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CBS oughta check in with the brain trust at Macy’s about how well standardization works.

Yup. People love having some kind of local connection. Lazarus here used to have 10 or 12 stores in the area. Once they took the Lazarus names off the buildings and put Macy's on them, they've dwindled to three stores, soon to be two.

By the way, we thought NN had made a mistake sending us the promos for the Cuomo interview earlier today. I didn't realize they had decided to rerun the interview tonight.

And they deleted the clip a short time later

It is interesting that Hearst's WMOR Tampa provides TV Listings on its Web Site!! I have been trying for years to find Listings on any Hearst Station Web Site!! Fortunately, there are plenty of Online Listing Services!!

That's not necessarily a bad thing. News overkill is done to the death on alot of stations with nothing but repeats, fluff and the same stories every other station is doing. Then again I suppose the point of more hours of news is not to get the same audience watching continuously for hours but the ability to have different audiences tune in at multiple points during the day for news at almost any time of day.

KBJR is stronger, yes. But with two states (three, if you want to get technical since there's a couple counties in Michigan's UP) they have done a good job after the "NewsCenter" breakup to make KBJR6 a Minnesota-heavy newscast and CBS3 a Wisconsin-Heavy newscast. Given that both stations share reporters and a newsroom, the only real cost differential is that Quincy has 2 studios and 2 control rooms in the Lake Avenue studio that they operate simultaneously. Each station also has their own anchor teams and meteorologists (Which Gray might keep- Looking at KVLY in Fargo, similar is done for the 4pm-7pm news blocks that alternate channels every half-hour). What I see happening in Duluth is consolidating Morning newscasts, Weekend Newscasts, and Breaking news/weather cut-ins, but leaving weeknights alone.

They probably won’t rebrand as “X’s NewsCenter” or “X News Now,” but I could see the Peoria operation rebranded as “21 News,” as both ABC and NBC are on WPTA now. I don’t know if Gray has been doing the same “consolidation via attrition” strategy in Duluth, but if they are, I imagine they’ll do something similar and take the name of the stronger newscast (KBJR I assume.) I agree with your sentiments of everything being boring and cookie-cutter, but they already do this now. Everything has been consolidated under the same umbrella for a while, and I don’t think having different studios and anchor teams changes that. Besides, the content is pretty much the same anyway. Gray doesn’t want to spend on different studios, anchors, etc. to put out essentially the same newscast from the same news department with the facade of looking different. It makes financial sense to consolidate everything under the stronger news brand (25 News) than to spend on a facade. It might actually drive more viewers to the ABC station. I imagine more people watch “25 News” than “Heart of Illinois News” even though they’re both from the same operation. Ideally, I would rather the two stations have completely different newscasts, staff, newsrooms, identities, etc., but we sadly don’t live in that world anymore.

WCCB has Maury so I figured it would go there.

Funny you mention Bozo. David Arquette bought the character last year and is looking to bring him back to the limelight. That said, I don't see any evidence that local TV stations are part of the equation. As for local stations making more diverse programming, I think the last major push for that kind of thing came from USA Broadcasting, who used WAMI in Miami as model for CityVision, which was supposed to be a group of stations emphasizing locally produced programming. Unfortunately, the WAMI experiment was a ratings disaster, and the rest of the USA stations abandoned the idea of a big local push in favor of just being run of the mill independent stations at a time when The WB and UPN were pushing those out, and Barry Diller gave up on the whole experiment within a few years, selling the stations to Univision to form the basis of Telefutura, now called UniMas. I can imagine the failure of the CityVision concept left a massive stink over the concept of local programming outside of news and pay-for-play, and it's probably why stations haven't been more daring. Still, that was in the late 90s and early 2000s, when cable was at its peak and internet video was barely a thing. Maybe it'd work better today, but I can still imagine some executive thinking back to CityVision and saying "Nope! Not again!"

WGN had been using weekends a few weeks ago for original content like Chicago’s Best and Living Healthy Chicago. Currently, they only have Backstory with Larry Potash, but they recently launched a new longform documentary division called WGN Films.

I’ve come around to thinking this way myself, but in all likelihood, station groups will continue to add newscasts for the time being. The amount of ad revenue they generate will be attractive to station owners, and they don’t yet see the implications of overworking the staff. There has to be some sort of breaking point for this expansion, but I don’t see it happening yet. If they don’t slash the non-core time-slots entirely, I’d like to see stations do news differently in those time slots. I’d love to see a local Ros Atkins-type analysis show at 4pm, where major stories are broken down/explained, and multiple perspectives are examined. I actually give Tegna a bit of credit for trying alternative newscasts in certain time slots at KUSA and KTVB. I personally wish they would focus more on analysis instead of commentary/opinion, and Kyle Clark can come across as being a bit arrogant at times, but the format seems to work, at least at those stations. Plus, they relieve the pressure on the rest of the staff and make the station stand out. I don’t think they have to revive “Bozo the Clown” or anything, but it would be refreshing to see local stations produce their own content. The way the TV market is going, they might just need to in order to stay relevant. The networks are prioritizing streaming, and the affiliates have become a secondary concern (Ex: CBS was willing to leave top-rated WRAL for basement-dweller WNCN just so they could receive reverse compensation.) Producing local programming other than news and the generic pay-for-play crap would at least be a step in making stations more relevant in their own communities again.

Forget whether Americans really want them or not, do people at the stations themselves want these extra newscasts? Especially when stations are already short-staffed and most certainly aren't adding extra bodies for these (both because people don't want to work there and because companies don't want to hire extra labor — it's a two-way street)? If anything, stations should be dumping newscasts outside of core hours to help give their staff a break. Mornings, noon, 6, and 11pm are all you really need. The 9ams, 3pms, 4pms, 7pms, weekend morning shows of the world can go if you don't have the staff. Not only is it overkill and repetitive, but it's a lot of work when most stations are stretching their staffs thin. If you have to make your people pull double shifts to get both the morning and evening shows on the air, that's a problem. If you have college interns anchoring your weekend morning show because no one else wants to do it, that's a problem. Although I'll argue that syndication has not been very compelling the past few years and has gotten pretty cliche. It's either "talk show with big name celebrity" or court show. There's no ifs, ands, or buts. These companies really need to do something different. I'd also love to see a local station do something other than news or pay-for-play, but unfortunately local stations stopped being daring and creative once quirky local individuals sold their stations to hedge funds. (I will give Graham Media Group credit in San Antonio, KSAT can and has produced a lot of non-news local shows in the past couple of years, mostly for their digital platforms but they'll air it on TV as weekend filler, most notably Texas Eats)

Neither do I, but apparently, this is America, and it’s all about greed. Honestly, if TV is nothing But News, I really don’t see how this makes America the greatest country in the world. Anyone loving all these newscasts must have about as much personality as a slab of wood.

I'm not liking the trend of filling programming gaps with news news news to the point of fluff and repeats.

Whether or not we are, I’d rather ask myself Not whether America really needs all these newscasts, but rather whether Americans WANT them? Are Americans really asking for the end of syndication as we know it?

Agreed. As I've said before Lacey delivers like the kid who got picked to read in class and didn't want to. He rushes through sentences with no emotion at all. I get that Fox 5 News tries to fit as much stories into the first 10 minutes of the 10:00 news in a fast paced format, but his cadence lacks. Times have evolved but Reporters from the 60s-80s were really good at rythmic but straightforward delivery. None of Fox 5's news teams-- or newscast for that matter-- really stand out. The one thing I'll give the station is that they are really good at covering urban, hip hop, and West Indian communities.

Steve Lacy and Lori Stokes have no chemistry as an anchor team. It's hard to watch. In fact, none of WNYW's anchors/anchor teams work. From anchors to reporters, they all seem inexperienced. They need to work on their delivery.