Milwaukee has been waking up with Mark Concannon since September 1990. The Philadelphia native has worked his way through the country making stops in Syracuse, N.Y., Norfolk, Va., Fort Smith, Ark., Davenport, Iowa and Greensboro, N.C. before landing in Milwaukee to as a sports reporter in 1987. Still a die-hard sports fan, he's a Milwaukee ambassador, too. We sat down with FOX 6's resident early morning guy in this latest edition of Milwaukee Talks.

OMC: What brought you to news reporting?

MC: Growing up, I played sports a lot. I was one of the millions who were OK. I was lucky enough to walk in to the next best thing: sports broadcasting. It's funny, my two best friends I grew up with, we were all interested in this. One of those guys, Terry Smith, now does the Anaheim Angels and the other guy, Paul Kurtz, is now the news anchor at KYW in Philadelphia.

I was doing sports full-time up to 1990 when the Wake Up News started. Management asked what I thought about doing morning news. I felt it might be time to branch out and do some other things. My interest in news has grown, but it all came to that crossroads in September of 1990 when we turned the key and started Wake Up.

OMC: What is your schedule like?

MC: It's an early day. I get to the station between 3:30 and 4 a.m. I write, edit and produce the sports segments we have on and anchor Wake Up News.

It's three and a half hours, but it's pretty fast paced for us. We do a lot of news, interviews, preparing for interviews; a lot of times we're editing interview tapes and preparing for interviews during commercial breaks. Every day is different with this job.

OMC: What's the best part about your job?

MC: It's the personal connection the viewers feel with you. You're there as they're getting the kids ready, as they're jumping in and out of the shower. It's a very informal situation and relationship we have with the viewers. They feel very comfortable with us, and that is the best part. I've done other newscasts, sports and nightly newscasts, but I've never felt the personal connection in my career that I feel doing mornings. There's been nothing like it.

OMC: And the toughest part?

MC: I tell people, once you get up, it's great. An early start to the day and a relatively early finish compared to those folks on the clock until five o'clock. But it's getting to the getting up that's tough. That alarm never moves. If the neighbor's dog barks at 11:45 at night, the alarm still says 2:30 a.m. There are some days where you hear something, you look at you're alarm clock and it says 1:48 a.m. You look at the clock and say, 'I've got 42 minutes left to sleep and it feels like I've been asleep for five minutes.'

OMC: How has morning news changed?

MC: We started in 1990. Everyone had done cut-ins during the network programs, but actual morning news shows were not very developed. We were just kind of on and feeling our way through. There were actually people who said to me, 'You do morning news but you're on TV?' They were thinking radio.

Now, you look at the competition in our morning place and it is such a high priority. Morning news has grown so much with viewer interest and total viewership, it's unbelievable. It's easily the fastest growing television news viewership segment.

OMC: Would you consider yourself a news junkie?

MC: Even if I didn't do this for a living, I'd always want to be the guy who walked in to a friend's house and asked, 'did you hear this?' I always want to be the guy asking if you heard about this trade, this story. I just can't wait to tell people. Even if I wasn't on television, that would be me. That's always exciting.

OMC: Who are some of the notable people you have had an opportunity to interview?

MC: When I was in Virginia, our station and a business newspaper had learned that Muhammad Ali was coming to Virginia Beach. I believe Larry Holmes was fighting that night. Ali was there to look at some hotels. We went, along with the business newspaper and he agreed to let me ask the first couple of questions about sports. We're rolling on the interview, and I'm asking him if he's thinking about another comeback, what he thinks about tonight's fight and after like four or five questions, I ask my last question. He finished his last answer, looks at me and says, "Any more questions, Cosell, Jr.?" We ran that tape a lot.

Two years ago in Lake Geneva, Arnold Palmer was there building a golf course. We were standing in the middle of a fairway, and I asked him what he would do here. He responds, 'Well, you know, Mark,' calling me by my name, 'I'd probably hit about a six or a seven here, but a big guy like you would probably hit a nine.' The greatest golfer of our time just playing up like that.