KBTX Bryan-College Station's "Brazos Valley This Morning" teams up newlywed anchors Kathleen and Josh Ninke
I am late on this one, but it is interesting to note that KBTX News3 Bryan - College Station now has a married morning anchor team.
Kathleen Witte (who now goes by Ninke on air) and Josh Ninke met each other at KBTX in 2017 and just got married earlier in 2020.
"I will say that our bosses asked if maybe Josh would consider taking my last name, Witte, so we could call the show, 'Wake up with the Witte's,'" joked Kathleen in an exchange with KBTX evening anchors Karla Castillo and Rusty Surette in announcement about the big schedule change before its debut.
As of early September, the newlyweds have been waking up together at 2:30am with Kathleen moving from anchoring the 4pm and 6pm newscasts to join Josh on "Brazos Valley This Morning" at 4:30am.
"Maybe it'll be easier because when his alarm goes off, I already wake up a little bit," Kathleen said. "So now I'll just stay awake instead of going back to sleep. Wait a second. This is sounding this isn't sounding good [laughing]."
Surette added that when the now newlywed anchors first met, in his opinion, they were newsroom flirts!
"There was immediate chemistry," Castillo added. "This is nothing but respect to all of y'all, and I think, you know, you kept that boundary, that workroom and friends. But I think we could always tell there was something there. And that's what I think has been fun when y'all started dating and then you got married, I think we were like 'finally!'"
"We fought it for about a year, year and a half," admitted Josh. "But then it was like, 'Oh, yeah, no, this is exactly what we're supposed to be doing.'"
Anchors across the world have to look like they like each other or at least pretend like it on air, but this won't be a problem for the new BVTM team.
But even if love is in the air, the newsroom bosses still carefully suggested the new on-air pairing.
"When our boss, Josh, our news director, also named Josh [Gorbutt], when he sat me down, he said, 'Hey, this is the plan and I'm going to do it unless you tell me right now that you're like on the brink of divorce,'" Kathleen admitted. "And I said, 'We're not. We're newlyweds, so I think if ever a couple can handle it, it's right now at the beginning, it's right now."
Also on the un-official "News with the Ninke's" is meteorologist Max Crawford and reporter Fallon Appleton. No word if those two are in relationships, but what if cupid struck the KBTX team twice?
With Kathleen's time slot move, morning anchor Erika Fernandez moves to the 4pm newscast and Castillo adds 6pm news duties.
