Hometown News

This. But I'll add that these stations are in for a rude awakening if they think they can succeed being "the CNN of [insert market here]" with a schedule of 95% redundant local newscasts. People's brains have not been rotted by local news like they have by national politics over the past few decades, so there is no real audience for 24/7 local news. At the same time, syndication is absolute crap nowadays and these stations would be left to pick from the least desirable shows, so you can't build a station on that either. Any serious attempt at making independence work would have to look more like ITV's old system in the UK. Gray, Hearst, Sinclair, Nexstar, etc. would have to become full-scale production companies making a variety of programming (not just news) to fill out each other's schedules. I'm not particularly optimistic for that to happen either. If anyone in the linear TV business had that much ambition or competitive spirit, this would all be a moot point because they wouldn't have gotten their asses kicked by streaming in the first place. What they'll most likely do is run their news operations into the ground and then use their failure as an excuse to give up and take all those stations off the air, and blame Netflix for it.

I've already started seeing people call the network "MS NEVER."

I don't think either of these are insurmountable obstacles. Theoretically, they could either refer to the FAST channel as Sky News UK or rename MSNBC to Sky News America. They could also license the Sky brand to the network after Versant is spun off like they've already been doing with Sky News Australia, which is still owned by News Corp.

I'm not sure that this goodwill (if it was ever really a thing in the first place) still existed anyway. Since this change is coming from NBC's side, it likely means that being associated with MSNBC had become a liability for their brand, not an asset. The more I think about this, I'm not sure how Comcast missed the obvious solution of just adopting the Sky News brand. Unlike MSNBC or this frankensteined "MS NOW" experiment, it's been a proven success in both the UK and Australia/New Zealand. Certainly the network has other issues besides branding, but this was an easy layup and they managed to airball it.

It's weird that they're still keeping "MS" in the name even though Microsoft sold its share of the network 20 years ago. I know they're trying to make it a backronym for "My Source," but it's just very clunky. I'm not sure why they weren't willing to make an 100% clean break from the MSNBC brand. They've always been the third-place also-ran in cable news, there's nothing there worth clinging on to. The logo is also bad. It looks like the logo of a third-rate presidential candidate who gets 3% of the vote in the Iowa caucus and drops out before New Hampshire.

Independence was also the last resort for KTVK after losing ABC. They wanted CBS, didn't get it, and had to settle for going indy. And that was at a much healtheir time for linear TV and certainly a much stronger market for syndicated programming to fill a schedule with. They were able to spend $100 million to get shows people actually wanted to watch. Nowadays, it doesn't even matter how much money you can spend on syndication, it's all the same copy-pasted court shows, game shows, and Big Bang reruns no matter where you look. These stations nowadays who are just shrugging off the loss of their affiliations like it's nothing because they think they can be "CNN, but local" are delusional about their place in the current American media landscape and the way the average American consumes news. I'd argue that the exact opposite is necessary. A new network would have to program a lot more of the day's schedule than MNTV does, given how weak syndication is nowadays. If anything, it'd need to look more like Ion, but with more variety than Ion's endless NCIS and FBI reruns.

This is insane. I guess they don't realize this, but the audience they're angling for with a schedule like this is already glued to CNN or FOX News all day. Those people aren't going to flip away from the national politics they're obsessed with to watch hours of local news instead. All they'll end up doing is overworking their anchors, reporters and staff for diminishing returns until they either leave or quit. Again, with this new round of affiliation changes, there needs to be a better alternative for the stations left behind than either the bottom-of-the-barrel syndicated slop or hours of redundant local news on a loop.

Most people don't care because, in their view, they've already long since replaced whatever local TV brought to the table with streaming and the internet. I also assume this is ultimately why the FCC has checked out of regulating all this consolidation. They probably don't see much of a future in local linear TV either, just a few sclerotic companies haggling over what's becoming a razor-thin slice of the pie.

Ah, that makes sense then.

I don't mind the graphics in a vacuum, they're more inspired than what WHDH has and certainly better than the dull "flat design" that 99.9999% of newscasts are using these days. My point is that the flat ABC logo doesn't match the glossiness of the rest of the package, so it looks like a lazy copy-paste job. It's also strange and potentially confusing for viewers that it's only the ABC logo without the Miami wordmark. And truthfully, as a major network affiliate in a top 20 media market, it seems a bit cheap for WDFL to be using the exact same graphics as WSVN anyway. Hopefully once the new station is more established they'll start to give it more of its own identity.

That looks like it was thrown together 5 minutes before the station went on air.

It might be time for Hearst, Gray, Sinclair, etc. to start thinking about working together and producing their own programming besides just news and sports. Kind of like the old regional ITV model, but without the regional aspect and on a larger scale. The networks are going to abandon linear TV eventually and I don't see any other path forward for the local stations and their owners once it happens that doesn't end in them just pulling the plug and going off-air. Unfortunately, how I expect them to respond to the networks leaving them behind is to just keep accelerating the news overload until local TV stations are all just 24/7 news, which nobody watches because we're all sick of it, which then becomes the excuse for them to give up.

I personally doubt Trump had anything to do with it at all. All of these late-night shows have spent the past decade telling the same jokes about him that were probably already posted a million times on Reddit before their writers' rooms even thought of them, but the only one getting cancelled right now is the one on the network that's spent the last few years cancelling or giving away everything to save money. I always thought Colbert was a baffling choice to replace Letterman anyway. What made Colbert famous was the parody of Bill O'Reilly he did on the Colbert Report, but he had to retire the character to host the Late Show as himself. Without that character, it turns out there's nothing special about him in particular, thus there was no strong hook to keep Letterman's audience invested in the show. They should have just promoted Craig Ferguson instead. Yet another awful decision by CBS in hindsight.

Of course it's financial. Letterman's final Late Show episode got nearly 14 million viewers. A decade later, the Late Show has an audience of just over 2 million boomers who forgot to turn the TV off before falling asleep. It's not worth paying Colbert $15 million a year on top of the staff's salaries and the costs of maintaining that theater anymore, especially when its spot in the cultural milieu is now occupied by podcasts with postage-stamp budgets by comparison. Not to mention, this isn't new for CBS. This is the same network that was already too cheap to keep the SEC or the Grammys. They are cutting costs to the bone in any way they can. Not everything in life is hyper-politicized. Sometimes it actually is just about the money.

This is just the first late-night show to get cancelled, it won't be the last. Like I said in another thread a while back, these shows offer nothing that podcasts don't. Is anyone under 50 even still watching them?