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.

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.

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.

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.

KVUE and KXAN are two UHFs that repeatedly beat KTBC, the biggest bust of all the New World—Fox stations.

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.

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.

That’s literally what PBS does on a daily basis.

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.

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.

Gee, it’s like I might have been on to something… Ready to claim my prize lmao

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.

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.

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.

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.

He’s also the father of CBS Weekend News anchor/senior correspondent Jericka Duncan.

Wouldn’t be surprised to see affiliates owned by Gray, Scripps, Sinclair and CBS just refuse to carry any NewsNation cramdowns over the CW by Nexstar. Scripps can simulcast Scripps News, CBS has the “Now” hybrid newscasts, Sinclair has TND and Gray stations have a sizable commitment to local news.

NewsNation reached that when they trotted out “Truck Week” twice like it was supposed to be a Late Night with David Letterman running gag.

How'd you like to be at WPIX, WJW or WGN and see that KTLA can still stream live? That's really gotta do wonders for morale. It's obvious why they exempted KTLA. Because the second they order KTLA to delay by two hours, KCBS-KCAL would eat their lunch.

KTLA is controlled by a cheap company run by a Luddite who sees no value in streaming platforms. They won't be solid and dominant for too much longer.

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.