Exclusive: Stephany Fisher leaving CBS46 at end of her contract

I do not know exactly what day will be her last on the air though I'm told by one source her contract is up at the end of June.

Here's what happened last month. A very reliable inside source told me she had left the airwaves during March Madness and that she was leaving the station permanently. Fisher herself wasn't responding to my inquiries.  She was off the air for several days. I didn't hear back immediately from news director Larry Perret.

I held off from writing anything until I noticed Fisher doing something unusual on Saturday night, March 28: she changed her Twitter from @fishercbs46 to @stephanylfisher.

That's when I made presumption #1. She must be leaving the station, I figured. Why change the Twitter handle and drop the station name?

So that's what I originally wrote on March 29: signs were that she was departing after 12 years.

But on Monday night, she returned on air with no comments about her absence. Perret said she had taken some vacation days and was still under contract and working.

I proceeded at this point to make presumption #2: she was staying at CBS46. I didn't ask Perret the right question: was she under a new contract or her existing contract? His wording, in retrospect, implied she was under her current contract. Nobody told me she had signed a new contract. But I made an assumption she may have done so.

In other words, I didn't think of another scenario: she is simply riding out her current contract by staying on air until the contract ends and would be leaving soon.

So I changed the headline to my previous story to "she's staying after all." Technically, I was right. But that implied she was staying because of a new contract. I didn't say that in the story but it was easy to make that supposition.

In reality, that was not the case. So today, once I learned what was going on for sure, I changed the headline to that original story yet again: "she's staying for now."

I will repeat the bottom line: Fisher is leaving CBS46 at some point in the next few weeks.

Fisher has arguably been the face of CBS46. She has been the station's consistent evening anchor since 2003, leading the 11 p.m. newscast, which tends to be their highest rated.

She has been an exception. For the most part for years, CBS46 has been a shifting morass of management and staffing as it has struggled to lift its ratings. But the constant changes and lack of consistency (something both Fox 5 and Channel 2 Action News generally have) has handcuffed the station to a degree. Meredith Corp., which owns CBS46 (WGCL-TV), has shown little patience and keeps hiring and firing administration every couple of years.