Rusty Muck

He just hates practically everything else that deviates from his limited mindset of news... as it used to be.

The hilarious part is that KTLA, WJW and WGN will be totally crippled on a digital angle by more aggressive efforts from KCAL-KCBS, WOIO-WUAB and WBBM. And in this era, it’s terminally stupid to hand your competitors a massive advantage right off the gate. I was always curious when Nexstar would start sabotaging the only good assets in their portfolio they basically lucked into, and now we have our answer. The irony is that Uncle Perry and ol’ Scotty Jones have something in common… they both openly want to keep the industry forever stuck in 2003 and discourage innovation.

KCAL has a strong news brand and KCBS has been a market laggard since the early 1990s (and again, they were an embarrassment under Applegate before that). It’s a net positive to have the stronger brand used over both stations. KCBS has nothing to lose by ceding their brand over this. Yet again, this is not complicated. I’m an armchair quarterback and I’ll never work in the industry. If I operated a television station it would fail in a matter of days, and I know it.

Calling it “KCAL CBS News Los Angeles” is an invitation for disaster. Scuttling the “KCAL” name right away is as bad an option.

With all due respect, how is this “alienating KCAL’s current audience” when it had always been a news-heavy indie? If anything, it’s finally showing people that KCAL’s news and KCBS’s news are one and the same. It’s literally doing the same thing KPIX is doing, just in a different path but the same end result.

Yet again, this is not indecision. It’s a fairly calculated move and entirely a transitional one. It’s brand evolution for KCAL as their brand is being refitted to the CBS branding conventions. It’s transitional because the entire operation is being renamed outright and “KCAL” will be retired in less than a year. And yes, big-picture, it is a rebrand for the obvious reasons. All they have to do is literally swap out “KCAL” with “CBS”. And in the end, the viewers will not be confused. This AGAIN is not complicated.

For this debate about how long a brand should last, WJW used the “ei8ht IS NEWS” name for 10 months, then hastily renamed themselves “Fox 8” after the network bought New World. (The newscasts went from “ei8ht IS NEWS” to “Fox 8 Is News” to “Fox 8 News” in less than a month.”) No one ever accused WJW of indecision. ei8ht IS NEWS lasted through three sweeps periods and a ton of promos incessantly intoning the brand.

It’s brand evolution. Businesses in practically every other industry do it.

This is also an atonement for the infamous “NewsCentral” setup 15 years ago in which **both** KCAL and KCBS were de-emphasized right out of the gate. It was a marketing nightmare and confused viewers. Take the KCAL name, use it for both stations as a long-term transitional brand, then creep in “CBS Los Angeles” and retire the KCAL name in a year. Boom. Done.

People are assuming this is a permanent situation and it is most clearly not one at all. In less than a year, “KCAL” will be gone, the name “CBS Los Angeles” will be on both stations, and no one will call either station to complain about being confused over “where did KCAL 9 News go?”

KCAL is a brand. WJZ, WBZ, WCCO and KDKA are also brands, but the latter three are brands now confused openly with radio stations which also still use those brands for their own purposes. (KCAL doesn’t have that problem because virtually no one confuses them with KCAL-FM in Redlands.) Call letters are not “meaningless” but they are increasingly unreliable in order to make your station stand out in a digital world. Same with “CBS 2” or “Fox 5” or “ABC 7” or “NBC 4”. KCAL AGAIN doesn’t have that problem BUT they have to reconcile their brand legacy with what has become a streamlined branding convention among CBS as a whole. That’s all there is to it. We aren’t talking about rocket surgery.

That’s exactly what I said. They’d be foolish to drop the KCAL name right away and risk confusing viewers that still view 2 and 9 as separate news departments.

Because it’d be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Rebranding KCBS as “CBS Los Angeles” makes the station easy to identify and distinguish. KCAL has been a news-heavy indie since Disney signed it on in 1989 and the brand was never de-emphasized under CBS ownership. KCAL’s news department (despite being one and the same as KCBS) has a better reputation and standing as Bill Applegate, quite frankly, dragged KCBS into the mud with a tabloid format that would put WSVN to shame, and they’ve never recovered from it. My hunch is that you’ll see the KCAL brand get slowly phased out over the next few months, if not a full year. It’s capitalizing on their existing brand equity while associating it with the “CBS Los Angeles” branding.

That’s exactly the problem. The Post has an extremely polemic reputation as a right-leaning paper, and Fox News has pushed an anti-CBS agenda dating back to Bernard Goldberg’s falling out with the network a generation ago. So even if there’s a possibility it might be true, there’s also a good chance people will dismiss it as little more than a hit piece.

This story is from the Murdoch-owned New York Post. Unfortunately the Post’s track record is such that it merits scrutiny as much as the subject matter itself.

It’s also trading on the legacy “WSM” name. After all, Gray has been collaborating with Ryman (owner of WSM) for Circle well before they bought Meredith.

In every aspect it’s an outright failure that has been both continually rejected by the marketplace AND bested by other broadcast chains with better now non-cable concepts… and yet it still makes money. Only In America…

Would Nexstar be able to accommodate her with an Atlanta facility? tbh I wouldn’t be surprised Gray hired her for WANF-WPCH once her noncompete ends. She’d be ideal for an old-school lifestyle talk show that can be syndicated throughout the chain and they’d have the facilities for it.

CNN acquiring the Beeb’s rogue robot cams might just result in the UK’s most significant cultural export since the Beatles.

A retrospective on her life and career: https://www.ideastream.org/npr-news/2022-12-30/trailblazing-journalist-barbara-walters-has-died-at-93 She was the product of an era in which many of us on here are so removed from and will never be able to fully understand (none of us were around to experience the Great Depression or WWII), which makes one appreciate her body of work even moreso when understanding the context. 93 years and a treasure trove of glass-ceiling-shattering accomplishments. Much respect.

Huh, it’s almost like Scotty’s starting to slowly admit that this merger attempt is in fact doomed to failure, if it hasn’t already. So Google Translate is ghosting for Scotty now?

Ratings for cable talk channels in general deserve a massive asterisk. Yes, they (and Fox News in general) have a large audience, but when the bulk of it is over the age of 54, does it even matter? Maybe that’s why FNC only needs direct response ads, because they get hefty retrans fees from cable providers. NewsNation’s continual failure remains on two points: the audience rejected the original intent of a generic prime—time newscast in resounding fashion, and the channel isn’t able to peel away any viewers from Fox News. Scott Jones may call it “Fox News Lite” and call Chris Cuomo “Fredo” (which isn’t even an original insult) but to be honest, no one really cares. Viewing patterns are difficult to break, which isn’t helped by not doing anything to differentiate from the competition.

I mean, WPVI kept Jefferson Kaye for far longer than necessary out of traditional alone. The last VOs he recorded for them were borderline tragic to hear.

Not that I want to toot my own horn, but I redid the history of channel 23 on Wikipedia. @Samantha redid the history of WBPX in Boston (which as WQTV was an unprecedented financial failure for the Church of Christ, Scientist, and as WABU had a good amount of local programming attached to it; it just struggled to find viewership at any point in its existence). WPXN and those two stations—and to a lesser extent WOAC, which indeed was sold to “Whitehead Media” and LMAed to Paxson—are the only ones in the Paxson chain that genuinely had history attached to them. The others were struggling or failed U indies which never had a chance in their respective markets, but were bought … mostly for the broadcast spectrum and must-carry on cable, which in 1996 hadn’t been upheld yet by SCOTUS. Inyo is a shell operator that explicitly exists so Scripps can continue to operate at the 39% national ownership cap for OTA stations. Ion Media didn’t have to worry about an existing chain of network affiliates (having sold off WPBF in 1996) when they set up their chain that also corresponded to the 39% limit. It’s the only reason why WVPX-WDLI was “spun off”.

Scripps spent all that money for the broadcast spectrum, not the content featured. Replacing Ion Life (nothing but CanCon drama reruns) Ion Plus (an infomercial farm) and Qubo (the only Pax diginet that had some bit of care to it but ultimately felt neglected and didn’t have a chance) with Scripps’ Katz diginets absolutely constituted an upgrade.