libertyville.
Mike Lowe
You may not see a more clever feature story on TV news this year than Mike Lowe’s two-minute masterpiece last week on Tribune Broadcasting WGN-Channel 9. Lowe turned what could have been an ordinary piece — about Build-A-Bear Workshop's "Pay Your Own Age" promotion Thursday at Woodfield Mall — into a work of poetry. He even managed to incorporate interviews with customers into his rhyming scheme. (Here is the link.) A Chicago native and graduate of Loyola Academy and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Lowe has been a reporter at WGN since 2015.
Whet Moser
Whet Moser has resigned as senior editor (digital) of Chicago magazine to join the news website Quartz as deputy obsession editor. Moser, a University of Chicago graduate and former associate editor of the Chicago Reader, is the author of Chicago: From Vision to Metropolis, to be published in October by University of Chicago Press Books. Chicago magazine is expected to fill Moser’s position from within.
Chicago media personalities with inflated Twitter followings have seen their numbers plummet since the social media platform purged tens of millions of locked and inactive accounts last week. According to a survey by Chicago free-lance writer Bob Goldsborough, the biggest losers here were food critic Steve Dolinsky, who dropped 25,800 (from 52,200 to 26,400), and radio personality Erich Mancow Muller, who dropped 18,400 (from 61,800 to 43,400). Twitter said it purged previously locked accounts because of suspicious activity as part of a security crackdown. Disclosure: My account lost 200 — from 29,800 to 29,600.
Friday’s comment of the day: Mike Braden: One paper says Marwa [Eltagouri] was wrong, another says she is fine. None of us know the truth, and may never know. But the impotent anger from people who think they know more comes out.