Trailblazing KDKA, KPIX Boss Carolyn Wean Dies

By Andrew Gauthier 

Carolyn Wean, a trailblazing TV executive who was a longtime station boss with Group W, died Friday at her home after a long illness.  She was 68.

Wean was a TV pioneer. She was the first woman to serve as news director of a Pittsburgh station and eventually became the market’s (and Group W’s) first female general manager with KDKA. In 1986, Wean was tapped as GM of Group W’s KPIX and in 1993 she became vice president of news development for the station group. She retired in 2002 after a stint overseeing production for Pittsburgh’s WQED.

“She left a real legacy,” Kweilin Nassar, who worked with Wean at KDKA and WQED, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently. “She was a mentor for a lot of women.”

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A Baltimore native, Wean got her first TV job at WBZ and over her long career she won a slew of awards, including two Peabodys, three Emmys, and an Edward R. Murrow award. In 2010, she was honored by the Women and Girls Foundation as one of Pittsburgh’s leading “Women in Media.”

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