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Rusty Muck

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Everything posted by Rusty Muck

  1. Rusty Muck
    “NewsNation, the cable news channel created from what had been WGN America prior to Nexstar’s acquisition of Tribune Media in 2019, was another area of focus during the call. Execs emphasized that it has been profitable since it launched in rebranded form in 2020. They also noted their plans to program it with 24 hours a day of news from Monday through Friday by the end of 2023 and then fully 24/7 news by the end of 2024.” That’s literally it in a nutshell. Regardless of how much Nexstar screws up The CW, it’s still going to make a profit as opposed to the prior business model. NewsNation has objectively failed in their original stated purpose as a news channel, and no one is watching, and yet they would be losing money continuing to have it as a ION-lite rerun farm that no one would be watching.
  2. Rusty Muck
    Apples and oranges. Sinclair could not legally keep either the 33 or 40 of “ABC 33/40” and if they filed such a request to claim VC 33 or 40 in the present day, it would be rejected. And AGAIN, people have no trouble finding James Spann when there’s a tornado and he rolls up his sleeves.
  3. Rusty Muck
    4pm might not be far off at this rate, which would match up with their intended launch plans (after considerable revision). One thing I’m legitimately surprised about is WWJ running Entertainment Tonight at 1:35 a.m. … why not at 7:30 p.m.?? Amyre Sr. got her big break in 1975 as one of the first anchors for WGPR-TV’s Big City News, so it really does come full circle.
  4. Rusty Muck
    These are diginets as opposed to cable. Thanks to the Ion/Inyo footprint, Scripps has a major OTA presence to exploit as well as getting them on every FAST/OTT/SVOD. tbh if they spin anything off in a few years, it’ll be the network affiliates. And they have no reason to even do that.
  5. Rusty Muck
    I looked at WBMA’s channel lineup with @Weeterslast night. It’s devolved into an absurdly laughable mess since Sinclair twisted arms and bent reality to get the Allbritton deal finalized: Sinclair could make it so much easier on everyone and call the whole enterprise “WBMA ABC” or “ABC Birmingham” or “ABC 58” or “ABC Alabama”… and yet… and yet, people still find a way to watch James Spann on ABC 58/68.2/17.2/40.2… errr… “ABC 33/40” AND are doing so in a market historically dominated by 6 and 13 with a branding that’s been obsolete for nearly nine years. That’s what I mean when I debate the actual importance of channel number branding in the post-DTV switch and early OTT/SVOD eras.
  6. Rusty Muck
    The bitter part is that WGPR-TV has a legacy. It was merely erased from channel 62 in 1994 when CBS was forced to buy the station under duress and is now confined to a museum.
  7. Rusty Muck
    Of note, Fox affiliate branding conventions came from how the MetroMedia chain identified themselves for decades. What had been “MetroMedia Channel #” was altered to “Fox Television Channel #” when Rupert bought the chain. By 1988, it was simplified to “Fox #”.
  8. Rusty Muck
    Why would Manham/Sinclair want to sell it? If Nexstar strips WWHO of the CW, they could still run the station as a diginet tree from a server in a broom closet at the WSYX studios. Put Comet on 53.1 or something.
  9. Rusty Muck
    With all due respect, this reads like a typical Scotty Jones “tHiS iS tEgNa” old-man-yelling-at-cloud post which got his blog banned from this forum’s Discord server in the first place. PROVE to me with ratings data that the station was “trashed” because it’s Doing Things Different And That Is Bad, otherwise it’s just conjecture. My 69-year old mother watches all the local news (with divided preferences to WKYC and WJW) and she doesn’t care about the ownership of either. Whenever I see people, including some who live in other parts of the freaking country and would never want to see Cleveland, go on their typical “WKYC ruined themselves with that logo…” or “when they call themselves ‘channel 3’, I’ll care about them”, it comes off as ill-informed and silly and makes the TV hobbyist community look out of touch. (“No, it’s the children who are wrong!”) The cold hard truth is that the vast majority of television news viewers are 25–54 female; the demographics here and on Discord do not match up with that in any way. It’s for a variety of reasons but it’s not like we’re doing anything to make either platform all that more palatable to them.
  10. Rusty Muck
    How is WKYC a “disaster” under Tegna when the ratings position hasn’t changed much, if at all, since their 2019 revamp? Scott Jones’s hilariously biased anti-Tegna blog posts don’t count. Gannett split for only two reasons: 1. NBCO forced Gannett to assign quite a few of the Belo stations into shell groups until the split allowed them to buy those stations outright. 2. Who in their right mind wants to buy a newspaper? It’s nonsensical other than for the historical archives and digital assets. And you think Gatehouse/Gannett is bad? The Plain Dealer, owned by the Newhouse family since the late 1960s, has only FOUR union employees on staff. Up to the early 2010s, it was a damn good paper. The Newhouses busted the union and destroyed it in favor of their Cleveland.com digital property, which has always been substandard ever since they launched it in 1998.
  11. Rusty Muck
    MediaGeneral was doomed as a station group when Soo Kim and Deb McDermott forcibly took control of the chain, merged it into LIN and THEN tried to merge it into Meredith before dumping it all in Nexstar’s lap.
  12. Rusty Muck
    KVUE and KXAN are two UHFs that repeatedly beat KTBC, the biggest bust of all the New World—Fox stations.
  13. Rusty Muck
    Including the very old demos that seek out cable talk channels regardless of the high channel number they are on? Surprised that no one has pointed out that those channels are listed as “CBS”, “ABC”, “Fox” and “PBS” … not “News8”, “10News”, “Fox 5/69” or “KPBS”. The generic displays on YouTube TV lend themselves DIRECTLY to CBS’s new branding convention.
  14. Rusty Muck
    I get that they don’t want to confuse themselves with WCBS NewsRadio 88 or 101.1 CBS-FM, but this is why you don’t even bother with the black box. Good grief.
  15. Rusty Muck
    That’s literally what PBS does on a daily basis.
  16. Rusty Muck
    I’m trying to understand the logic of debating the importance of channel numbers when they’ve been falling into irrelevance since the DTV switchover… and will further become irrelevant as ATSC 3.0 is rolled out. This isn’t 1994.
  17. Rusty Muck
    Even if it is just that, I highly doubt that you’ll see a branding disparity between OTA and streaming last for long. For one, February sweeps is forthcoming. No better time for the CBS Los Angeles name to be gradually phased in with the KCAL name so OTA viewers can connect the two brands.
  18. Rusty Muck
    Gee, it’s like I might have been on to something… Ready to claim my prize lmao
  19. Rusty Muck
    KCBS-TV hasn’t been relevant since Bill Applegate made it an über-tabloid schlockfest in the early 1990s. “CBS 2” only serves to remind of how they’ve been trapped in mediocrity ever since. Just because a station “revolutionized local news” — and the term is fairly subjective and varies wildly on a per market basis — doesn’t mean that branding should be trapped in amber and prevented from evolving.
  20. Rusty Muck
    A station logo that doesn’t look like it’s been trapped in amber since 1993 or looking like a generic McStation, what a concept!
  21. Rusty Muck
    Or even in the case of WCCO-TV, KDKA-TV and WBZ-TV, the mere fact that they have to share their call letters with unrelated radio stations. For KDKA-TV, it’s already shown to be a liability.
  22. Rusty Muck
    WWJ has one of the biggest signals of any full-service television station in Michigan and they have good cable placement. They don’t need a superfluous LPTV. They just need investment. Weigel has “CBS 58” Milwaukee and “ABC 57” South Bend and you don’t see them being embarrassed about those numbers because they invested in the stations and have tried. CBS never did that with WWJ for a garden variety of reasons, and wound up making “62” a tainted brand by negligence and inaction.
  23. Rusty Muck
    WWJ is simulcasting the streaming service CBS News Detroit, which will ultimately be in operation from 4am to 11:30pm every day. The original and current plans are to offer up to 40 hours of simulcasts a week on channel 62 (and presumably WKBD can also simulcast in other hours. Supply chain shortages delayed everything and resulted in a soft launch so a presence of some sort could be had for the February sweeps. Even with just a 6 and 11, it’s still far more local news than anything CBS has ever done with the station and the most local news output on 62 since labor unrest shuttered Big City News on WGPR in 1991. This brings up a point @Weeters has raised before and I agree with. It’s 2023. What good is it to identify your news operation with EWN or Action News, which date back to 1959 and 1970, respectively? Plus “CBS 62” has long been a negative and a liability and an embarrassment for the network—they were basically forced into buying an obscure indie from the Free Mason that was the first-ever Black-owned TV station in the mainland, and because of continued upheaval at the network and it’s corporate parents, couldn’t do anything with it.
  24. Rusty Muck
    Fox is basically a sports programming service with a forgettable primetime block of crappy reality shows—including 33 different shows that Gordon Ramsey can scream in and 9 different iterations of The Masked Singer (a fad that has long passed its expiration date)—and The Simpsons and Family Guy, two shows that will never die. That might be the goal Nexstar has for the CW, but they’ll never get anything close to the NFL or MLB. So why NOT turn the station into a O&O for a sports programming service that you own?
  25. Rusty Muck
    He’s also the father of CBS Weekend News anchor/senior correspondent Jericka Duncan.
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