Weeters

A year and some months after the shutdown, an auction has popped up for the assets located in the Farmington Hills studio. The auction provides some insight on their plans before the shutdown. The Farmington Hills facility seems to have been outfitted with two complete studios and control rooms (we only really ever saw pictures of one studio), fully equipped with Ross Carbonite Ultras and Ross Xpression. Both had matching desks, but different LED wall configurations. They definitely seemed to think this was going to be a huge operation, if they invested in two complete fully-equipped studio/control rooms.

Weigel is not going to build out a news operation for an ABC St. Louis affiliation for the same reason Sinclair hasn't: There's no demand for another news operation in the market. ABC isn't going to pull the affiliation over not having news, because there's nowhere for it to go. ABC knows this. That's why it hasn't already happened, end of story. The market is dominated by existing news operations. None of those are places for ABC to go. Nexstar is being openly hostile to ABC, Gray has been semi-openly hostile towards the networks in the recent past, and Tegna has been desperately trying to not exist for years now, and will likely become an extension of Nexstar. None of these seem like good options for ABC to even start negotiations with. Look at Miami. They had to settle on a .2 of what is ostensibly an "independently-owned" station with an existing news department. You have to assume they went to Scripps during these negotiations, as they own both WPXM and WSFL in the market. Scripps probably said "no" to the idea of building out another news operation in Miami, because they've done it before, and it's failed every time. At best, ABC would end up as KSDK 5.2 in St. Louis. Weigel does not seem interested in owning network affiliates as their entire business at this point is diginets. This is why the rumors frequently swirl about CBS buying up WDJT. It just makes more sense than what is currently happening. KDNL is probably what most "network affiliates" will look like at some point, anyways. It's no secret that Nexstar and Sinclair are dreaming of a world where they control 100% of the airtime on their stations. As the networks increasingly become commercials for streaming services, I can see a future where the "Big 4" simply bounce around low-powers and diginet trees with a deal that they get to program 2 minutes of ad time an hour. The big owners won't want them, because they don't want to air an all-day long commercial for Disney+/Paramount+/Peacock. CBS in Atlanta, ABC in Miami, and the Kimmel thing, are all symptoms of the early stages of the death of the current affiliate model. Not to mention, business analysts are starting to suggest that ABC (and probably the others) get out of traditional broadcast altogether.

It's really important to remember that Hearst paid $220M for WBBH and only WBBH. WZVN remains owned by Montclair, and while that LMA likely added to the value of the station, they still do not own it.

It's worth noting that the weird "Connect +" sidebar thing shows up in examples of the ABC O&O package in the demo reel. As does the incredibly boring "callsign/market" logos in what looks to be a prototype of the Scripps look they did There's also some stuff that looks Weather Channel-esque. I kind of wonder if some of this might be "spec work", like Allen was shopping around for a Weather Channel refresh, and Defiant pitched "we can rebrand the stations too!" which is why there's no actual logos present. Given Allen's attempts at replacing local weather teams with The Weather Channel staff, I also wouldn't be shocked if the whole idea here was a mostly unified look between both the local stations and TWC. It might also be necessary to standardize both TWC and the local stations, given that I can't imagine they have the internal resources at any of the local stations to integrate a graphics package like this.

Noticed in the video mentioned in the thread about the possible Allen Media group pack that the recent Defiant demo reel has what looks to be a prototype of a Scripps look that never made it to air.

I wonder what Newsmax's goal is,here? I can assure you that they do not care, in the slightest, for "localism" or local news. Are they running interference for Sinclair, who was alleged to also be gunning for Tegna? Do they think this is sucking up to Trump? Or, maybe, they want local news to fail (and soon) so these companies have to liquidate their assets, giving Newsmax a chance to gobble up some stations so they can really capture the 55-dead demo. No more diginet trees for them! They can get a nice full-power signal to broadcast Newsmax 2 on. Whatever it is, it is not caring so much about local news being so important.

Did whoever wrote this just crawl out from under a rock? Seriously. Some of this is already happening ("Community roundtables and town halls") and it's usually a snoozefest that doesn't attract any more eyeballs than normal. Nobody is going to run "Neighborhood lifestyle shows, spotlighting local eateries, artisans, cultural scenes, and hidden gems." without there being some kind of time buy for the privilege. Broadcasting high school sports would have been a big deal 15 years ago... when a lot of schools started streaming themselves. A lot of stations with union representation would find the costs to do this in-house enormous and not worth the effort. This reads like broadcast stations should turn into public access outlets, which already exist.

This is why you don't see more of these outlets. I hate to say it, but a lot of these newsrooms, whether they be TV or radio or print, only exist because they were once wildly profitable, not because there's enough news in the area to need three, four, or more newsrooms covering it. They were all covering the same news and trying to win the game of Capitalism. I don't think you'll see more independent voices out there until market conditions exist to justify it, and that won't happen until there's fewer outlets delivering it. It will be smaller, perhaps you could say "right-sized" for the market, because it won't ever make the money TV, radio, and print once did. There will be no massive Channel 7 News Cavern studio with 30 people running around in the background. The weather streamers are, themselves, a late response to an already ongoing trend: Weather streamers like Ryan Hall pull in hundreds of thousands of views just on their forecast discussions, and I've seen their live streams with 150k+ people watching in the middle of the night. Folks, The Weather Channel isn't getting numbers like that, and they have a way more polished broadcast. The future will be independent journalists.

The way things are going, I sincerely doubt that this will be a huge priority for a new administration once 2029 rolls around. The damage would have been long done, there will have been even more consolidations, and there will be nobody left looking to buy. TV will be in an even worse and more precarious place than it is today. Who knows what the landscape will even look like? Who's to say that the affiliation model doesn't break down before then? The money is gone, and the viewers are fleeing towards the exits. The weather streamers are a huge flashing red warning light that these companies seem to be failing to notice. Weather was always one of the pillars of local news. It was one of the reasons local media executives thought they were invincible. "Everyone loves their local meteorologists, they can't get this anywhere else!" Yet, several of these statewide weather streamers, and none of the big name national ones, have any connection to local media companies. They're these startup operations with a shoestring budget, doing something that a company like Nexstar could get off the ground in a week. The reality is that I really don't think there's enough room here for there to be a huge amount of competition. Alabama could use a service that focuses on statewide severe weather coverage, but they don't need six of them, and whoever isn't first will really need to make waves to be noticed.

https://latenighter.com/features/analyst-network-late-night-talk-shows-became-unprofitable-in-2023/ And it was happening under Letterman too. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-letterman-s-late-show-by-the-numbers-214329990.html Read both of those articles closely. In 2009, The Late Show was pulling in the same ad revenue as all of late-night television in 2024. TV is a dying medium, it doesn't need conspiracy theories to explain why things are getting cut. EDIT: As a bonus, days before the Colbert cancellation announcement dropped, Nielsen reported that broadcast television viewership had dropped below 20% for the first time. You tell me how the show is magically extremely profitable when there's barely more people watching than there was under Letterman 10 years ago.

If Trump was so upset about Colbert, he'd be gone already. The show would have gone on summer hiatus and never returned. They would have paid out the rest of his contract and that would have been that. It would have been a drop in the bucket compared to the purchase price. They, instead, gave him ~10 months to continue to make jokes at Trump's expense. Not sure if you've been watching the same Trump I have, but the one I've been watching would have wanted him gone immediately, not next year. The show was losing money, it's that simple. His contract was up next May, they chose not to renew. It was cheaper to continue the show as-is than pay out whatever is left on his contract plus penalties. This isn't some grand conspiracy, it's the realities of the industry. Late night is dead.

For what it's worth, CNBC's San Francisco bureau is in its own space.

If USA Network truly had the brand equity to justify changing the name of MSNBC to "USA News", then I suspect they wouldn't have picked "Versant" as the spinoff name. We'd have seen a return of "USA Networks". I hear there's a motivated seller with the brand "NewsNet" available!

So if a station goes from "CBS 2 News" to "CBS News Chicago" it's "confusing" to the viewers because there's no channel number, but when a station goes from "ABC Action News" to "Tampa Bay 28" it's "confusing" to the viewers because it's too similar to everyone else? Given the situation at WANF and WPLG right now, I don't think it's too hard to see why some of the creativity in channel branding has disappeared. The ol' affiliation as part of the brand can't be relied on anymore. I suspect "Scripps News Tampa Bay" wouldn't have gone over well here, either. "Today's" was getting long in the tooth, and I know station management was pretty attached to that brand, so to see it go meant they must have really felt it wasn't "working" anymore. I would have loved to have seen a return to "News 4 Milwaukee", but "TMJ4 News" takes up less characters on Twitter, so...

I'm not sure a strongly-worded letter written by Newsmax is going to sway many opinions in Congress and at the FCC. What ulterior motives could Newsmax have for wanting a bunch of full-power TV station licenses to be available at low cost? Keep in mind, the FCC's mission is to regulate the wireless spectrum, not business and commerce. The cap exists to prevent a company from monopolizing available, finite radio spectrum. The stupid simple solution to this issue (which I suspect we might see play out if this merger is attempted and fails) is to make that work differently. Sinclair and Nexstar have been pushing ATSC 3.0 datacasting quite heavily, to the point that datacasting is often the only time ATSC 3 comes up in their quarterly and annual investor reports. All they need to do is make the argument that, because the spectrum can now be used for multiple purposes, they are no longer "television stations" but "data transmitters". Multiple stations sharing one transmitter is already happening (both "sides" of ATSC3 lighthouses, post-repack channel sharing), and the FCC has not really addressed the multiple questions this raises. If everyone is on one frequency anyways, what exactly is the FCC regulating? The next step is to decouple the transmitters from the broadcasters themselves (hey remember EdgeBeam Wireless?). The UK has been doing this since 1997, and I believe most, if not all, of the transmitters in the country are owned by Arqiva. The UK Government still regulates the use of the "Muxes" on these transmitters, but the US has a pesky "Constitution" that would probably make that difficult for our government to do. It would likely end up with "let the free market decide", and pitched as "anybody" can now operate a "TV station" over these transmitters, as long as there is available bandwidth, and you can pay for it. Not enough transmitters? Oh well! Should have formed a consortium and bid on the spectrum that was freed up when every television broadcaster consolidated onto 3-4 frequencies in each market. We're kind of already doing this. What are cellular networks if not wireless data providers, available to anyone who can afford a phone and the subscription to use it? We don't regulate what websites can be accessed on cellular networks, so why would we regulate datacasting differently? Something is going to give, eventually. Whether it be the scenario above, or the FCC/congress/etc. just throwing up their hands and saying it's pointless when all this is available online, anyways.

Not sure why we're collectively shitting on the World News broadcast... It's pretty impressive for a local station. I'm usually quick to denounce the "more news" mindset that has infected local television, but I understand what the goal is here. Yes, it's "more news", but it's replacing a network newscast and going up against network news. They're trying something that's not just the same local stories from 30 minutes ago run on a loop. It's different, and we should be celebrating that.

They are hardly alone, Disney has a lot of non-WLS business operations in that building. I know Disney had other Chicago office locations pre-COVID/the normalization of working from home, so I would imagine they would have consolidated what they could into 190 N by now. They could also sublease the space the way they do in San Francisco (and I'm not just talking about KRON! There's a law firm, and TK Elevator's San Francisco office in the building too.) They are already doing this with the Potbelly.

I don't think it's a great idea to use the NY project as a guide for what will happen elsewhere. The circumstances are wildly different. ABC did not move to the new NY facility simply because some of the buildings were "old". A properly-maintained 100-year-old building will last for another 100 years.

Removing the time/temp just because the news gets rebroadcast would be extremely silly, this has never been an issue in the decades this practice has been happening. The consultants told them to get rid of the time. They made the change to the weekday newscast template, and forgot to change the weekend. Nobody who asked for the change is probably paying attention to the weekend news that closely. Maybe they have noticed, and don't care. I know it's 2025, and everything has to be treated as some grand conspiracy, but sometimes we have to apply Occam's Razor.

Someone who knows more about the NBC union contracts might have to correct me here, but it's very possible that NBC has some operational efficiencies available that would make the costs of production slightly lower. A camera operator could be scheduled for an 8-hour shift with 4 hours working on Late Night and 4 hours working on SNL rehearsals. If the union has even a 5-hour minimum call, then they are "saving" money by moving people around, as neither show would theoretically pay for more than 4. I am fairly confident they moved Kimmel because, given the choice between Nightline and Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert, the young eyeballs these networks so desperately need are going to go to the latter.

The New York Times is reporting that the show was already unprofitable, and had been that way for three years.

Also think it needs to be asked: If Trump was behind this, why is it taking so damn long? If Trump was the one pressuring CBS, then you'd have to assume he'd want Colbert gone now, not give him carte blanche to ratchet up the attacks for almost a year.

I don't think it's fair to say they "didn't consider" things, because again, we lack the information. "Financial reasons" could, for all we know, have included starting on negotiating Colbert's next contract, and him going "$25 million and I keep the band, or I walk!" and that made it financially unviable. Guess which conspiracy theory narrative works out better for his PR? Some industry analysts are starting to doubt Kimmel or Fallon will be around in 5 years, either. Someone at 11:35 had to be first to go, and we've already seen late night talkers in different time slots (Corden, Conan) go already. There are fewer soaps on then there used to be, and soaps have never really been known for high production values and expenses. Price probably costs very little to actually produce, as it's all product placement, and they can be efficient with time and tape multiple episodes a day. Late Show, however, is paying for Colbert's fat contract, plus expenses and fees for celebrity guests. These genres are all very different things and have very different profit margins.

No! This is not what needs to happen, at all. This is how we're going to end up with more "Shovelcasts" (this is a new term I just invented, you're welcome) like Scrippscast being shoved into the schedule. Nobody is asking for more news, period, and any 11:30 newscasts that get created in summer 2026 are going to be canceled by November 4th of that year. Folks, we're talking about a genre that used to have 15 million sets of eyeballs a night. Colbert's "most watched" status is 16% of Carson's audience. Any profit the show makes is likely sliding every year, and it would not surprise me at all if the bean counters determined it would slide into "unprofitable" territory during his next contract. The Internet is the one holding the smoking gun here.

Probably for the same reason restaurants and casinos don't have clocks: so you can't see how late it is.