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https://www.facebook.com/100044407330467/posts/524312242392349/

Simple: he was caught with his pants down and moved to quickly scrub the use of the stuff ripped from News Music Now once it was exposed to the right people that he was doing that. He probably made it private hoping nobody else would see that he was doing that. I am going to go out on a limb and say that he had probably hoped nobody would ever catch him doing this, and it worked, almost. Kind of an odd logic to have when you boast about being seen in over 115 million households. He also started to scrub the NMN stuff from his other show, "The Reed Report" and now uses some random YouTube music: It looks like he was doing this with his other show too, "Valley View with Austin Reed" (how many shows does this guy have?). That one is/was using the old TXCN music and Impact in a sponsor bump. Again, I think once Austin realized what he was doing was not cool, he corrected this. That said, he shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.

Considering where that station's headed, I guess he wanted to get out while the getting was good.

I think they realize that no matter who they brought in as a replacement, it wasn't going to lift them out of third place. It makes sense to continue to strengthen the CBS News brand and devote both time and resources to that effort rather than trying to find yet another anchor for CBSEN. Sometimes you have to resign yourself to certain things (at least for the time being).

There were at one point standards for production that the industry was somewhat holding themselves to, but those have long since been thrown out the window. A one man band with a YouTube account, iPhone and a ring light pulls in millions more viewers than most local newscasts ever will. And good for them. Here's an unpopular opinion: local news doesn't have to be exclusively delivered to an audience via over-the-air television broadcasts. Fresno seems like a journalism desert, a great place for a digital local news startup. It would be much easier to churn out a few local stories daily for a digital presence than trying to figure out how to make 60 minutes of engaging television. There are fully-staffed newsrooms across the country that can't even pull this off. Honestly... it would probably be easier to find too. Meet your audience where they are. I don't think it's 8pm on MyNetworkTV. But if this is about rebuilding a personal brand, getting one's face out there and building a reel, or having a sandbox to play in - why not? No reason to be jealous about it.

My problem isn't with potentially ripping off the news music, which seems to be the main gripe here, though a superficial one. The problem is with the content. There wasn't a single original story and not a frame of newsworthy video he or anyone else shot outside of a studio. If he tried to shoot and put together his own story (or two) like a proper reporter and then put in a few "pacer" stories from police, press releases and other material that don't require too many resources, then he'd probably be able to come up with a decent 15-minute newscast. Throw in a longer interview or two and you might be able to stretch it to 30. That would be a better use of his time and his viewers' time than an hour of old content ripped from other news outlets from YouTube. Go out into the world, talk to people, and do your own story instead of repackaging everyone else's.

Because their days are so long, especially the morning shift. In at 3am and out by at least 1:30. No wonder why Amy Freeze left. Though, if they hated their schedules, they can always find another job that's more flexible. Also, by adding one, the network can pull from here instead of flying some from Chicago, Nashville, etc.

Jim Ramsey, longtime weather anchor and reporter at WGN-TV for 30 years from 1987 to 2017 (and whose career in Chicago began at WLS-TV years before), has died at the age of 69. As someone who watched him regularly growing up on the former WGN superstation feed, all I can say is… we’ll miss you, Jim.