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Published on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 11:47
WMAQ-TV/NBC 5 announced a some changes with their newscasts today. The station is reshuffling its anchors around -- moving one from mornings to evening and one from weekends to weekdays -- and giving one of its best reporters a more prominent role.
Rob Elgas is being promoted up from early mornings co-anchoring to co-anchoring the 4:30pm newscast, as well as reporting for the 10:00pm newscast. For the 4:30pm newscast, Elgas will join Marion Brooks in anchoring the early evening news. Brooks has been anchoring the newscast solo. The promotion takes effect this coming Monday, February 20th.
Elgas has been with WMAQ-TV since August, 2002, when he joined the station as a general assignment reporter. He has been co-anchoring the early morning newscasts since 2008. In his nine and a half years with the station, he has won a pair of local Emmy Awards for his work.
Rob Elgas is a native of Chicago's northwest suburbs. Prior to joining WMAQ-TV, Elgas was an anchor for KVIA-TV in El Paso, TX, and also worked for WICD-TV in downstate Champaign, where he did reporting, fill-in anchoring, weather, and more. Being an alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in Broadcast Journalism and Communications, he was quite familiar with that market.
On his
Facebook page today, Rob Elgas said: "I hope all of you continue to follow me as I move to the 4:30pm news, co-anchoring with Marion Brooks. And join Lauren Jiggetts, Alison Rosati, Rob Stafford and me, starting next week, as I start reporting stories for the 10pm. Dusting off the reporter notebook. Thank you all for allowing me to be a part your mornings for the last 4 years! Every single one of you make me proud and humble to be a Chicagoan."
As Rob Elgas referred to in his quote, popular general assignment reporter Lauren Jiggetts is now back reporting for the 10:00pm newscast, as of this past week. She is now being given a more prominent, regular role with the station, after having having worked every possible shift and newscast for the station since she joined it back in January 2007. Jiggetts previously worked with Elgas on the morning newscast as a contributor and fill-in anchor. She will now be reunited with him as a regular reporter on the television station's all-important 10:00pm newscast. Jiggetts, the daughter of former Chicago Bear and local sportscaster/sports talker Dan Jiggetts, will still be seen on other evening newscasts, as needed.
Lauren Jiggetts has earned both a national and local Emmy Award for her work since joining WMAQ-TV just over five years ago.
When Rob Elgas was promoted to co-anchor the WMAQ-TV morning newscast, he was promoted up from being anchor of the weekend newscasts. The same career path is true of his replacement. Starting next Monday morning, weekend morning news anchor Stefan Holt will move up to weekday mornings.
Holt, who has been with WMAQ-TV only since last June, came to the station after two years as a reporter and weekend morning/fill-in news anchor in Palm Beach, FL at WPBF-TV. He also was a reporter/correspondent for Palestra.net/UWire.com, the college news network. Holt graduated from Pepperdine University with a Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Broadcast Telecommunications and Political Science.
Like Lauren Jiggetts, Stefan Holt is the child of a well-known Chicago media star. His father is Lester Holt, the NBC News/MSNBC anchor who spent over a dozen years in Chicago as an anchor for WBBM-TV. Stefan Holt grew up in Chicago's Lincoln Park area while his father worked here.
It has been a positive and eventful year for Stefan Holt, who was able to come back to Chicago to become a news anchor, earn a promotion from weekends to weekdays, and became engaged to his college sweetheart.
Temporarily, Stefan Holt will be co-anchoring the weekday morning news along side his weekend co-anchor Kim Vatis, who is filling-in as co-anchor since Zoraida Sambolin exited NBC 5's mornings in December to take a national job with CNN in New York. That will only be the case until the middle of next month, when new morning news co-anchor Daniella Guzman will start. (Start date tentatively set for March 12th, but could very well change.)
Guzman, whose hire was
announced last month, is coming up to Chicago's WMAQ-TV from Houston, TX's KPRC-TV, where she has been a weekend anchor and general assignment reporter since 2006.
Guzman is exited about joining WMAQ-TV next month. She has already been approached to emcee events around town, as well. Her first one will be on April 25th, where she will be the host for the Chicago Latino Network's 12th annual "Schmoozefest," Chicago's largest Latino professional networking event.
