WTHR weekend anchor Pescovitz leaving for Minneapolis station

WTHR-TV Channel 13 weekend anchor Naomi Pescovitz announced Monday that she’s leaving to take a job at a Fox station in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, covering the region where she was born and previously worked.

“In so many ways, this feels like a homecoming for me,” she said in a post on Facebook. “It is also a wild new adventure.”

Pescovitz

Pescovitz will be helping to launch a 7 p.m. newscast at KMSP-Fox 9, which she said will “give me my weekends back and I’ll be able to turn off that 1:30 a.m. alarm clock.”

“We know launching a new show will be a challenge and guess what, we are pretty darn excited about that,” she wrote.

Although Pescovitz was born in Minneapolis, she moved with her parents—prominent physicians Ora and Mark Pescovitz—to Indianapolis before her first birthday. She graduated from North Central in 2005 and earned a double major in journalism and international studies in 2009 from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

She spent two years as a reporter at KVOA-TV Channel 4 in Tucson, Arizona. She was one of the first journalists on the scene on Jan. 8, 2011, when U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and seriously wounded at a grocery store outside of Tucson.

She then worked as a reporter and fill-in anchor for ABC affiliate KSTP-TV Channel 5 in Minneapolis before returning to Indianapolis to take over Channel 13’s weekend morning newscasts.

In her Facebook post on Monday, Pescovitz reflected on her time in central Indiana, saying that she had enjoyed watching Indianapolis become a destination, seeing the city’s “food scene explode,” and spending time at her former high school.

“Leaving all of that is hard,” she wrote. “But it’s time for something new.”

Pescovitz's mother, a former senior vice president at Eli Lilly and Co. and former CEO of Riley Hospital for Children, left the Indianapolis area earlier this year after she was named president of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Her father served as a professor of surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine before dying in a 2010 car crash.

In the past year, WTHR has lost two other prominent on-air personalities.

In January, longtime Channel 13 anchor Bruce Kopp announced his departure after nearly 34 years at the station. He told IBJ that WTHR offered him another contract, but he could not agree to its terms and decided to leave. Months earlier, the station had moved Kopp from his weekday morning news anchor position to a weekend anchor spot.

In December, Jeremy Brilliant, who had worked at the station for 10 years, largely as a morning reporter, announced he was leaving the station. In January, he joined Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill’s staff as director of communications.