Claudine Ewing

Claudine Ewing is a long-serving on-air journalist at WGRZ whose work is defined by deeply reported community stories that follow people over time and connect local culture, education, and public institutions. She works across anchoring and reporting, combining daily news with feature pieces and special programming that foreground the lives behind headlines. Entertainment and cultural coverage sits inside that frame, often tied to performances, sports, honors, and community events where individual stories carry as much weight as the spectacle.

Community programming and cultural storytelling

Ewing helps shape WGRZ’s community-focused programming, co-hosting and producing the monthly show “commUNITY,” which is built around conversations with local leaders and residents about culture, inclusion, and everyday life in the area she covers.

Her reporting often highlights people being recognized for their contributions, such as coverage of a school being renamed in honor of educator Nan M. Wood, where the emphasis is on legacy, students, and the community reaction rather than ceremony alone. In her work around diversity and inclusion, including moderating a workplace DEI symposium, she draws out specific, grounded examples of how policies and corporate initiatives affect employees and neighborhoods, favoring practical detail over abstract language.

Across these pieces, the tone is direct and respectful, and she treats cultural and entertainment subjects - performances, events, and honors - as entry points into broader stories about identity and community.

Human stories followed over years

A defining trait of Ewing’s coverage is her willingness to stay with a story over long stretches of time. In “Preemie Goes to College,” she follows one young woman from a premature birth through high school graduation, using each milestone to show both medical progress and family resilience.

That approach turns a single-feature premise into a longitudinal narrative, with careful attention to chronology and the small changes that add up to a life trajectory. She applies similar discipline when profiling people connected to sports and entertainment, as in “The Smart Football Scholar,” a story on mathematician and professional football player John Urschel, where she balances athletic achievement with academic rigor and the decisions that shape a career.

Ewing’s broader professional descriptions emphasise asking tough questions and giving a voice to the voiceless, and this is visible in how these pieces center the subject’s own words and circumstances while still situating them in a wider social context.

Public issues, law and accountability

Beyond individual profiles, Ewing covers public policy and legal change with a strong emphasis on how decisions affect families and vulnerable people. One recurrent example is her reporting on a family’s sustained campaign to strengthen penalties for repeat child abusers, a story she follows through legislative efforts and eventual passage of “Jay J’s law,” treating the statute not as a procedural outcome but as the culmination of advocacy rooted in a specific child’s experience.

She has also served as a panel journalist in a mayoral debate, where her role is to press candidates on issues that matter to residents and to test campaign claims against everyday realities.

Across this work, Ewing’s style matches what her professional summaries describe: direct questioning, clear framing of accountability, and space for affected people to explain how policy choices show up in their lives. Even when the subject matter is serious, she maintains the same plain, measured delivery seen in her feature reporting, avoiding loaded language and keeping the focus on verified facts and lived experience.

Breaking news and special coverage

Ewing’s long tenure at WGRZ includes significant breaking-news and weather coverage, which has shaped how she handles high-pressure stories. During the historic “Snowvember” storm, she reported on conditions that dramatically altered daily life in parts of her area, and later reflected on the need to stay sensitive to the people living through a crisis rather than treating the event only as spectacle. That perspective - recognising that a major storm or emergency can permanently change individual lives - feeds back into her broader reporting style, where even routine news is framed in terms of impact on households, workers, and communities. As an anchor as well as a reporter, she routinely moves between presenting fast-developing information and returning to longer-form, follow-up pieces that document what recovery looks like after the cameras move on. The result is a body of work in which entertainment, culture, public issues, and breaking news are all approached with the same straightforward, community-grounded lens.