Samantha

And of course their news van just has to be in their parking lot.

In January 2015, almost all of Arizona's major television stations will simulcast a report on heroin produced by the journalism school at Arizona State University. In total 32 stations will air the program. In Phoenix, KTVK, KPHO, KAZT, KAET, KSAZ, KPNX/KNAZ, KNXV, KUTP, KASW, KTVW, KFPH, KTAZ and KPAZ (!!!!) will air the report. For Tucson, KVOA, KUAT/KUAS, KGUN, KMSB, KOLD, KTTU, KUVE and KHRR are all lined up. (This does not include KWBA.) In Yuma, all stations in the NPG Yuma cluster will air the program including all digital subchannels. (Notably, Entravision's stations are missing. I believe they are run from California, so they are not be members of the Arizona Broadcasters' Association.)

It had been planned to launch next year but it was moved up specifically because of the cuts at Univisión. And in fact WKAQ has already scooped up talent from channel 11.

Univision already had cut weekend news there, which prompted Telemundo PR to add weekend news ahead of schedule. Some other bullet points from the Spanish article: 109 employees are affected by the decision; the final newscasts have already aired. Just one local show will be on. The management structure will combine radio and TV units. "The layoffs are part of a national strategy by Univision to make itself more attractive for a sale, according to a source."

Well, Puerto Rico is heavily Christian (97%, according to Pew Research Center), and nearly three quarters of all Christians there are Catholic. That's a total of 2.6 million Catholics and nearly one million more Protestants. This is a good deal stronger than on the mainland. The religious stations vary in content. For Protestants, 3ABN, TBN and CTN all have a presence on the island, and there is a local evangelical outlet (WCCV). The Catholic Church owns a station there—which was on VHF in the analog era, to boot, and signed on in 1984. Even the TBN outlet is locally owned. Now, you might look at PR and think "well, where are all the religious TV stations in Mexico?" They're pretty much boxed out by law there — the government has a bit of a secular streak to it. But (usually Catholic) religious outlets can and do exist in other Latin American countries (El Salvador*, Colombia, Argentina). Going back to the WORA material, I'm stunned to see no ABC logo. ABC is among the most insistent networks when it comes to network branding. Perhaps they made an exception for Puerto Rico. *This is a new one. The station is channel 39 and has three 5 kW transmitters. In many central American countries all odd or even channels in UHF are in use, a bandplan that makes DTV transitions exceedingly tough.

And I found one of the people in the credits on LinkedIn—the news director, who began working there in 1983. The newscast name appears to be WMNews — a name I cannot find anywhere. That has to be incredibly rare material.

It's showing up for me. It's basically color bars with the black box of [KFOX - KDBC PRI] superimposed. Edit: The site briefly had a box stating it's in read-only mode for maintenance. Never seen that before.

KDBC relaunched overnight, showing off these color bars (from my Mexican source):

Hours of Portland and national news from CBS in 1983. At the end of this linked clip is 18 seconds of a close to some Montana newscast. Any clue as to which station?

KFOX relaunched overnight from the new Sinclair facilities on the west side of El Paso with KDBC scheduled to make the switch tomorrow. The $10 million investment includes a new facility, new sets for each station and the Sinclair graphics package. (I believe the two stations may be using variants.) The combined operation employs 120, including 45 hired just for KDBC. Currently KFOX has morning, 5pm and 9pm news. The KDBC new look launches for their 5:30 and 10pm newscasts tomorrow. Currently KDBC airs the network news at 5pm. I expect some change on this front soon, as quite clearly KDBC's news schedule was trimmed back to avoid competing with KTSM, and the setup allows KDBC and KFOX to broadcast live separately. KDBC also gets a new website. The story about the transition on their old site takes more time to hawk the fact that KTSM keeps meteorologist Robert Bettes in the move, which involves the dissolution of one virtual duopoly and the creation of another. It doesn't even link to the new site. I'm no fan of Sinclair but this move is a big step up, particularly for KDBC which has really been neglected in recent years.

It's a metered paywall. Unfortunately the entire world has a paywall now, it seems. The network may require certain facilities or the technical system is different. The networks have fairly proprietary equipment.

The Great Yuma Merger hasn't gone terribly smoothly. With every English-language television station in town under common control, it's been a mess to try and get them on the same page in terms of facilities. Problems have included overruns from CBS sports events on KSWT; transferring KSWT's master control from Texas and bringing over all the CBS receiving equipment; the NBC satellite equipment; and sun outages. Also, the transition of KYMA and KSWT news to high definition is another hurdle. So where was KSWT being master controlled from? KDBC??

WHDH? That's definitely a duopoly. But WUCW and KASW, certainly those are oddballs. I don't know if they're actually selling KASW—I get this distinct feeling it may be cashed in in the spectrum auction.

WDBB ripped off the old Hayes "splitting city skyline" element (see: WAGA, KMOL) . That could also be actual Hayes work, but I don't think so by 1984/85.

James did KPHO up until his death. In fact, it was when KPHO went away from James that I found out that he had died. He lived in Scottsdale. As to the name, it seems fine. KDBC needs a little love, and Sinclair is giving it to them.

KTVK's logistical challenges are more upcoming when KPHO moves up to that facility. In an interview with TVNewsCheck Meredith's VP of local news had this to say: "In Phoenix we now have two very large, active news-producing stations, so that is going to be a very interesting merger. KPHO and KTVK both have very unique marketing positions. So the question is how do you merge two unique brands? It is challenging but provides an incredible opportunity. We will have the largest television news operation in the Phoenix marketplace."

That's a supposition under new LMA rules — that article is not about the sale of WLOV.

Sold! WLOV will become the first non-Alaska property of Coastal Television, owner of the Fox and ABC affiliates in Anchorage. The sale is probably related to that of WTVA that was announced late last month; it also will mark a separation of WTVA from its longtime LMA partner.

TVNewsCheck this morning has an interesting profile of DuJuan McCoy, whose Bayou City Broadcasting recently moved to buy WEVV Evansville. This quote is really interesting:

Sinclair will need to find an alternate look for those two — it's just not wise to have them looking the same as WEAR.

That was more related to CBS syndicating that typeface (used at the network level) to its stations than anything else.

A good reminder that WAAY was once an NBC affiliate, too.

Most Gannett stations and newspapers are integrated into the USA Today product because the states/schools use a backend product called Schedule Star. AZCentral is by far the largest exception to the USA Today integration in large part because Arizona is not a Schedule Star state. In addition here Gannett has a partnership with MaxPreps, which in turn has a partnership with our state high school association.

I thought Landess was retiring? Though I suppose moving back to your childhood town is part of that...

Puerto Rico is a really odd one. While it's certainly small (it's smaller than Connecticut but larger than Delaware), there are many low-powered stations and they are packed in quite tightly. It has three main regions: western (Mayagüez), central-southern (Ponce) and northeastern (San Juan). To be statewide you need to get into all three of those areas. At one point, WLII had retransmission agreements with four stations: WSUR-TV (channel 9), WSTE (channel 7 with boosters across the island, distributed transmission system), WORA and WNJX (also in Mayagüez but WORA had a better transmitter site). This combo of "11-9-7-5-22" was so powerful that the FCC admonished WLII which dropped WNJX (now a WAPA repeater) and WSTE (now in duopoly with WLII under Univision ownership). WKAQ, WAPA, WORA, WIPM, WSTE and WLII — along with any TV station worth its salt in Puerto Rico — all have transmission systems that enable them to reach island-wide coverage either through distributed transmission systems, semi-satellites or full-fledged satellites. To demonstrate this would require a major digression and probably a very large table. It's boricua craziness, I'll say that much.