Veteran reporter John McLoughlin returning to TV news on WNYT

Longtime television newsman John McLoughlin, who recently left WTEN Television, is going back to work on TV.

McLoughlin said Thursday he will be working three days a week for WNYT Television, NewsChannel 13, beginning in mid-April.

The veteran reporter also has another job lined up. Starting in May, he’ll write a column that will appear Fridays in The Daily Gazette.

“It just sounded good,” McLoughlin, 68, said of the WNYT position. “They do a nice job over there.”

“They don’t need me to be No. 1,” he added, alluding to the Menands station’s consistent top finishes in the Nielsen quarterly ratings books. “They’re already No. 1 across the board.”

“We’re very happy about it,” said Stephen P. Baboulis, vice president and general manager at WNYT. “We’ve admired John from afar. He has such deep knowledge of this community and the Capitol and how the system works around here, we feel that’s great knowledge that will benefit our team and our viewers a lot.”

Baboulis said WNYT viewers will see McLoughlin on all station newscasts. “He’s going to be doing some of those stories that he has special knowledge about,” he said. “Whether it’s people he knows that nobody else knows or things he knows that are going on that nobody else knows, or the inner workings of the Capitol that he can get us a scoop on that his decades of experience really help him to just know.”

In January, McLoughlin notified Albany’s WTEN he intended to resign; his final day with the station was Feb. 10. He told The Gazette he hoped to eventually find part-time work.

McLoughlin is one of the longest-tenured reporters in the Capital Region. He began his news career at the Troy Record newspaper on May 5, 1965.

He later worked at the Times Union in Albany, moved west to work at the afternoon Times-Union newspaper in Rochester and then switched to Rochester’s morning paper, the Democrat and Chronicle.

He returned to Albany for a job at the Times Union in the early 1970s, and took a part-time job at WTEN in 1972. He began working at WTEN full time in February 1973 and was promoted to managing editor in 2003.

Baboulis said he was “pleasantly surprised” McLoughlin was available. “And more pleasantly surprised when we began talking with him,” he said. “Eric Hoppel, our news director, really was the one who began talking with him and it seemed as if they hit it off immediately. I’ve known John for decades myself and it seemed as if we were getting to the same page of what we would want out of him and what he wanted to do. It really was a nice series of discussions between Eric and John.”

McLoughlin said he’s anxious to get back to news.

“You can only watch ‘Judge Judy’ for so long,” he said. “I’m afraid all my muscles will atrophy if I don’t go back to work.”