Samantha

Gray is WYMPing out: they're acquiring WYMP-LD 14, virtual 7, southeast of Memphis (Bruce, Mississippi) from 5GTV for $500,000. On October 18, Gray executed a subchannel lease agreement with 5GTV, too.

The "Metromedia News at Ten" moniker is interesting. This is from just after the time when they flirted with starting up a national newscast which would have competed with INN, and I wonder if that is a legacy of the failed attempt.

The local news did indeed start 12/12.

No kidding. Big fan of the theme music, too. Unfortunate why we have it, though—it was taped because of the story of a 2-year-old baby (and others) who died in a fire.

KLAS veteran Gary Waddell has died of a heart attack while battling COVID-19 in a Las Vegas hospital. He was 77. According to the linked article, he was fully vaccinated but suffered a breakthrough case.

There are two cross trends that are going on at the same time. With so many cord cutters, OTA channel numbers have become more important—but also less important as many vMVPDs (say, YouTube TV) don't use channel numbers. At the same time, we're also seeing the increased presence of city and region names in TV station branding in the last 10 years. My guess is that this aids SEO. When the "MyFox" era ended, KSAZ didn't revert back to fox10.com and became fox10phoenix.com (they are also Fox 10 Phoenix on all social platforms). Years ago, KNXV added "Arizona" to a lot of its branding and materials, and they slapped a big "Arizona" on KASW when they bought it. NBC famously tried dropping channel numbers, which was both a foresighted idea and a horrible one at the nadir of the NBC-owned station group about a decade ago. We are also seeing this elsewhere in Scripps (see WRTV, for instance). When you're a station like WJZY that has a high channel number and is trying to be relevant, you end up ping-ponging between the two when you refresh (WGNX/WGCL is the most classic example of this, imo).

Wow, that KCOP stuff is raaaaaaare. (They indeed changed their news brand and look later that year.) It also is loaded with strange presentation elements.

We learned today that KPLR will be the host in St. Louis. KMOV, KTVI, KSDK and KDNL are also on board. Planned distribution of KPLR's subs: 11.1 -> KTVI 11.2 Court TV -> KDNL 11.3 Comet -> KSDK 11.4 Grit -> KMOV WSTR will be the host in Cincinnati. All of the major network stations will be included. Planned distribution of WSTR's subs: 64.1 -> WLWT Antenna and Comet -> WKRC TBD -> WXIX Dabl -> WCPO WMYV will host in the Piedmont Triad, where WXII is confirmed on board.

Did not know that, probably simply because we didn't have a lot of KSL from that era (and I believe we are still missing an open generation from 1992–93).

I still agree that it is Lubbock — no references to "Newsbeat" in the El Paso papers of the period.

Paging @Knoxville TV Fan...

KCWX is actually slotted in the SA DMA, though when the DTS is completed it will have transmitters in both cities.

WRIW has filed to shack up with WSBE.

There's probably a retrans and contractual benefit to having the two licenses. Especially retrans.

I saw this. My personal guess is that Telemundo was taking up space that Scripps wanted for itself and, as a CSA, it had to be terminated. There were several other Telemundo subchannels on Ion transmitters: Atlanta (// the LPTV affiliate there), Portland, Sacramento, Seattle. One of the Ion transmitters (WPXG Concord NH) has Daystar as a channel share (WYDN). Another has a UHF simulcast of the Scripps VHF station in the market (Tulsa). The other oddities are Columbus, a full-service license on an LPTV stick and there are only two subs Ion controls (shared with Daystar) and WKOI in the Dayton market, which is just one subchannel on a three-license mux.

WIS is not on the Peters client list.

KFNB had news briefly in the late 1980s (1986–87).

You should look for the late 90s blooper reel. Benedek improved the quality of that station quite a bit after purchasing the station (including a studio relocation) but could not get stable management and shuttered it as the company ran financially aground.

It's the Peters special. I can't describe it any other way.

KVVU wants less V and more U: it wants channel 24 instead of 9.

Very cool to see more of Arizona's News People Mk I — which included the 1986 theme. They weren't Arizona's Family until 1990 — the opens didn't change until independence, though, and in the case of the 10pm not until February 1996.

Wowza. If not for the statutory cap, the base penalty would have been $1,720,000—and likely to be adjusted upward. Also worth noting: Gray ended the violation by moving the CBS stream to K22HN-D (now KYES-LD)...and then putting it on a subchannel of KTUU. How dumb this whole mess is. It's clear these rules were not written with multicasting in mind.

Gotta love how KUTV turns up everything but an open from this era... The theme package is killer from all I've heard of it (and we've been piling up non-news open uses of it). Also nice to see more of the Livin' in Utah short promos...noticed they changed the end animation between February and August to the one that matches the signoff supercut...but you have a different version! The partial one you uploaded has a different Utah Jazz section (there was a coaching change midseason for the Jazz and the full version has footage from a 2-1-89 game with the Atlanta Hawks), and it also attributes the beginning quote to "Al Seethaler, Vice President and General Manager". Seethaler left that year, or maybe in 1989?, for KMGH. Seethaler hired Mike Youngren for KMGH, too... Keep this in mind (and the fact that we have a 1983 mention of the Mike Post KUTV theme) while reading the Tulsa TV Memories material:

It is very clearly from a production library. Maybe Killer Tracks? Compare to the PRISM Sports logo on EDIT: KT31-15 "Zap Ya" https://www.universalproductionmusic.com/en-us/discover/albums/589/sweepers-and-stingers-volume-1 They've added some of the stings from Dawn (track 37) for WBNS...not sure if that was a separate edit.

KNXV wound up having the right type of game-changer product for the market anyway. But yes, they were clearly going that direction. One can imagine Tampa was next on the list—though maybe further down the road because their existing building was insufficient when it did end up coming time (as things turned out, the news area had to use third-party production facilities for over a year until the Tampa Stadium studios were finished).