Channel 6 anchorman Walter Cryan

Journal files / STEVE SZYDLOWSKI

As Channel 6 formally changed hands this week, a venerable Rhode Island broadcaster waved goodbye to the news business.

Anchorman Walter Cryan, a Massachusetts native whose Rhode Island career began on radio in 1965, retired last Friday, ahead of the ownership change that took effect Tuesday.

The new owners, Global Broadcasting of Southern New England, made several changes in station management, including letting news director Edwin Hart go. Cryan, 75, came out of retirement three years ago to lead Channel 6’s news broadcast at Hart’s request. Hart and Cryan became friends when they held similar positions at Channel 12 in the 1980s.

Cryan said yesterday that his contract with Channel 6 included a clause letting the newsman walk away if Hart were ever replaced as news director.

When that happened, Cryan took stock of where he was in life. “I’ve got more behind me than I have in front of me,” he said. “It was time for me.” He said he will miss his coworkers at Channel 6. “It was a great bunch of young people there.”

Hart was temporarily replaced as news director by the station’s new vice president and general manager, Stephen Doerr.

Doerr has been in broadcasting more than 25 years, previously working for the Dallas-based media consulting firm Audience Research and Development. He has held news positions at stations in New York, Dallas, Washington, Cleveland and Philadelphia, according to a statement from Global Broadcasting. Besides filling in for Hart until a full-time replacement is found, Doerr also replaced general manager Roland T. Adeszko.

Kevin O’Brien, a San Francisco resident, is president and chief executive of the company. His business partner, senior vice president Robinson Ewert, now lives in Westerly, a community he began summering in 20 years ago. Both had been executives at Iowa-based Meredith Broadcasting Group. Channel 6 is the first television station purchased by Global Broadcasting.

When the deal to buy the station from Freedom Communications was announced in March, O’Brien and Ewert said they plan to invest in the station and expand the news staff in hopes that the third-place newscast can compete with Channels 10 and 12.

“The staff is going to be dramatically increased over time,” O’Brien said then. “We did not buy this television station to cut it back. We bought it to add people to it, to fix it and to make it the number-one television station in the market.”

Ewert said then that he respected Channels 10 and 12, “but I feel we can really move WLNE forward. We’re going to try to nip at their heels.”

A company spokesman yesterday reiterated their statements, promising Channel 6 would reinvigorate its news programming.

After 15 years at Cox Television Independent Group, supervising five Cox stations around the country, O’Brien became president of Meredith Broadcasting Group, based in Iowa. In an effort to make Meredith’s TV stations more competitive, O’Brien moved aggressively to make changes, including replacing station general managers “at dizzying speed,” according to a 2003 account printed in The Business of Television Broadcasting & Cable. The article described O’Brien’s effort, saying “he launched a critique of what he considers complacency among many of his peers in the tactful, understated style for which he’s known: ‘Wimps!’ he called them.”

Analysts credited him with boosting profit.

But O’Brien’s leadership of Meredith ended abruptly in the fall of 2004, when the board of directors fired him for “violations of Meredith’s Equal Employment Opportunities policies,” according to a company news release dated Oct. 28, 2004. The company’s statement did not elaborate on the dismissal, saying only that “it did not involve financial matters.”

Channel 6 primarily serves Providence and New Bedford, Mass.

With Journal file reports by Lynn Arditi and Andy Smith.

pparker@projo.com