channel2

On 4/14/2025 at 6:39 PM, norcalTVfan said:

KPVI is an afterthought in a two-newsroom market. Its quality is on par with its former sister KIEM. Longtime users of this forum know that KIEM and quality typically aren’t mentioned in the same sentence. 

Isn't KIFI itself kinda lousy?

If I were a Comcast shareholder and the company decided to withhold all the valuables from SpinCo I would be furious with them. They would be, knowingly, sticking shareholders with a lemon. They need to give USA and its siblings a fighting chance for the company to have any value as anything more than a collection of withering assets waiting to be stripped for parts.

2 minutes ago, mre29 said:

Didn't that attempted sale also include WVIT?

They tried to sell WVIT at the same time but found no buyers for it.

I don't know if it was ABC being wary of Scripps or more that Scripps doesn't feel like forking over more reverse comp for another ABC affiliation.

I get the impression that all ABC cares about is WSVN's ability and willingness to pay the reverse compensation.

9 minutes ago, MD TV said:

The only time ABC has made any tv station transactions since 1985 was buying (and later selling) WTVG and WJRT. I doubt they showed any interest in WPLG.

 

In any case, I'm getting the feeling what's happening here is gonna be more common in the years ahead.

Hell, if you want to get technical, those are the only stations that ABC or its corporate parent at the time has ever bought. CapCities did make an equity investment into Young Broadcasting, but Disney sold that interest in 1998.

I feel like not enough is being said about what a bad, bad sign it is that WPLG is losing ABC because they literally can't afford to be an affiliate anymore. The fact that WPLG doesn't have scale to fall back on (anymore) is part of it, but still. If a station owned by Berkshire Hathaway cannot or will not cough up increasingly-onerous reverse compensation fees, how long will it be before the time bomb goes off for the big chains?

Didn't Nexstar have a habit of getting rid of choppers after it bought stations anyway?

They are/were at the forefront but I feel like station groups have been increasingly getting rid of the choppers...

On 3/5/2025 at 9:21 PM, ns8401 said:

I bet Scripps gets broken up at some point. Expanding with the crappy groups they purchased over the years was dumb. 
 

No offense to the KMGH or WTMJ fans out there. 

Scripps has had some presence or another in Denver for more than a century (barring 2009 to 2011). KMGH wasn't just some random clunker they ended up being stuck with.

On 3/6/2025 at 12:10 AM, mre29 said:

 

Purchasing Ion and most of its O&O stations (over sixty of 'em!) and not doing anything with them beyond running daily marathons of procedural dramas (read: cop shows) from the last few decades and occasional live sports is particularly dumb. I doubt they're attracting any cord-cutters with that strategy.

 

They seemed to think Ion was another Food Network...

I feel like the company that had the ingenuity to put HGTV on the air and fleece Belo out of the Food Network is basically gone. The current Scripps Networks is not particularly inventive like the previous iteration was.

4 hours ago, Dave Lampstein said:

Is this the beginning of the end for federal funding for PBS? Efforts to defund it, including past attempts by Trump and others, have failed before. But in today’s digital age, is PBS still as much of a public necessity? They often argue that they provide crucial access to children’s programming and the arts, particularly in rural areas—but with the internet, is that still a compelling case?

Absolutely. History has shown that you can't necessarily count on the free market to always serve the public good.

Per the Lexington Herald-Leader, they firing all six of their news directors and replacing them with "local news content managers" who will receive guidance from a new "news operations manager" based at WTVQ, Russ Geller.

It sounds like a more top-down, corporate-driven structure than what they're doing now.

I think people forget that Graham isn't exactly some mom-and-pop shop. Graham Holdings is a diversified conglomerate and their TV stations are just one of their many businesses.

And Graham Holdings is still headquartered in Washington.

14 hours ago, mrschimpf said:

At least unite the graphics packages, WTHI is still on a LIN-era system. I like unique looks but not because you starve your stations to make more cheap game shows with expensive comedians and court show hosts.

LIN hasn't even existed in a fucking decade! Heartland must've been cheapasses too.

7 hours ago, GoldenShine_10 said:

 

Just wait until advertisers leave and they have hash mark ratings. KCRG is already the 100-ton gorilla in that market, and WSIL's market, I would think WPSD will become the strongest station (KFVS is too far removed from the population).

WSIL's market seems to have the Big Three affiliates all with their own turf. WSIL being Southern Illinois, WPSD being Kentucky, and KFVS being not only Missouri but the general "Five States" area.

If that's the case then it's wild seeing WPSD aggressively pursuing those laid off from the "Illinois" station.

1 hour ago, newsteam13 said:

Unfortunately, today's KUSA doesn't resemble its glory days. One noticeable change is removing the signature patriotic red, white, and blue lines from the current 9NEWS logo, which was introduced in 1984 when the station changed its call letters from KBTV to KUSA. Not to mention we don't see the 9 K*USA logo as much nowadays.

They were barely using it even when I grew up, which would've been the 2000s. Considering that a lot of the American flag iconography Gannett once drenched its stations in now seems to be the exclusive province of outfits like Fox News, I sadly don't blame them for ditching those trappings.

It sounds like it's akin to the CBS/Viacom split, where Sumner Redstone still controlled both - although he clearly favored Viacom, which kept the "sexier" Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks and BET, over CBS.

It's more than nothing!

They went international in the joint venture days and they still used the name! And look at Marvel parading Captain America throughout the world!

I'm not keen on scrapping Syfy for a subordinate brand of USA.

USA is basically the general entertainment cable network, something that is considered a liability nowadays because streamers have eaten up much of their value proposition. But it's still one of the biggest cable networks and knowing that "USA Networks" has a history as a corporate moniker, I think using that for this company would be a good idea.

2 hours ago, mrschimpf said:

It seems like all that AMG has is cheap programming and no desire to expand at all, so they've contracted two generations of progress with WXOW/WQOW/WAOW to basically return them to the state they were in the 70s, but with an ugly 2020s centralcasting twist. A red flag for me with the Quincy/Gray merger was the lack of fight to keep WYOW and letting it go for a pittance to Gray; it felt very out of character and there didn't seem to be any regulatory reason to do so.

Why did they let Gray keep WYOW anyway? And isn't their application for a new Eagle River station going to complicate things?

WKOW and its spawn seem to essentially be the sick men of their markets, although WXOW and WQOW at least cover both La Crosse and Eau Claire. I'm under the impression that WEAU and WKBT have long focused on Eau Claire and La Crosse near-exclusively.

1 hour ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Maybe Allen sees Lafayette as being a "cool" place to set up a hub, especially since Coastal runs the other stations in town that way.

Isn't West Lafayette also a place where they can scoop up lots of fresh-out-of-college kids to work at WLFI?

Heartland seems to have been run on the cheap even before Allen absorbed it...

It's so wild to me to see USA described as a "smaller" network when it was one of the pillars of cable for decades and it wasn't even a decade ago that they still had big hits like Mr. Robot, to say nothing of the Netflix-fueled resurgence of Suits.

9 hours ago, AmericanErrorist said:

 

I believe that is due at least in part to the fact that the Polish channel is still named SciFi because Syfy is similar to the Polish language word for syphilis.

It's also a valuable domain name they wouldn't want to fall into the hands of a competitor. Especially since it's still a homophone!

Doesn't Gray own the "First Alert" brand? Can't they just revoke the licenses to competing stations when it's up?

11 hours ago, Howard Beale said:

TVNewsCheck has a glorified Gray Media press release under a Mark K. Miller byline, which announces the “retirement” of three general managers of the following stations:

• WAGM, Presque Isle, Maine
• WIBW, Topeka, Kansas
• WYMT, Hazard, Kentucky

I say “retirement” because I believe these GMs retired in lieu of being fired in any future Gray budget cuts.  These are all small-market stations, and I know WYMT lost a few people in the last round of Gray budget cuts.  Perhaps Gray will have one of its many regional VPs oversee these stations, or a GM from a nearby market will also pick up one of these stations.

Isn't WIBW the traditional powerhouse in Topeka?

It'd be pretty sad if they just turned it into an extension of KCTV...

6 hours ago, mre29 said:

 

Science fiction and fantasy have always been joined at the hip -- both fall under the term "speculative fiction" -- so the fantasy-based programming has never bothered me.

 

Reality programming is a problem shared by nearly all channels, be they broadcast, cable, or streaming.

 

The real problem for Syfy at this point is more fundamental:  Is it even needed anymore? When the channel launched in 1992, the broadcast networks were still king, there were fewer cable channels (and even fewer with original programming), and there were few ways for a sci-fi or fantasy show to be seen. The best option was broadcast syndication, which usually meant airing at odd hours because shows were either on network affiliates that had obligations or independent stations that had no interest in giving up time slots they used for second-run movies. But the television landscape has changed radically in the 32 years since then, and there are more possible homes for genre programming than ever. It's possible, maybe even likely, that Syfy's time has come and gone.

 

Nobody's ever said it outright but I'm pretty sure much of the reason USA ever put the Sci-Fi Channel on the air is because Kay Koplovitz loved the works of Arthur C. Clarke, and it just so happened that one of USA's corporate parents owned Star Trek and the other one a bunch of seminal horror movies. So of course they'd be willing to foot the $100 million bill that USA paid for a cash-strapped independent channel that had to keep delaying its launch!

The thing about Syfy is that the domain name "scifi.com" still redirects to their site. Which I think hints at Syfy being an asset that somebody could do so much more with!