Samantha

https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2022/04/05/kris-pickel-fired-arizonas-family-phoenix/9478247002/ Kris Pickel is out at KPHO/KTVK due to a "business decision".

This is the WHCP "Bubbity News" of our time.

I've been thinking all day on this one, and yiiiiiikes. It's rare in 2022 to see a company with this much of a "moral"/"family" lean get into the business of full-line broadcast TV stations (ones with network affiliations and newsrooms). It's also a bit alarming because there is far less tolerance for that than there was even a generation ago. I'm reminded of when WPGA cut bait from ABC in 2009. Granted, they were a small operator that could very well have been muscled out by the shape of events in the intervening decade-plus anyway (especially because they did eventually go bankrupt and they were not willing to pay reverse comp), but one of the two reasons WPGA dropped ABC was because its programming had failed to meet Lowell Register's "family" standards. The last operator left that can be said to be cut from this sort of cloth is Bonneville, one of the last "boutique" TV companies, and that's a company that also happens to have an actual century of experience in broadcasting (and an alignment with a regional-national TV network much in the vein of INSP). That's not saying that such wouldn't be a bad fit in theory for some of the markets on offer, with Pocatello and Tulsa standing out in particular as fertile ground for something like that. But in the moment we are in in media, affiliates exist because of tradition, public service obligations, and their news output. They have a reservoir of inherent trust that every other medium would kill to have these days, and they provide vital regional news and weather services. Sure, the networks don't truly need affiliates any more to reach much of the country, with three having SVOD platforms and the fourth going the FAST route and local TV combined being out-revenued by Google. But Disney+ won't give you the weather down the block, and try hearing about your local high school teams on Paramount+. These are the things people turn to local news for, and among the purveyors of such content, TV has the steadiest economic picture. Imagicomm/INSP has no experience with any of these three things. They've been in two lines of business that, while about television and TV programming, don't coincide with the bedrocks of American local TV at the "spoke" end: a TV channel that shows Westerns and the distribution of family-friendly entertainment content. In this day and age, it's hard to be anything but skeptical of new entrants into this marketplace. There were probably some serious shudders today, especially at Memphis and Tulsa, where the company is going to be running much larger concerns than the ex-Northwest outlets, a fair number of which just outsource the production of local news programming anyway. The problem is that PE companies see TV stations as assets to ride the downside, squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, and then discard the dry lemons to people who are deluded into seeing value or need them as dumb pipes for other types of services (and Imagicomm may well be in that business). They don't understand the social value of TV. They don't get what makes people who care about the news business tick. They don't get that this world needs lemon juice, badly, and they aren't making many more lemon trees. And, particularly as interest rates rise and chill M&A activity, there aren't going to be many real fruit growers out there to fill their shoes.

A few notes here in re: @Kenneth Kissel's comment. CBS has done something no other network does. They don't have a network news division and the local stations, they have News and Stations which are one leadership group and are integrated. This makes sense because, as O&Os, editorial responsibility for both lies with one company. It also makes sense given that both needed to do something different badly. CBS as a whole has gone big on a federal brand that is sprawling and consistent. News and sports share big pieces of their visual language with entertainment, etc. The local stations haven't yet had a revamp of their looks to integrate them into this, but that has to be coming (watch for Detroit later this year). Also, why city name? It helps distinguish the social media pages from other stations that are also CBS affiliates and it improves search and app rankings if people search for, say, "Pittsburgh news" or "Denver news". This is especially apparent with the NBC, CBS and Fox groups in re: websites and app names and branding, but you'll see increased city/region name usage across a lot of station groups—"ABC15 Arizona", the "Very Local" OTT channels from Hearst, etc.

This is Gray, so "My Little LPTV: U-Relays are Magic" is probably the answer. Of the BX LPTVs, they could use a U-relay in Montgomery, but they don't need an LPTV in the other markets (and indeed one they don't own a network affiliate in). They could always put Circle on WBXC; the network has no place to hang its hat in that market, and the LPTVs are all unremarkable diginet trees.

@ChesapeakeTVand I are pretty much in agreement. It's Peters. When you see full-page newspaper ads like this with copy like this... Who else could it possibly be? https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857000/ Peters LOVED flowery newspaper ads. I had already clipped three of these for KOLN/KGIN (10/11 Strong debuted 1977), KMST (It's a Must, used 1991–92), and WTXL (This is Our Place from 1984), and I was able to nab another five from WEAR Clearly Yours (1979), WXLT 40 is Yours (1980), KVIA 7 Together (1983), WQAD One Quad-City (1984), and WSPA In the Center of it All (1990). https://www.newspapers.com/clip/48745979/the-strength-of-nebraska-1011-strong/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75942435/looking-toward-tomorrow-its-a-must-a/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/29141556/tallahassee-this-is-our-place/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857200/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857208/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857232/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857336/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857453/

Might delay things, but I do not expect issues from petition for declaratory ruling given that this is fairly routine for people with clean ownership records. This has included some large companies like iHeart.

Thanks for posting, Dan. I think every single person who has said something in this thread (including myself) would say we really appreciate your work. I don't know of anyone else who had that many concurrent campaigns on the air in the same market. A lot of craft goes into making all that work, and this thread exists because we want to recognize the people that produced it.

They're also buying an associated digital media business, and the owners are joining Gray to run strategy for the Telemundo stations. Still doesn't make sense.

I'd like to induct a new Canadian member of the Worst News Opens Club... Bad 3D, vapid music... Earl Mann's VO is the only good thing about this. What was WIC thinking!?

The second one is a specific service mark for the National Captioning Institute. It must be the case that NCI did not caption Cosby but captioned Family Ties (I found a 1986 newspaper article mentioning they captioned the latter).

They also put in that post that David Wolter, one of their mets in Erie, would be doing cut-ins for Marquette during CBS Mornings. They had been posting weather graphics pre-CBS (with red instead of yellow).

Per Nexstar's 2021 ownership reports, other agreements that expired at the end of 2021 were KLBK, KLFY, KLST, KOIN, KTAB, WCIA, WFRV, WKBN, WLNS, WMBD, and WROC.

https://wzmq19.com/wzmq-becomes-marquette-michigans-new-cbs-affiliate/

Zap2it shows WZMQ-DT2 (!) as airing CBS beginning tomorrow. It will essentially be MeTV with CBS programs inserted and 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts of some variety.

Gray petitioned for tolling on K19KE-D and KKTM-L(D) in December due to tower crew availability. They'll be out at both sites in mid-February, and construction should take about two weeks. I wish they'd be a bit more precise about their wording. Lawton viewers don't *need* to rescan if they have a setup that's good at receiving the Grandfield transmitter. But they *should* rescan if they have signal problems or a setup that's not good at VHF.

You've missed this @CircleSeven, but I've talked a bit in the Discord about what Gray is doing. Gray buys LPTVs for two reasons: To provide UHF transmission in the core metro area for a VHF station that cannot move to the UHF band at full-power (what I call a "U-relay"). To provide additional translators, even for stations and regions where traditionally this has never been a consideration, at the outer edges of station coverage areas. I don't know how many LPTVs Gray is buying for ATSC 3.0, a la their Tallahassee test bed. However, I do believe the strategy also has to do with looking down the road and the idea of a more cellular signal topology (multiple transmitters ensuring a high SNR within the defined coverage circle of the primary station). Along the way, they get UHF sticks that can serve a high percentage (if not all) of the viewers of the DMA and their flat-panel indoor antennas and, where necessary, can serve as ATSC 3.0 transmitters if so desired. In Nashville, for instance, Gray has contracted to buy three different LPTVs: 15 Nashville, 29 Lebanon–Nashville, 29 Lewisburg. Lewisburg is a translator; it's toward the southern edge of the WSMV contour. 15 Nashville could easily be a U-relay. (RabbitEars lists the first two as U-relays already!) This is actually some cutting-edge stuff and shows that Gray sees value in improving signal coverage. It may be one of the largest efforts to commission new TV translators in 20 or so years at least, and a lot longer than that when considering the location in the eastern US of many of the stations that benefit.

That is sliiiiiiiiick... It's also a new design riffing off the 1960s version (with the sine wave in the A).

Calling it CBS News Detroit is a very elegant way to de-emphasize that big old 62 and matches the other ex-CBSNs. Good time to have a newsroom up and running, too—they'll unlock some more of that sweet political ad money.

Watch the close at 36:34; guess the Newsmat was still in place when they debuted that look!

https://www.inforum.com/business/7302587-Forum-WDAY-TV-plan-to-acquire-KVRR-TV-in-Fargo-KQDS-TV-in-Duluth Also mentions that Forum owns the Duluth News Tribune.

I'll note that some of these are assignments vacated a decade ago or more (by groups like Pappas and Equity, as well as the Apollo closures). Only Freeport and Eagle River are new allocations.

They look like knockoffs of that package. No eye, incorrect typefaces.

Wow, what a newscast! The answer is we don't have a lot of KMOX-TV of this era. They also likely used the Palmer package briefly in 1985–86, as we have some IDs and bumps with it.

How has that KEVN logo survived this long?