T.L. Hughes
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Posts posted by T.L. Hughes
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Gray shut down KNEP's news department and laid off staff in certain other departments on the same day the Marquee swap announced. Since February 2, the station's in-house newscasts have been replaced by simulcasts of KGWN/KCWY's Wyoming News Now broadcasts.
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5 hours ago, nickp said:
This is interesting to note considering FOX is the only one of the three without a standalone streaming service
Of course, had Rupert Murdoch not sold 20th Century Fox and the FX Networks, National Geographic Channels and Fox International Channels properties to Disney (along with the Fox Sports Regional Networks that became Bally Sports under Sinclair), they likely would have had a robust SVOD platform instead of relying on Hulu and the in-house AVOD service Tubi (which Fox Corporation bought in 2021 to have some mainstream streaming presence).
I honestly think it was a mistake on the Murdoch's part to not keep those properties, because it robbed them of creating a strong streaming competitor, because it turned the successor Fox Corporation into a runt while giving Disney bigger market share in TV and film production and distribution as well as linear distribution, and because all that sale did was make Fox Corporation defined in the public by Fox News instead of the more reputable and less controversial properties it used to own and still owns.
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5 hours ago, DENDude said:
CNBC is reporting this evening that ESPN, FOX & Warner Brothers/Discovery are going to launch a yet to be named streaming service for sports, don't know much more than that yet. (Notably absent from this are Comcast's NBC Universal & Capital Amusements CBS).
From what I took of it, the service in concept seems like a hybrid of Fubo (with far fewer entertainment-based networks with little or no sports content, seemingly what it would have been if entertainment networks weren't bundled into its carriage contracts) and DAZN. On top of it, they apparently plan to incorporate ESPN+ content onto the service.
That said, even though ABC and Fox are among the networks whose sports content is being offered, I'm not sure if it's planning to run their full linear feeds or just the sports events they air (a la Max's Bleacher Report add-on, which is basically one to four part-time feeds only active when simulcasts of sports events from TBS, TNT and truTV and original daily sports talk shows air).
There's also the matter of whether this replaces ESPN's original plan to offer an expanded standalone streaming service (mixing programming from the ESPN linear networks and ESPN+), and if ESPN/Disney partnering with Fox Corporation and Warner Bros. Discovery (which was done very much on the DL since there were no scoops on this partnership before the announcement) was its way forward to getting a service along those lines off the ground.
Also, it's National Amusements, not Capital Amusements.-
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1 hour ago, GoldenShine9 said:
The problem is that the market cannot support three, let alone four, independent outlets. The only alternative would be piping in adjacent markets (Memphis in the north, Jackson or Meridian in the south).
Kind of a good point, actually. While Morris' shifting of Fox programming to WCBI-DT2 technically violates the new Top-4 regulations (this move likely would have required a waiver to allow it under the new rules, and there hasn't been enough time since the ownership rules were passed to get approved for one before WLOV came under Morris' control), keeping the status quo under Allen was risky too.
Until Morris took over the SSA, Allen (like Heartland and the Spains before it, dating to WKDH's shutdown after its LMA with WTVA was terminated in 2012) had control of three Big Four affiliations between two stations: Fox on WLOV, and NBC (main channel) and ABC (on DT2) on WTVA.
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FTR, WLOV had been managed alongside WTVA since 1992, when the SSA was first established by the Spain family to take over operating the weakest of WTVA's two Big Three competitors. (WLOV was Tupelo's ABC affiliate at the time, and would switch to Fox three years later, leaving the market without a local ABC station until the now-defunct WKDH signed on in 2001.)
The problem here is, considering the FCC recently approved an update to its broadcast ownership rules that closed the loophole allowing station operators to put a Big Four network on a multicast channel (including through the acquisition of another station's primary affiliation), Morris might be looking at a fine soon thanks to its decision to move Fox to WCBI-DT2 after the fact.
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Diamond Sports has secured deals to televise Texas Rangers, Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins games for the 2024 Major League Baseball season, keeping all 12 remaining teams that it held broadcast rights in the fray; however, it still does not have rights to stream games from those three teams over Bally Sports+. (The Twins deal had expired before the start of the year, while the other two teams were being renegotiated.)
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On 1/31/2024 at 7:45 PM, MorningNews said:
KTLA also streams on the radio. Might be an LA thing.
Aside, how does that work? It makes sense for its newscasts, other local shows (L.A. Unscripted, Off the Clock, California Cooking with Jessica Holmes, Frank Buckley Interviews and Inside California Politics) and Clippers games, but the bulk of KTLA's local programming airs between 4:00 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. weekdays. The rest of the station's schedule (outside the weeknight 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., weekend morning and evening newscasts, Sports Final and a few of the above-mentioned non-news local shows) consists of CW shows, syndicated and paid programming, and I doubt those shows are given audio simulcasts on the iHeart feed.
Radio simulcasts of local TV newscasts have been a thing for about 35 years or so, but usually have been limited to evening broadcasts—usually during drive time—on a news/talk or music station. (There were also a few cases like the arrangement that KPRC had with KLAT radio in the early 1990s, where a Spanish-language station ran a translated simulcast of the English broadcast.)
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Demetrius Ivory has been named to succeed Skilling as chief meteorologist. Effective February 29, he will take over Tom's slots on the 6:00 p.m. hour of the WGN Evening News and the 9:00 and 10:00 newscasts, while ceding his own duties on the WGN Midday News.
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46 minutes ago, AmericanErrorist said:
All told, a number of satellite viewers are either going to be stuck watching the Super Bowl either on OTA or the Nickelodeon broadcast. (Surprised the CBS affiliate body allowed Nick to cut in on their biggest day in 4 years.)
Paramount likely figured the Nick simulcast would add viewership, boosting total ratings for the Super Bowl, rather than cannibalize the CBS viewership, given their different demographics.
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WGN plans to commemorate Skilling's retirement with special events throughout February, leading up to his final day at the station:
* On Friday (February 2), Tom will report from the Groundhog Day event in Woodstock, Illinois during the 7:00 a.m. hour of the WGN Morning News.
* On February 20, Tom will be honored on his 72nd birthday during the WGN Evening News (4:00-7:00 p.m.) with special guests.
* On February 22, a live celebration saluting Tom will air during the 9:00 a.m. hour of the WGN Morning News from the Music Box Theatre (near the North Center and Wrigleyville neighborhoods, not far from the WGN-TV studios). The event will be broadcast before a live audience of over 600 fans; free tickets are being distributed on a first-come, first-served basis as of 9:00 a.m. Thursday (February 1), and can be reserved at the theater's website.
* His final day, February 28, will feature retrospectives and honors by WGN staff, friends and family during the WGN Evening News and the 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts.
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Syncbak has announced the planned rollout of Zeam, a relaunch/replacement of its local news streaming service VUit, which will offer live and on-demand news, sports and lifestyle programming, carrying over the latter's existing streaming deals with stations owned by groups like Gray, CBS News & Stations, News-Press & Gazette, Hearst and Morgan Murphy Media.
The marketing campaign for the (re)launch will include a commercial starring John Stamos that will air within local ad breaks during Super Bowl LVIII on about 100 of the CBS stations whose local content will be available on the service.
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David Smith is financially involved in a lawsuit accusing Baltimore City Public Schools of defrauding taxpayers filed in 2022 by Jovani Patterson, chairman of People for Elected Accountability and Civic Engagement, a PAC funded almost entirely by Smith promoting ballot initiatives seeking to reshape the Baltimore city government.
Apparently though, WBFF's news staff had no knowledge of Smith's involvement when it ran previous stories concerning the suit; the station now plans to add a disclosure notice to stories concerning the suit.
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Neal Barton is stepping down as KETK's evening anchor and news director after 20 years with the station (the longest of any of his gigs during his 42-year career). His last newscast will be on Friday, January 26.
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13 minutes ago, Megatron81 said:
I thought that Dish & Mission was dark since the fall of 2022 or was that DirecTV which is still dark. I think that has to do with the lawsuit once that gets settled maybe a deal gets done. I'm surprised that Dish didn't take Mission to court like DirecTV is doing.
Mission's stations were pulled from Dish in early January 2023, so 54 weeks have passed between the start and resolution of the dispute.
Mission's dispute with DirecTV began three months before the Dish dispute.
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Mission Broadcasting stations will return to Dish Network about a year after they were pulled as the companies have reached a new carriage arrangement.
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2 hours ago, gbsgeo said:
The announcement doesn't mention whether the games will air on any other stations in the Mavericks' broadcast territory, which is especially interesting given Tegna that owns four other stations (KYTX, KCEN and KXVA/KIDY) in the team's designated market.
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Here are a couple of montages of the morning and evening opens:
They employ cuts from at least three of the "Hello News" series, with Series 3 appearing to be the lone one left out. Most newscasts use the Series 1 primary open (the cut used during KWQC's first "Hello" tenure) for the intro, except for the 10:00 show, which uses the Series 2 topical instead.
Bumpers, teases and topicals mainly use what may be the Series 4 cuts (I couldn't find the cut used in the topicals in the montages in the Series 4 cuts available on News Music Now, so I'm not entirely sure that it's from that track list or a previously unreleased cut).
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8 minutes ago, ABC 7 Denver said:
They are using Gari, not Warner Chappell Production Music.
Warner Chappell owns the Gari library.
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The show's concept sounds a lot like the original 2015–16 format of Crime Watch Daily, which was also distributed by Telepictures/WBTD, when Matt Doran (who was replaced by Chris Hansen for its final two seasons) was the original host.
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The Washington Post has an article about Smith's purchase and troubles he's already having with staff over his views about how the Sun papers (the flagship of which he admits to not have read since the early 1980s) should be run. For those who get a paywall:
QuoteIf the employees of the Baltimore Sun were expecting a charm offensive from its out-of-the-blue new owner, they sure didn’t get one. “Full disclosure, I haven’t read the newspaper in 40 years,” David D. Smith, a television executive and lifelong resident of the Baltimore area, told the 60 staffers who crowded into a conference room at lunchtime Tuesday.
“Literally have not read the newspaper. … I read the paper maybe four times since I started working on trying to buy this place,” Smith said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post. Regardless, Smith seemed to have strong opinions — negative ones — about the Sun and the fleet of suburban papers he purchased alongside it, which he laid out in a tense, 2½-hour meeting that left many staffers baffled about the multimillionaire’s intentions for the city’s 186-year-old newspaper.
He suggested that the Sun overlooks the stories readers crave about crime and government dysfunction. (Retorted one journalist: “We’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom,” most recently in 2020, for a fraud investigation that forced the mayor to resign.) He stood by a 2018 interview in which he called print media “meaningless dribble.” And, when pressed, he said he mostly thought the same of the Sun. “Just look at the data,” he said, citing declining print circulation, though newspapers nationwide have been affected by the same decades-long shift in the public’s reading habits.
In recent years, many journalists have waxed nostalgic for the era of family newspaper dynasties, when owners with deep local roots and deep emotional investments in local news made executive decisions — instead of distant corporations responding to the whims of Wall Street and global economic pressures. That has certainly been the case in Baltimore, where the Sun suffered years of cutbacks after it was consolidated into the Tribune newspaper chain, even before it was purchased almost three years ago by a financial-management firm with a reputation for slashing jobs and shuttering newsrooms.
But while many Sun reporters yearned to break away from that firm, Alden Global Capital, Monday’s unexpected news that their paper had been sold to an independent local buyer has triggered more concern than joy — especially after meeting with Smith, executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose nearly 200 local TV stations have shown a marked conservative bent in recent years. In their meeting — some details of which were previously reported by the Baltimore Banner and NPR — Smith professed to know little about the newspaper business other than that it’s a business. “Your job is to manufacture content,” he said, according to the audio recording, “a product that people want.”
One former top Sun editor said that the drama around Smith’s purchase will make this “one of the most fascinating local news acquisitions in the country to watch” in coming months. “Generally, research has shown that local ownership is good for regional news organizations,” ushering in greater investment and renewed local coverage, said Tim Franklin, a former Sun executive editor and now a senior associate dean at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. “The concern here is whether he will use the Sun to advance his ideological agenda.”
Smith turned down a request for an interview Tuesday, but his spokesman said that the new owner “looks forward to having the Baltimore Sun cover important, impactful stories to make a difference in the community” and that he “believes one of the primary purposes of the newspaper is to serve the public interest.”
Sinclair has drawn criticism for integrating conservative and right-wing commentary, frequently on hot-button national topics, into its local TV news coverage — a deviation in an industry that has usually aspired to strike a nonpartisan tone. In 2018, it required anchors nationwide to read a script condemning “fake news,” invoking President Donald Trump’s derogatory term for news media. Smith insisted in his meeting with staffers that he doesn’t care about politics. “I don’t trust any politicians under any circumstances,” he said. “I don’t trust government under any circumstance.”
Records show that he last made campaign contributions in 2018, when he donated to a few Democrats along with a mostly Republican slate. But tax forms show that his family’s foundation has contributed generously to conservative and right-wing advocacy groups that have inserted themselves into some of the nation’s most polarizing discussions. The David D. Smith Family Foundation gave $275,000 in 2021 and $261,000 in 2019 to Project Veritas, a right-wing organization known for undercover sting operations on journalists, government officials and political activists. It also contributed $121,000 in 2018 to Moms for America, a conservative activist group that says it “empowers moms to raise patriots and promote liberty” and has joined campaigns to remove books it finds controversial from public schools.
The Baltimore Sun Guild, the union representing Sun staffers, said in a statement Wednesday that the editorial direction described by Smith “focused on clicks rather than journalistic value,” which “concerned many of our members.”
“We don’t know how to reason with him,” one Sun staffer told The Post after the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve working relationships. “Because he is so uninformed about print media standards and journalism ethics as a whole.” While Smith’s plans for the Sun remained murky, many in Baltimore also puzzled over the reasons Alden decided to sell it — especially just a couple of years after rebuffing an effort from another deep-pocketed Maryland businessman.
In 2021, when [..] Tribune was in the process of selling its newspaper holdings to Alden, Stewart Bainum Jr. — executive chairman of Choice Hotels and a former Democratic state senator — attempted to buy the Sun for $65 million. But that deal fell apart over the multimillion-dollar fees Alden would have demanded from a detached Sun to keep providing the business and administrative services that had been consolidated under the Tribune chain.
Bainum instead launched the Banner, a local news nonprofit that now employs more than 100 people, about 15 percent of whom came from the Sun. Rick Edmonds, a media analyst for the Poynter Institute, said that competition from the Banner may have dissuaded Alden from many of its usual cost-cutting regimens at the Sun, which still employs around 150 people.
Under Alden, the Sun shuttered its printing press and laid off its 100 workers. But the newsroom hasn’t been subjected to the same kind of slashing Alden has done at other newspapers, Edmonds said — which may also explain Alden’s reasons for offloading the Sun. Usually, he said, Alden “can take the paper down in quality, and people who still really want to have a newspaper won’t like it — but they can still make some money and have some customers.” However, “all those numbers get worse when you have an ambitious competitor.”
Smith’s price for the Sun and its affiliated suburban papers — which include the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, the Carroll County Times and several weekly papers — has not been made public. He mentioned in passing in Tuesday’s staff meeting that he paid “nine figures.” It was unclear whether that sum includes the fees he told the Sun he will pay to Alden’s MediaNews Group for business services. In a statement about the sale, MediaNews Group’s chief operating officer, Guy Gilmore, said: “We are always open to discussions about local ownership and pleased that our preeminent newspaper operating and technology platform will continue to provide services for The Baltimore Sun.”
Smith repeatedly bashed the Banner in his meeting with Sun staff. “It’s just a matter of time before they’re gone,” he said. “They won’t survive. In fact, if anybody thinks they’ll survive, I’m happy to give you odds and take your money.” (Bainum, in a note to Banner staff Monday, said, “We welcome more and better coverage in the Sun, and wish the new, local ownership the best of luck” — and assured them that “it doesn’t change our mission, our commitment, and our plans in any way at all.”)
Smith held up one of Sinclair’s Baltimore TV stations, Fox45, as what he sees as an exemplar of successful local news coverage, “despite the fact that people might say it’s a crazy, right-wing [station],” he said. “I’ve been called that by everybody, Democrats and Republicans.” Franklin, the former Sun executive editor, said that any changes in the paper’s editorial pages will suggest the future Smith has in mind for it. If the newspaper veers into “a rigid, ideological, conservative direction,” he warned, that could hurt the newspaper’s bottom line, given that the Baltimore area is heavily Democratic.
Former Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik, now a professor at Goucher College, said that Fox45’s coverage of Baltimore schools and city hall is considered aggressive but said that it takes a partisan tone. “It fits into a larger pattern of, ‘This is what happens when you let Democrats run your city: It goes to hell.’”
Smith has personally involved himself in local politics. He and his family bankrolled a successful effort to impose term limits on the mayor and city council, as well as a failed effort to allow citizens to recall officials — one that received extensive coverage on Fox45. During his newsroom meeting, Smith argued with one writer who suggested Fox45’s coverage of whether to recall Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) — including the station’s promotion of a self-proclaimed “unscientific poll” — was biased. “This guy bought the Sun, he’s got enough money to wield that kind of power,” said another staffer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve newsroom confidences. “But how easy will it be for him to bend a newsroom?”
One area on which they did get a specific answer was whether Smith was committed to maintaining a print edition. “No,” he said bluntly. Smith added that he was, in fact, “committed to getting out of the paper business. I’m a right-wing radical who loves trees,” he said, with a small chuckle. “Reconcile that for me.”
Toward the end of the meeting, Smith went on a tangent about how he believes Baltimore police officers are scared to do their jobs because “they’re terrified of what state government is going to do to them,” noting that the state’s attorney tried to prosecute six officers. “It ruined those people’s lives.” “I’m sorry, are you talking about the ones who killed Freddie Gray?” a staffer asked, referring to the 2015 death of 25-year-old Gray while in police custody, a galvanizing event that led to widespread protests across the city, some turning violent. Three of the officers involved were acquitted, while charges against the others were dropped. A tense exchange followed. “You may believe that they killed somebody,” Smith said. “I’m not here to tell you they did or didn’t.” The Sun was a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of Gray’s death.
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20 hours ago, EJ Velazquez said:
20 minutes ago, NEPANews said:You know, the more you look at the talent intros, and this may be really nit-picky, but the ABC logo within them. Is that…..the now “former” ABC logo in there with their names?
Upon closer inspection, yes, that is the monochrome/print version of the logo's original 1962 design, with the minimal spacing between the "abc" text and the edge of the circle.
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Sinclair has renewed its affiliation agreements for the group's 41 Fox stations.
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A WHOI newscast from 1999, featuring what appears to be a knockoff of TVbD's "Balls and Walls":
The Ever-Evolving Gray Graphics Situation...Thread
in Graphics
Posted · Edited by T.L. Hughes
I'm guessing WLTZ is the .5% of that minority still using the Peacock because of the SSA?