The Baltimore Sun
After 21 years at Baltimore’s WMAR, Mary Beth Marsden, the face of Channel 2 news, signed off for the last time from the station’s anchor desk Wednesday night.
She said goodbye to area viewers at the end of the 6 p.m. newscast with the same sense of fun and easygoing grace that distinguished her long career.
“Twenty-one years. 15 hairstyles. One for every news director,” she said in narration over an evocative three-minute package of clips that stretched back to her earliest days at WMAR and closed her last newscast. Her writing perfectly captured Marsden’s keen ability to kid herself and a local TV news industry that often seems to take itself far too seriously.
Marsden’s exit is part of a larger story of transition and upheaval at Baltimore’s ABC affiliate, as union employees weigh buyout offers from the station’s owners, the E.W. Scripps Company. Like Marsden, anchorman Terry Owens has also accepted an offer, and is leaving the station at the end of the week after 17 years on-air. More departures are expected in coming days and weeks. More…