Rusty Muck

The FCC reset the 180-day “shot clock” but the DOJ—the agency that determines divestments and market revenue concentration in M&As—has been curiously absent. Usually they’ll come out with a finding and recommendations but they have literally said nothing at all. Given the fact Apollo (through financing the Tegna deal) would have an ownership stake in four TV stations in Jacksonville and three TV stations in Atlanta (plus non-insignificant radio clusters in both markets) the DOJ’s complete radio silence is unprecedented and tbqh a deal-breaker.

A company that can't sell itself because the economy is in a limbo and interest rates are no longer dirt cheap is not a good thing. That it’s a company which is also too big to fail makes it even worse. (That being said, it IS a better position than seeing Apollo de facto run the company and controlling Soo Kim and Deb McDermott like a marionette, gutting the stations from the inside out and selling the IPs for king’s ransoms.) The so-called “M&A Rolling Thunder” cheered on in some places (cough Harry Jessel cough) was abject poison on the television industry, and now the consequences of that foolish mentality are coming home to roost.

The desperation is extremely palpable on Soo’s end. He knows the deal is doomed because the FCC and DOJ are outright sitting on it; therefore, he’s making promises he knows he and Apollo won’t keep.

Even in the 1980s there was minimal difference between the two brands. Look at Bill Bonds at WXYZ with Action News, and it was basically all centered around Bill Bonds and his on-air presence. Ditto with Irv Weinstein at WKBW; they used the EWN name but it wasn't anywhere close to the Al Primo EWN. The brands were never uniformly applied and mean different things to different people. @HulkieD has brought up how CapCities slowly (even if unintentionally) morphed WABC into... if not a Xerox of WPVI, then obviously a station with WPVI's Action News in its' blood. It still used the EWN name, but it wasn't the EWN pre-1986. WOIO's usage of Action News is mostly associated with the "last-place, last-chance news" uber-populist format that Bill Applegate---the same person who presided over WABC's late-80s changes---put in, almost out of desperation by Raycom, having admitted to overpaying for WOIO/WUAB when they bought out Malrite. It is a tainted brand in the market. EWN means nothing in Cleveland and hasn't meant anything since WEWS gave it up in 1990, and even then, NewsChannel 5 meant nothing when they gave it up a few years ago, aside from people likely confusing WEWS with WPTV on social media. If WOIO used EWN, it would feel tacked on and meaningless. (Yes, channel 3, then KYW-TV, originated EWN from 1959 to 1965 but it predated Al Primo or even Westinghouse's full treatment of the brand. Because of the passage of time, few are alive to actually remember when it debuted in Cleveland.) It actually says a lot that none of the stations in Cleveland have a so-called "brand" for their newscasts: 3 News, News 5, Fox 8 News and 19 News. But does it matter? I'm from Cleveland and I can tell the four news operations apart fairly easily.

I am not trying to be snarky in asking this, but what makes a station logo “unchangeable”? And why should we hold a television station to unrealistic standards when practically every other business in existence either refreshes or redesigns their logos or branding every X years? Stations logos and network logos are meant to be changed and to adapt with the times. NBC and ABC did what they did for practical and functional reasons. CBS **finally** adopted a design standard among the network and O&Os for the same reason. WKYC debuted their current logo—which is above and beyond the garbled mess that their prior logo became—for the same reason. Change can hold promise and potential. When WOIO rebranded as “19 News” in 2019, then-GM Erik Schrader said, "we have to stand out. Action News was an effective brand for its time, but time moved on and we had to move on, too. And tastes will change. As much as I like this brand (19 News), it probably will eventually change."

inb4 ION rebrands as “Scripps Sports” and ION Mystery casually drops “Mystery”…

The way I see it, Briella isn't wrong, but neither is nycnewsjunkie, and neither are you. It's the old adage of "perception is reality"... or more accurately, perception can become a person's reality.

The thing about nostalgia-driven posters is that they’re usually the loudest people in the room. It’s easy to see how the perception takes root. Said posters can have their opinions on CBS going for unified branding and music not Enforcer being A Bad Thing but CBS is doing this because they see it in the best interests of the network and their station group. The execs in charge have determined that The Old Way Of Doing Things is no longer going to work.

Its almost like everything that happened between 1985 and 1995–Chris Crane dissonant chord music, sets with corrugated metal panels and video walls, flashy flying graphics, crime-crime-crime-all-the-time—needs to be ensconced in amber and abided by for all eternity, and any deviation from this by a station or owner is Somehow Very Bad. cough cough Tegna cough cough To be honest, WSVN (the station that is seemingly subject to the most nostalgia) is still its old flashy self because Miami is an outlier of a market. An aberration. WFOR under this CBS revamp would be taking a position unlike any other station in town, which I’d prefer over having them be Another WSVN Knockoff or Another Generic Newscast (as took place with Dunn-Friend) and languishing in obscurity.

There was never a “CBS Mandate”. In every aspect, the station group was a total mess design-wise, with inconsistent branding, inconsistent logos, a music package (Enforcer) that kept getting worse with each passing generation, an okay-ish graphics pack by WCBS forced on everyone because past leadership was too miserly and didn’t care. And that’s not counting WJZ and the garish mess they deteriorated into. What is happening now is a TRUE CBS Mandate. Every station is on board… even KCNC, and they’re one of the few bright spots in the entire chain. This is not only here to stay, I expect that ramifications for branding conventions to occur at the affiliate level before too long. (PS: be sure to click the link )

I’m getting WCCO vibes seeing that...

The KPIX box screams “tacked on for a few weeks so the ‘KPIX 5’ brand can be retired completely”. I’ve seen this before…

The Maag family is just trying to stay afloat in a market that's had its' population halved over 50 years. There's far too many radio stations in Youngstown and 1-2 too many TV stations. Even the Maags gave up on the city's lone daily newspaper. WFMJ's biggest weakness is the fact it remains locally owned; thanks to the M&A mania, WKBN-WYTV have the bigger advantage of economy of scale. WFMJ doesn't have the resources to compete with those two long-term, and even launching a 5pm news felt like their resources were being strained. The better question to ask is when do the Maags throw in the towel with WFMJ and sell the NBC affiliation and station IP to Nexstar.

I’d put my money on WCCB moving MeTV to 18.1 and selling off their program inventory to Nexstar.

It might be out of sheer ego and resentment towards Fox that WCCB still trudges along under Bakahel but they aren’t exactly in the best shape. WJZY flopped so badly under Fox ownership that Nexstar completely blew up the station’s identity in a bid to be competitive. WAXN is owned by a private equity firm so the obvious outcome is them doing it all on the cheap with no investment, extending already strained resources at WSOC. When you add in WBTV doing More Local News under Gray (and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try a 10pm news again somehow), something is bound to give. If WCCB and/or WJZY were to throw up the white flag and concede a battle for ratings that amounts to diminishing returns, no one should be surprised in the least. This is not 1993 or 2003 or 2013. The landscape today is not the same as in the past and people have every incentive to abandon OTA TV if the content they want no longer exists. Having nothing but cheaply-run local news with practically no distinction between them is a recipe for trouble, especially with a finite audience that risks shrinking—even ever so subtly—regardless of the market size. Why would I want to watch the “attack of the clones” that is the same late-evening local news on a plethora of stations, with the same music from SAM or Gari, the same format with emphasis on Bad Things with minimal Actual Local News of Relevance, the same minimal sportscast and the same 10-day Super Doppler Googleplex Extended Outlook? Am I saying the audience for OTA is dying? No. At least not for a few decades. But it’s absolutely eroding; even if it is a small erosion, it is still a needlessly self-inflicted wound for the industry.

They used to have four with KCOP in the mix, and KCOP struggled for years before Fox ultimately subsumed everything into KTTV. Los Angeles is almost an anomaly with three 10pm English-language newscasts battling it out against each other. If such a thing were to be tried out in Memphis or Jacksonville or Omaha, the results would be beyond disastrous. There is such a thing as too much local news in Anytown, USA. When you gripe at operators “cheapening out” on news and graphics and music, muse about off- and on-air talent resigning and getting out of the industry, or insist MMJs are a pejorative for Something Bad, maybe it's because the economics of More Local News doesn't exactly add up the way you want it to.

Good luck if you’re in Billings, Montana or Alpena, Michigan or Wheeling, West Virginia, or any small market that can’t support one 10pm news, let alone two or more. Or in any market that is not in a political swing state (Wyoming, Mississippi, etc.) and won’t get that easy money. The pending death of syndication and the presumed death of scripted primetime will inevitably result in the death of local news programming for television stations, many of which will simply become relay stations for large-market stations and/or O&Os. And those stations may be reduced to being nothing more than a turnkey diginet or rerun farm. If the audience no longer exists for syndication or scripted primetime programming, how in the wide wide world of sports is it going to remain for local news???

Good. It doesn’t help the affiliates to be forced to program an extra hour of primetime in an environment where syndication is an endangered species.

This would have been news 30 years ago. Or even 20.

WarnerMedia sold the building in 2021 and even with a lease agreement, WBD has every incentive to move everything back to Techwood as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Huh, it's like the world changed in 2020 and no one noticed. Golly gee, imagine that, so baffling...

It was the only remaining news program that originated from Atlanta. Without it they could proceed on moving everything back to Techwood and do all the stuff @Weeterstalked about just a few posts earlier. Which of course will result in quite a few of those 1,500 people losing their jobs, which sucks. My point still stands.

He’s not on a mission, he’s stuck in a bad position related entirely to the creation of Warner Bros. Discovery at the hands of AT&T. Plus a lot of this (especially CNN leaving Atlanta) had already been in place under Zucker. Robin Meade and her show’s staff were for years the only ones that justified the Atlanta facility remaining open this whole time. Please, in the name of all that is all and holy and good, quit giving Chris Licht, David Zaslav and John Malone supervillain powers they don’t have and never will.

KOCO was a Combined-Gannett station (5 Alive) until the trade to Hearst in 1997, so this wasn’t exactly derailing anything here.