WTAE-TV general assignment reporter Lily Coleman will become the station’s new weekend morning news anchor effective Nov. 23.
Coleman, who reported weekday mornings before most recently filling in as morning traffic/noon anchor while Elena LaQuatra has been on maternity leave (LaQuatra will be back to work next week), has also been a weekend fill-in anchor on WTAE.
In her new role Coleman will anchor alongside meteorologist Jill Szwed 5-7 a.m. and 8-10 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Coleman will continue in her general assignment reporter role Monday through Wednesday, shifting from mornings to dayside.
“I’m really excited to work with Jill,” Coleman said. “Jill is super-talented, and she brings such a calm nature to the morning newscast. She’s so good at what she does, and she does it with a smile. People are just getting up and you want to bring them what they need to know and do it in a friendly manner.”
Coleman joined Channel 4 in October 2022 as a general assignment reporter. She’s a Johnstown native whose mother, Amy Bradley, was a long-time news anchor at WJAC-TV who was defeated last week in the Pennsylvania State House District 72 race by incumbent Democrat Frank Burns.
A 2018 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, Coleman worked as a reporter and later weekday morning anchor at WOWK-TV in Charleston, W.Va., for four years before joining WTAE.
“I’m definitely a morning person,” said Coleman, who gave birth to daughter Margot in March, giving her even more experience with early waking hours. “Not everyone is a morning person — sometimes people get thrown into that shift — but I love it.”
Coleman said she’s always been a fan of Western Pennsylvania but she’s even more of one now that she’s lived in the region for two years.
“I love the people and I love our viewers: they’re so loyal and so kind,” she said. “I grew up not terribly far from here and now I live 10 minutes away from my grandparents, so I knew what I was getting into [when I moved here] but I’m so pleasantly surprised to be able to do what I love to do in a place that I love with people that are so wonderful.”
Coleman takes the place of Tom Garris, who left WTAE in July for a weekday anchor role at Hearst sister station WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H.
Local on ‘Rhythm’
Pittsburgher Christian LaNeve, 19, is among the contestants featured in the second season premiere of Netflix’s “Rhythm Flow,” a rap music competition series with judges Ludacris, DJ Khaled and Latto. Episodes debut in batches Nov. 20, 27 and Dec. 4.
Channel surfing
On Thursday at 9 a.m., WQED-TV debuts the pilot episode of a program for children and adults created by Pittsburgher Mark Williams. “Hello, Humans!” is not a WQED production but an independent project designed to introduce mindfulness and meditation into viewers’ lives. The program repeats on Channel 13 at 6:30 a.m. Sunday and streams on WQED’s Education YouTube Channel and at https://www.wqed.org/hello-humans/. … Sunday’s return of “Yellowstone” delivered the show’s largest premiere night audience ever, drawing 16.4 million viewers across cable and CBS airings. … Chris Wallace will exit CNN after three years to pursue his own independent media ventures. … CBS’s new daytime soap, “Beyond the Gates,” will launch at 2 p.m. Feb. 24, airing locally on KDKA-TV. … Unsurprisingly, now that there are ads on Amazon’s Prime Video, Amazon will shutter Amazon Freevee, its free, ad-supported streaming service. … At 9 p.m. Nov. 29, CBS will air “Blue Bloods: Celebrating a Family Legacy,” a tribute special to the long-running drama series that goes behind-the-scenes of the making of the final episodes leading up to the 10 p.m. Dec. 13 series finale. … Hulu renewed Onyx Collective’s “Reasonable Doubt” for a third season. … Lady Gaga will have a role – details are being kept under wraps — in season two of Netflix’s “Wednesday.”