Marcheskie is a
newscaster for Channel 27, the ABC affiliate in Harrisburg, and he won in the
“Continuing Coverage” category during the Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award ceremony
Saturday night in Philadelphia.
He was competing against
news reporters from all of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, he said.
“I’ve been nominated
before and not won, so I didn’t think I would win this year. And then I did the
same kind of thing Jon Hamm did; I didn’t even use the stairs, I just hopped up
on stage,” Marcheskie told The Mercury Monday.
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Marcheskie, who
graduated from Pottstown in 2003 and was a member of the Trojan team that won
the PAC-10 football championship that year, was recognized for a
four-installment series of stories called, of all things, “Cat House of Horrors.”
“It began with this
woman, and she got kicked out of her house, and she was living in a trailer and
feeding all these feral cats and it smelled and it was just a mess,” Marcheskie
said.
“I was nominated for
another story, a very sad story, about a 9-year-old boy who died in his
third-floor bedroom. He was just 16 pounds and his parents were brought up on
charges, but I guess nothing beats the crazy cat story,” Marcheskie said.
He had been nominated in
the past, but this was his first win.
“It was definitely a
shock. I mean I was nominated for the other story, so I was competing against myself,”
Marcheskie said with a chuckle. “And submitting the cat story at all was just
kind of a last-minute thing.”
A guard and linebacker
on the football teams of both Pottstown High School and Ursinus College, where
he also studied politics and “all things media,” Marcheskie said he has always
wanted to be in front of a camera or behind the microphone.
“I did the school
announcements, I worked with PCTV and took all the television classes they had
and when I wasn’t playing football at college, I was calling lacrosse games,
anything I could to keep my hand in it,” Marcheskie said.
He singled out Pottstown
High School teachers Leslye Blackwell and Robert Decker for “always being so
supportive and giving great advice.”
And about two years
before graduating from Ursinus, Marcheskie said he realized being a
professional athlete was not in the cards for him.
“So I figured I could
still be part of the sports world and I got a job as production assistant at
Comcast SportsNet, but I really wanted to get on camera,” Marcheskie said.
“I had dinner one night
with (Channel 6 Action News reporter) David Henry and he told me I should try
out for a news job,” said Marcheskie.
“So I was selling cars
at Fred Beans in Limerick, and I quit my job and put together a news audition
tape and I got a job in about two weeks down in North Carolina,” he said. “I
was really lucky.”
For two years, he worked
for a Greenville TV station “basically covering everything east of I-95. I was
kind of a one-man band, had to bring my own camera. So if there was a hurricane
coming, I had to drive three hours to the Outer Banks, shoot a segment and
drive three hours back to put the story together,” Marcheskie said.
“And that was before we
could do it remotely, so you didn’t always have a lot of time,” he said.
And somewhere along the
way, Marcheskie said he started to realize how much he liked straight news
reporting.
“I really like the
storytelling aspects of it, interviewing people about their lives, the idea of keeping
politicians accountable, with my background studying politics, it got under my
skin,” Marcheskie said.
And now he has an Emmy
Award to show for it.