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This Tulsa setup is clearly a test by a very desperate Sinclair. If they’re willing to torpedo a newsroom in a market that size, the sky’s the limit for them. They’ve obviously done the math and know that, even with lower ratings, they’ll come out ahead due to the cost savings from shedding all those salaries. I could totally see them doing something similar in Austin, for example, where KEYE has been in the cellar forever, moving production an hour south on I-35 to the WOAI/KABB studios in San Antonio.

One thing that is not on the horizon is any standardization of ABC O&O graphics. CBS, NBC and FOX affiliates all have identical design. (I think local news is the poorer for that, especially CBS's rendering its stations to the "CBS News (insert market name here) " generic quality. WABC, KABC, and WLS, to name the three biggest ABC markets, are their own tooling and bear little resemblance to one another in font and design. KABC and KGO are mostly similar, except for differences in L3 color and a few other details. KABC by the way is working on the same graphics and set that made a debut in October 2015. That is some kind of record maybe.

I am extremely excited to announce that "Hello News" and "Hello Quad Cities" has officially made its return to KWQC-TV6, and will soon return to all shows and newscasts permanently effective Tuesday at noon when we kick-off our 75th Anniversary Celebration. This has been in the works for sometime, and wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for my station manager giving me free reign. The amount of calls, emails and messages since last night has overwhelmed all of us, but what is most notable is the huge morale boost in the building from all of the employees. There is not a person in the building who hasn't been caught humming the chorus. Here's a clip of the open and close from last nights special, and also a sneak peak at the new open that begins on Tuesday. My favorite part is the image campaign that I have been working on for months now...but that will have to wait until Tuesday.

KOKI/KMYT couldn’t be considered “legacy” Cox stations since they were offloaded to the company in 2012, along with WFOX/WJAX (then WAWS/WTEV). Stations like WSB, WSOC and WFTV can be considered legacy stations since Cox has owned them for much longer (KTVU also can be called one, even as it’s now owned by Fox, given Cox owned it for the better part of five decades). It was WHBQ that was sold to Imagicomm along with KOKI/KMYT (and several small-market stations, most of them being former Northwest/Brady stations), and that station was sold to Cox as part of the 2013 swap that gave Fox ownership of KTVU/KICU; WLMT (and WATN, both now owned by Tegna) was sold to Nexstar/Mission as part of the Newport breakup… and Tulsa is still served by Cox Communications (as is Oklahoma City).

I have an update on the lay offs at KTUL. Joie Bettenhausen told me that they kept a handful of the MMJ’s, 4 production staff, a couple of producers, the entire meteorological staff (her, Colton Williams and Chief Chris Nunley), anchor Brenna Rose, both sports director TJ Eckert and weekend sports anchor and reporter Michelle Montaine and Sales. They only had 15 on air talent we know that KTUL main anchor of 27 years Mark Bradshaw is one of the laid off workers, along with Good Morning Oklahoma anchor Sunny Leigh and Live Desk anchor Tyler Butler and they (at least Sunny and Tyler will not sure about Mark) will all continue to work until the change December 11th.

Typically, KABC is a stable station in many ways, that include making only small changes in its on-air presentation over many years.

True TV legend. Her and Mike Gousha were probably the best anchor pairing in Milwaukee TV history.

In the 1999 book "Cleveland TV Memories" by Tom Feran and R.D. Heldenfels, it was something she said in a Cleveland Plain Dealer article that WEWS management didn't like.

An absolutely disgusting move by Sinclair, especially after reassuring their employees that these cuts were "done". I guess they changed their minds after more bad financial news. Basically, if anyone from Sinclair reads this, and your station is poorly ranked, under-invested....GET OUT NOW!!!

To me the city name as the main brand on the screen feels more detached, less local - like are people in NY and DC doing the news and this is our lightly edited “edition.” Just my observation. The Rich Lieberman blog says the rolllout hasn’t “moved the needle” at KPIX though they were pretty aimless going in. KDKA’s May was mixed vs a year ago…good data here: https://triblive.com/aande/movies-tv/tv-talk-strong-sweeps-ratings-for-wtae-tv-pbs-explores-age-of-easy-money/ The 6 dropped a lot esp among the demo, WTAE held its ratings at 6. The 5 and 11 look more stable. Don’t know the market well enough to hazard other factors at 6 though that tends to be the creature of habit time slot vs the leadin driven 11. Feb also showed a drop vs prior year for KDKA at 6. Noon which is an oddly big audience for KDKA held steady. Any other station have a Noon that draws more than most of the evening?

FTVLive’s Scott Jones, who once worked at KTUL, had some choice words about the gutting of its news department. The headline of his article on it says it all.

KWQCHELLO2023 (1).mp4 The relaunch happened right after InvestigateTV+ concluded. Attached is what preceded the inaugural noon newscast, the Hello image campaign in all its glory, sadly compressed to fit the filesize limits of this website. I will have the inaugural broadcast, including this promo, in higher quality uploaded on my YouTube channel later. Kudos to everyone at TV6 who made it possible!

WJBK 75th anniversary

KCAL in Los Angeles has updated to the new ticker as of today.

You have to wonder what happens to the Tulsa market if/when Griffin cashes out and sells KOTV (and KWTV).

Tulsa seems like a scary place for this to be going down especially since Sinclair and Scripps compete there. Has Scripps done any "Scripps-a-fying" of KJRH? At least they still have a dominant Griffin station that keeps things LOCAL. Another tell-tale sign of the Tulsa market was that KOKI was one of the two "legacy" Cox stations cast off to Imagicomm (along with WHBQ in Memphis). This was one of the Clear Channel stations purchased by Newport, who instead of dumping them to Sinclair or Nexstar, sold them to Cox at the time. Cox is still the primary cable company there, right?