Leaderboard

Surprisingly, Mobile/Pensacola is one of the only Sinclair markets to have not moved LMA/SSA station feeds to their owned and operated stations. That could be with WPMI's NBC affiliation, and if it is contractually tied to WPMI, and cannot be moved to WFGX or WEAR as a primary or secondary subchannel, much like Sinclair has done in other markets like Columbus and Charleston. Meanwhile, stations like WALA continue to run away with expanding their local programming, and with the recent cancellations of Dr. Phil, Judge Mathis, and the People's Court, there goes the last of their daily syndication, clearing the way for Gray to put the KVVU model of news from sunrise to sunset. FTVLive picked up on a Twitter thread from a former employee, describing his experience working at WPMI, and how the belt tightening has been going on for a while now... https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/3/26/sinclair-continues-to-cut

Sinclair has itself to blame, but also has Rupert Murdoch to share it with them. The company chose to grow its station portfolio as fast as it did, even though it had not long before its 2010s buying spree, had quite a bit of debt on its hands. On the RSN front, Sinclair chose to partner with Allen Media to buy the Fox Sports regional networks at a time when cord-cutting was increasing, and exacerbated things by, not long after taking over the company, making fee demands that wound up greatly reducing Bally Sports’ vMVPD distribution to where DirecTV Stream was the only live TV streamer carrying them; this, in turn, made it nearly impossible for the company to be able to pay down the debt it inherited from the purchase. By the time Diamond Sports got Fubo to bring back the Bally Sports networks a few months ago, cord-cutting had reached a point where the costs of a company like Sinclair operating an RSN became prohibitive. Diamond’s financial issues must have some ripple effect on Sinclair’s bottom line to where it’s making cuts to try to recoup the losses, on top of the affected stations’ moribund performance. Of course, a better solution to repay the losses would be to try to divest stations to AMG or other groups with significant cap room and use the proceeds to lower its debt load. I doubt Fox Corporation would’ve made the same mistakes that Diamond/Sinclair did if it had chosen to keep the RSNs; had it still owned them and floated a DTC offering for the RSNs at the same time WarnerMedia, Disney, Paramount and NBCUniversal/Comcast decided to venture into their own streaming services, such a move at an earlier point in time probably would have helped what became the Bally Sports networks and other RSNs weather the impact of cord-cutting somewhat better. Fox would have also had better leverage to secure DTC deals with MLB teams, compared to Diamond, which doesn’t even have groupwide streaming rights for all the teams that Bally Sports holds rights to.

Broadcast licensees are limited to producing no more than 25 hours of local programming per week (15% of the station’s weekly schedule) for a station it operates through an outsourcing agreement (shared services, joint sales and local marketing agreements or some combination) in conjunction with a station it owns and operates outright. While there’s a reason why it was put in place when the FCC revised the LMA rules in 1996, the 25-hour limit logistically no longer makes sense in this day and age, when many stations carry 35+ hours of local programming per week and syndicated programming availability for stations in larger and mid-sized markets has started to decline correspondingly.

The WBZ news at noon while showing a graphic promoting an upcoming interview with Robert Kraft that’s going to air during their 5pm news tonight was sporting the new o&o logo format. CBS News Boston with WBZ in a small box off to the left.

WEAR is much higher-rated and they tend to focus more on the Florida side of the market.

Or just breakfast mode. Someone there must really like morning news.

I’m sorry, but that pee-stained Spirit Airlines vibe looks awful. They should have been forced to use the same colors like everyone else.

KWTV did some re arranging moving the anchor desk to the interview set making it the permanent location and moving the interview area to where the anchor desk was.

To this day, their move to Time Square has been pointless. If you're a new viewer to the show, you would have no idea that they were broadcasting at "the crossroads of the world". They would have saved so much money if they stayed at Studio 57.