Samantha

And if the Palm Springs situation is any indicator, the two stations will have separate anchor teams and presentation but share a website, reporters and studio space. Did I just see that KION has no morning newscast? How does that happen?

If this is true it'd be a messy acquisition. It'd also spark some questions as to whether Cowles would be interested in selling off its other television arm—KHQ, Incorporated.

Consolidation, here we come! The Santa Barbara/Santa Maria/SLO market is going to look a lot like Palm Springs, down to the network affiliations. I think the KION-KCBA/KCOY-KKFX operations are tightly integrated with each other, too. KCBA is owned by Seal Rock Broadcasters and SSA'd out. Seal Rock, which appears to mostly be the vehicle of a George V. Kriste, apparently also entered into a JSA with Entravision back in June for marketing and sales services of KCBA. Entravision owns Univision outlet KSMS. Unfortunately I am mixing these markets up seeing as they both are known as the Central Coast.

Get a look at some of the channel numbers they got in other markets. One of them, Palm Springs, requires station rebrands! KMIR, branded as channel 6, is now channel 13: KPSE goes from 13 to 20. KMTV Omaha is now channel...99. That said, they kept the HD channel numbers the same, but what do you do if you are KMIR?

Wow. It was introduced in the 1970s. The logos that went with it lasted until around 1993 for KTVQ and longer in quite a few cases. (See John in Montana's website: he has a bunch of videos from KTVQ demonstrating their version of this look into the 90s. Three of those are news opens with new themes, which have already been submitted by yours truly.) Also see KPAX (the 18 is for Kalispell and that is now separate), (now KXLF/KBZK) and KRTV (somewhere in the NewsActive3 collection, don't have time to go digging).

A KPNX news van was involved in an accident in central Phoenix after an SUV failed to heed a stop sign, sending the KPNX vehicle rolling into oncoming traffic and crashing into another car. Anchor Kim Covington and photojournalist Michael Falvo were injured; Covington was taken to a local hospital. Also... What's up with the 70s/80s-look mic flags with this KBZK newscast? The Montana Television Network hasn't looked like that in a good 20 years. It's not just a one-off either. They look like new mic flags. Is this the logo used on their mic flags for statewide news stories?

Hearst probably couldn't have owned WCVB and WLNE together under the old laws. Also, mrtraveler01, perhaps you'll get the site names dead-on like I did that one time!

Looks like Brian Brady sold out in Binghamton to focus on his new station properties. The Binghamton situation should be a major concern. Nexstar may not be able to buy Granite now as it develops a chokehold on Binghamton television around WBNG (which is a towering market leader). Also, KLKN will now probably be up for sale, and the NTV cluster has probably been as well for some time if the KSWT situation is any indication. I wonder if a bidder would be able to combine the two outlets which would probably help the very disjointed market that now has major spillover into North Platte. (The markets need to be combined and redrawn, but the presence of a distinct Fox affiliate in North Platte probably prevents that.)

The calculations for buying a Hispanic television station are very different. Nielsen has its own DMA rankings for Hispanic television households. The top ten Hispanic DMAs in this list are LA, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, San Antonio, Phoenix and the Rio Grande Valley market. These DMAs, in 2012-13, included 51% of all Hispanic TV homes in the US; the top 10 DMAs for all TV homes the same year represented 29.5% of the entire TV universe. (2013-14 Hispanic DMA info was not available.) For NBC this is like buying a Top 10 DMA station. In fact KTLM was the last Top 10 Hispanic DMA station that was not owned by NBC or ZGS. The largest Hispanic DMA station not owned by NBC or ZGS after this transaction will be KCSO-LD Sacramento (HDMA #11), owned by Sainte Partners. KCSO does not have any local news.

As it should be. This is, what, the first time it's been back since 1994? That and the "Team to Watch" image tell me somebody's been looking at old Sydney/Melbourne videos from the 80s...

KGUN evening anchor Jennifer Waddell is headed to Nashville, where she'll work for WZTV.

I was wondering why that had happened. Last month Randall Weiss received $10 and an LPTV in St. George, Utah, in exchange for selling the one he had in Aspen, Colorado. Now he put that $10—and his motorhome—to good use.

In a Speculatron Time Machine posting, I mentioned WRAL and KSL as two of America's great stations. Turns out they're also the top two local TV news websites in the country. Each draw a majority of the area's adult population to their websites; for KSL, that's a whopping 67%, while WRAL pulled in 54%. The other three in the top five were WVIR, WMUR and KCRG. Also in re: Scott Light... Good luck. He's going to need it.

WSJV promo from 1992: In the "I didn't know this existed" category, an All News Channel-produced Showtime update from 1991 using a Network Music track. I found another one of these with Gordon Steinke, who went on the next year to CITV in Edmonton, Alberta:

News Station gone from WSYR. Next stop...WIVT, the station using 17-year-old TVbD graphics? If there's any real bad sheep in that area of the country, it's WIVT. Seriously, those graphics are old (they blew KOTA out of the water years ago).

Is it a promotion? You judge, but Sheila Gray, who just recently left WXIX, is going to work for Sinclair. She'll be doing a syndicated report for the entire station group based out of Dayton while also doing some reporting for WKEF-WRGT. It's highly likely that the Dayton choice was made to allow SBG to circumvent Gray's non-compete clause; she can't work in Cincinnati until February.

WVII "Profiles", late 80s/early 90s: http://archive.org/details/tobacco_hrx27a00 You don't get this every day: Hong Kong news opens from 1986! These are shot with a camera at a monitor. Some are in Chinese and some in English: http://archive.org/details/tobacco_ljw27a00 WQRF, "39 Today" segment, 1980: http://archive.org/details/tobacco_dlx27a00 New Zealand full newscasts from 1990. The "One" network with a New Zealand Commonwealth Games 1990 ident and "One Network News" open, plus all of the news stories and commercials: http://archive.org/details/tobacco_orm02b00

WCIU close and signoff from 1989. What's the close theme?

It's been a fairly technical day. We've had an update on Dielectric's equipment fixes in Richmond, a list of proposals for ATSC 3.0, and now WTHR has announced its intent to seek a power boost to help improve digital reception. Apparently even Indianapolis viewers are having problems with the RF 13 signal.

I've always loved the TVbD demo reels (they've also been up there for years). The WDIV theme was used 1981/82 to 1984. We have a bunch of pieces of it but it's not in the NMSA.

Other stations that used them extensively past 1992: KGET, KOAA, WFMJ (debuted 1993?), WICU? (says 1990-96, but we have Signature in 1993), WTVA. I also found the source for a bunch of the Huntsville, AL market finds: WAAY 1988 with KOAT89 theme: (used beginning in 1987!) WAFF 1988 with KSL89 theme: WAAY 1990 with NS2001: (I think this was picked up in 1990, not 1986)

No, that's the station's on-air ID.

KSNF was using five themes at once, several of them hand-me-downs from Wichita. In the 1990-94 time frame, they were using Hello, Turn To, All the News (especially), News Series 2000 and NBC: The Place to Be; that's a lot, and it's a really bad jumble too. And we don't know which one was used in the open. And from 1994-97 they used three different music pieces (I suspect that aside from Heartland, the other two are actually production music pieces). KOAM, KODE and KSNF are still pretty Swiss cheese, KOAM not so much thanks to my finds (we have most of the key pieces back to their switch to CBS in 1983). KODE has lots of missing pieces (including 1990s-2003) and mostly no-name themes to show for it. KSNF is confusing in and of itself, but being in Joplin where the NMSA source information is really bad doesn't help.

KSNF news updates from 1994. This is why I say they used NBC: The Place to Be...

The whistle's been blown by a couple of free press groups about the Dreamcatcher shell for Tribune.