T.L. Hughes

The network, which will be a National Weather Network partner, is also founded by Bryant. He registered the Arkansas Weather Network name to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on July 15. The two other on-camera meteorologists on AWN’s staff come from KNWA/KFTA, storm chaser Zachary Hall (who freelanced for them as a storm spotter) and Blaze Thomas (who had joined the duopoly in May as a digital forecaster and is a recent Mississippi State meteorology graduate).

Technically, the new logo revives the 1992 WKRC-style “12”.

My issue is why are broadcasters using the Eighth Circuit ruling (unusual since appeals court rulings usually aren’t final until SCOTUS has their say, whether they take their case or let the lower court ruling stand) on local TV regulations to facilitate deals. Not even in the Bush and first Trump administrations (the two GOP presidencies that followed the 1996 Communications Act’s passage) did broadcasters initiate M&A deals before the Republican-led FCC made any changes to broadcast ownership rules. Nexstar and Gray couldn’t wait until the FCC formally modded their rules (the Top-4 rule technically is still on the books, despite the Eighth Circuit ruling) before striking deals? I should also point out that while the presumption that the GOP majority on the Commission led by Carr will deregulate, you do have one of Trump’s pals, Newsmax head Christopher Ruddy, advocating against certain rule changes (like raising the national ownership cap), something he purportedly was successful in convincing the Pai FCC not to mess with. Not to say Ruddy’s lobbying efforts will be successful this time, but still…

MeTV and Get are examples of this broadcasting-wise, standing for “Memorable Entertainment Television” and “Great Entertainment Television” (though Get’s backronym is more recent, having been around since 2023, while MeTV dates back to 2003, when it began as a programming block on present-day flagship WWME). Weigel’s upcoming WEST network tries to replicate the idea behind the MeTV name by having it stand for “Western Entertainment Series Television”, but is kinda clunky in its own right. Nowhere near the level of MS NOW’s backronym, but clunky nonetheless.

This doesn’t work either. The international feed of Sky News UK is already available to livestream here in the States on Peacock, the NBC News website, YouTube and selected AVOD streaming platforms (like Pluto and Samsung TV Plus), plus Sky Group isn’t one of the properties Comcast is spinning off to Versant. (Duly noted, Comcast did create a US version of Sky’s NOW vMVPD service a couple years ago for Xfinity customers.) MSNBC and NBC News Now currently take the Sky News feed for international breaking news coverage, though unless there’s a licensing agreement for MSNBC to continue partnering with Sky News post-split (the only way such a brand licensing deal could arise, though this might require geoblocking the Sky News International streaming feed to limit confusion), NBC News Now picks up the slack there.

The only issue with that is that MSNBC has been available in Canada on cable and satellite since the domestic MSNBC Canada spinoff shut down in 2004. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is alternatively known as Société Radio-Canada, and Canadian media publications and media forums like this one sometimes use the SRC abbreviation to refer to the French-language Radio-Canada radio and TV networks. So, that might not have worked due to potential confusion, even though they’re completely unrelated entities.

No, they are not. The streaming windows are day-after-air. Sony acknowledged they are separate arrangements from the syndication pacts.

This comment completely ignores that KTVK (also an independent) airs both Wheel and Jeopardy!. Where are they getting the extra Big Bang episode? Last I checked, Warner Bros. distributes only two episodes per day for their weekday and weekend runs (ten total across the weekday runs and four for weekends, with stations getting the option of only running two of the weekend episodes either Saturday or Sunday). Ironically, although it is indicative of how much the syndication market has downturned lately, stations like WPLG, KTLA, KVVU and WANF have regional cable news channels (past and present, from NY1 to Bay News 9 to CLTV) as baselines for expanding news to fill their broadcast days to make up for the lack of adequate entertainment programming available on the market.

It’s supposed to be a National Weather Network partner; all of their partners (including flagship Tennessee Valley Weather) are advertiser-supported services.

Trump undermining Paramount’s own claims that the cancellation was purely financial: FCC Chair Brendan Carr once again ignoring politicizing situations is not supposed to be in his job description:

ABC and CBS had cited production expenses, despite budget cuts done in preceding years, compared to falling ad revenue for their spate of soap cancellations between 2009 and 2011. All My Children relocated from New York to Los Angeles in a bid to lower costs and it still got the axe two years after the move. Again, even though soaps cost more to produce than a game show, it didn’t stop CBS from greenlighting Beyond the Gates, which still relies on union actors and production staff despite being filmed in Georgia (a right-to-work state with a production tax credit program). The Bold and the Beautiful (which is helped by its global distribution) does occasional international shoots, long after soaps cut on-location shoots to keep production expenses manageable.

Didn’t the CBS Evening News‘s ratings struggles begin during the Rather-Chung era, though?

LateNighter’s Bill Carter pointed out that CBS has canceled a show due to political pressure before (back in the 1960s) and notes that NBC had taken cost-cutting measures at The Tonight Show and Late Night over the past year that CBS didn’t even consider: Considering the abuses of power during this administration, it isn’t a “sky is falling” situation. There’s genuine concern (and they’ve given plenty of reason for us to believe) Trump and company are undermining American democracy and trying to consolidate power (some actions being a matter of seeing how much they can get away with, and the Supreme Court now rubberstamping a lot of Trump’s actions on dubious legal grounds, whereas they were a bit of a mixed bag during his first term, and weakening lower courts’ ability to fully check his unconstitutional actions). Authoritarianism is not simply arresting and murdering political opponents and shutting down legislatures, it can take root through other forms of abuses including, but not limited to, pressuring media outlets to self-censor.

Not even certain network insiders, CBS and Late Show employees buy its purely financial. Also, autocrats in many countries have used shakedowns, rather than arrests, to silence TV satirists who criticize them, putting pressure on broadcasters to kick those satirizing them off the air. If anything, believing blindly this isn’t suspicious willfully ignores how this has been a part of the autocrat’s playbook for years. Trump and many members of his administration have shown they don’t revere the First Amendment that gives Colbert the right to hold them accountable through comedy and commentary. It is not assigning him superpowers.

Trump has repeatedly slammed late-night comedy shows for years for making jokes and criticisms about him, and even mused publicly about having the FCC punish networks for satire on shows like Colbert, Kimmel and SNL that is protected by the First Amendment. It was already reported that Skydance leadership might push for canceling Colbert and The Daily Show and reshape CBS News’ editorial independence to rid the company of what they consider a “liberal taint. The timing, days after Colbert criticized Paramount for settling a winnable lawsuit to get the Skydance deal over the line, makes it seem retaliatory or like capitulation to Trump. There were means to cut costs like asking Colbert to take a pay cut or eliminating the Late Show Band (like Late Night with Seth Meyers did with the 8G Band last year). Unless Paramount can prove it considered cancelling the show before the settlement, I think it’s a mistake to automatically believe the pretext it was financial. Two things can be true: The Late Show was losing revenue for the network, and Paramount could have used that to sell the cancellation to the public despite the optics clearly suggesting otherwise. Because of the aforementioned circumstances, it’s justified that most critical of this decision don’t buy that financial metrics were key, when there were changes they could have made to prolong the show for a few more years. Truly, we’ll never know unless a whistleblower confirms those suspicions, but one set of circumstances can be used to cover up an action done for indefensible reasons. Even if the financial circumstances that led CBS to dump The Late Late Show and @fter Midnight may have been an issue, treating it at face value as the reason for The Late Show’s demise given everything else may be unwise. After all, this is the same network that added a third soap opera to its lineup (Beyond the Gates, which CBS Studios produces) just this year, even though soaps are also relatively expensive to produce (the reasoning partly given for ABC’s move to pare back its soap lineup in 2011 to just General Hospital).

On the Broadcast Plaza Discord, Chase Wilson, who has been involved in the project, said that Spann and his co-partners had been working on developing the Alabama Weather Network since 2023. He also stated it would be a member of the National Weather Network, the cooperative co-founded by Tennessee Valley Weather managing meteorologist Ben Luna (who designed the logo with Wilson) of which Laubhan’s Mississippi Live Weather is a member service.

On the heels of ex-WTVA chief Matt Laubhan launching Mississippi Live Weather, ABC 33/40 chief meteorologist James Spann is launching a 24-hour statewide streaming weather service, Alabama Weather Network, set to launch on August 11. Spann will remain with ABC 33/40, doing weather for its 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. newscasts as well as severe weather coverage as needed, while also appearing on ALWN. The venture is a co-partnership between Spann, hotel industry executive (and co-partner on Spann’s Alabama Weather Blog) Bill Murray, former ABC 33/40 meteorologist John Oldshue, and business and personal finance expert (and former Birmingham Barons president/GM) Bill Hardekopf.

Correction: Both networks are also being added to additional Gray stations. Between Scripps and Gray, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs and Tucson are the only markets with new 365BLK and Defy affiliates where both groups overlap.

I posted this on Broadcast Plaza’s A Block, but might as well highlight it here too. There has been so much turnover for TBN’s diginets in the past decade, to sum up: * TBN Salsa (their attempt to target English-speaking Latinos/Hispanics) launched and failed within a couple of years; * The Church Channel became Hillsong Channel and then, in the wake of Hillsong’s scandals, became TBN Inspire * Smile and Juce TV (formerly JCTV) were merged into a Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite-style scheduling format OTA (Smile during the day and Juce at night for 12 hours each, with their 24-hour feeds relegated to the TBNi streaming offering) for a couple years after Salsa launched, then re-separated back into two 24-hour feeds when Salsa was dropped; * Juce (and its teen/YA-targeted format) was repurposed as a YouTube channel, while the OTA network got replaced by the family movie channel Positiv (becoming its first commercial diginet venture); * Merit TV launched under a distribution partnership, hit financial issues within its first year and is now likely on the verge of being kicked off of TBN’s diginet suite; * Enlace USA was shuffled off to streaming (bc of Merit’s launch); * Smile (one of the few OTA kids’ channels) folded in January and had its OTA slot replaced by infomercial service OnTV4U.

It’s a free-to-download font called Lemon Milk.

Warner-Chappell, which owns the rights to the original Hello package, composed this new series of themes, effectively Hello News v.2 (or Series 5, if you want to go by how Gari called their theme updates). Chris Majka composed a custom theme using the Hello signature that debuted last year, alongside selected cuts from Gari’s first three Hello series (the ones KWQC brought back in 2023 for their 75th anniversary).

No one’s gonna terminate their CBS affiliation because they chose to put an out-of-production Byron Allen show at 12:37 a.m. ET, BFFR. Considering the state of syndication these days, the current American network/affiliate programming model actually looks increasingly out of place, given that in most countries (as well as our Spanish-language networks and diginets), OTA broadcast networks handle most of their daily program output, fillling timeslots not occupied by first-run programs (e.g., dramas, sitcoms, reality series, lifestyle shows), news (local or national) and sports with acquired programming and repeats of current and past network shows. It kinda makes less sense now for networks here in the States to give lower-rated timeslots back to affiliates (the most recent occurrence being in 2021, when NBC gave up the 1:37 slot after A Little Late with Lilly Singh ended), given the downturn in the syndication market and stations’ tendency to just expand local news usually using an already stretched staff, rather than invest in other types of programming. Plus, CBS’s affiliates probably aren’t clamoring to take back the 12:37 a.m. slot. It’s too late for live news (outside of the occasional overrun during March Madness), and Big Three stations don’t run syndicated sitcoms and dramas in late night like they did through the 2000s (thanks largely to CBS and ABC making valiant challenges to NBC’s once-powerhouse late-night lineup with the Late Show, The Late Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!). If CBS had turned over the timeslot, it’d probably be filled by lower-rated first-run syndies (as was often the case until the 1990s), newsmagazines (either second runs of shows like Inside Edition and ET or lower-rated shows like Extra that the station might already air in a later slot), second runs of daytime talk shows (KOCO, for example, has done this since the early 2000s starting with Oprah and now Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson), or late news rebroadcasts. You’re likely not going to see the types of suited-for-late-night first-run syndies like Arsenio, Love Connection or Blind Date that did well in the past.

While the Spectrum brand will remain, the Charter name won’t (per a CNBC report): Cox Enterprises will also own 23% of the shares in the new Cox Communications, which will maintain Charter’s existing Stamford headquarters and old Cox’s existing offices in Atlanta post-closing.

It came from this photo of the new building on the FB post linked a few posts back. My guess is that logo was a prototype in case they got permission to drop the Fox branding, and they commissioned the signage before deciding to keep the “Fox 8” brand. The one branding change they did make was the replacement of the longtime “Your Weather Authority” brand in favor of “First Alert”, carrying over (a non-italicized version of) the Helvetica Condensed font and the stylized thunderbolt from the previous weather logo.

Let’s not exaggerate. Unless some were deleted, of the 41 comments on that post (as of this post’s writing), only four make reference to this, and two are from people confusing the Fox network and Fox News Channel. That said, I don’t know if they’re going the WBRC route with the branding (switching primarily to a callsign/channel brand, while keeping the network-centric branding in limited form) or dropping the Fox name entirely, since the post still makes reference to “Fox 8”, including on the standalone and desk monitors in the set pic (assuming that wasn’t taken from weeks ago, and updated graphics with the “WVUE 8” brand weren’t sent to the new control room yet).