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?

Big Brother at least is understandable on paper since it's cheap summer filler in timeslots that would otherwise be used on reruns or other cheap filler, the show's format necessitates multiple episodes per week, and unlike what they've done with MasterChef in Australia where they'll put it on in consecutive days, BBUS' episodes are spread out throughout the week. Of course, the show's been allowed to become so stale, predictable and childish over the years that they're now grasping at straws for content to fill three episodes with most weeks. Just another symptom of CBS' decline.

The police drama overload is because of demographics, not politics. Procedurals are for the elderly what true crime podcasts are for Gen X and millennials. Their lineup has only gotten more lopsided as streaming peels away the audience of everyone under 60. They're also a crutch Paramount uses to hide their utter creative bankruptcy. When they don't have that crutch, you have Network Ten's primetime lineup of MasterChef Australia multiple nights per week and back-to-back episodes of House Hunters on Friday. Or Channel 5's parade of documentaries about air fryers and electric cars that all recycle footage from the previous 20 documentaries about them.

I actually don't mind the color scheme, at least it's something slightly different in what is otherwise another generic 2025 graphics package.

Even if anyone did introduce a new look, I think we all know it'd just be a slightly (and I mean slightly) different spin on the same flat, minimalistic and boxy look that everyone else has been using for the past decade.

There are multiple factors to blame if we're going to do a full accounting of what killed traditional TV. I agree that greed is definitely one of them. Overpriced cable/satellite bills, extreme and intrusive levels of advertising, etc. It simultaneously got more expensive and more monetized while being less worth it. You could argue that the introduction of ads to cable TV, even though the original premise of paying for cable was that you were paying to avoid advertising, was the "original sin" that doomed the future of television. I posted this theory a few months ago, and I still believe it: I also think the historic laziness of American TV presentation is a big part of it. Compared to other countries that had idents, live announcers (sometimes on camera a la MTV's VJs) and all sorts of other extras that made TV feel like a big event, the presentation of American TV has always been minimalist and impersonal. In the long run, I think it's cost the networks dearly since they never developed the same brand loyalty as, say, the BBC that might have helped them hold out for longer against streaming and make the eventual transition more graceful. That laziness and lack of ambition extended to the programming, too. Networks started cancelling shows before they could even find an audience because it was safer to just recycle the same formats over and over again. Cable networks that started out with specific visions all drifted into being the same general-entertainment channels with the same programming before decaying into a worse version of Netflix binge-watching with ads every five minutes. And of course, the lack of local programming besides news doesn't help either. Most broadcast stations' schedules are full of syndicated crap that clearly nobody misses on streaming. Streaming is already heading in the same direction. It's becoming more expensive and fragmented, more encroached with advertising, too quick to cancel shows, and so on. It shows that the real problem was never traditional TV itself, it was the corporations behind it who simply can't help themselves.

I didn't think about that, but it's a good point too. I'd add that the non-news programming (especially syndication and cable) has become mind-numbingly repetitive in its own way. American TV has always been lazy in terms of its presentation, but it seems like around the mid-2010s, streaming became an excuse for the linear TV industry to give up and become just as lazy with everything else.

I don't think it has anything to do with Fox News. They started de-emphasizing network branding when NBC bought WTVJ, and I assume they've stuck with that approach ever since then because it's worked for them.

At the risk of getting off-topic, if I recall correctly, New Zealand is the only other country in the world that does allow pharma ads on TV. It's at least the only other developed country. And even there, it was only legally formalized in 2023, and a lot of people (including doctors) want it banned. The market in Europe is a bit more complex than you're making it out to be. Ad revenue is falling and there's still plenty of angst about streaming replacing linear TV someday. It's also not unheard of for networks in Europe, like Channel 4 in the UK, to make cutbacks as severe as what CBS is currently doing. Channel 4 just went through a few years of greenlighting significantly less programming than usual and cancelling series they had greenlit during production because the money wasn't there to support it. I have a theory about why it still doesn't seem quite as dire for traditional TV over there. European countries were always much better at making TV feel like an event consistently. Just look at all the extra effort they've always put into presentation - the idents, live announcers introducing the shows, etc. It sounds silly, but psychologically, I do think it matters to viewers on a subconscious level. Outside of the local news (which itself is becoming increasingly centralized), American TV has always lacked that personal touch. Linear TV in America and in countries with a more Americanized style of television seem much more vulnerable to streaming because there's so little to differentiate it besides the negative aspects: more ads and less choice.

That's a bit extreme, but I could see the networks' late-night lineups gravitating towards a mix of dirt-cheap experimental programming, movies, and imported shows, somewhat like ITV regions in the UK when they made their first attempts at late-night programming in the '80s and '90s. I don't see the classic late-night talk shows lasting much longer, that's for sure. There's really nothing they still offer that podcasts don't.

These look the same as any other modern newscast's lower third. Same stock rectangular look, same generic font.