Rusty Muck

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.

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.

It's made more complicated by Investigation Discovery having a much better brand and name awareness despite a smaller nationwide cable footprint. Plus—per Stelter—the simulcast of CNN This Morning is explicitly due to carriage contracts with cable companies that require HLN air a bare minimum of news programming. Stelter’s background working for CNN makes him very unlikely to simply make up an urban legend.

That montage all but encapsulated Stelter's piece in the Atlantic. The channel in it's original format was not only rendered obsolete, the truly ugly parts that came thereafter (Nancy Grace and her obsession with Casey Anthony) ultimately and irrevocably destroyed HLN's reputation en route to becoming a true crime rerun library channel. Meade's show felt increasingly out of place and to be blunt, I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did. Because HLN was already a zombie network and had been for years. Even with Meade, it had no identity, no direction, and honestly, no purpose to even exist as a cable channel.

Brian was badly—and I mean BADLY—miscast in his on-air role at CNN, but his written reporting and nightly online newsletter were highly, highly respected, @HulkieD often referred to the newsletter as indispensable. Hopefully he has a recurring role at the Atlantic.

CNN+ never should have been launched in the first place. It was doomed when the architect and highest-profile backer (Zucker) was forced out, and felt like it was given the green light in spite of the incoming Discovery team. It didn’t really have much to distinguish itself from CNN, it wasn’t a redo of Headline News… just a bunch of wayward niche fare. Given the crippling debt load that AT&T inflicted on WBD, the shutdown of CNN+ in retrospect should have been a warning sign for us all.

If you want to remake and streamline the O&Os to be synonymous and harmonious with the network, it’s the way to go. As it stands, the CBS O&Os are a weird mix of totally different logos and branding conventions, with some legacy brands and call letters shared by unrelated radio stations. Only WCCO-TV at this point holds any promotional or marketing connection to it’s former sibling at AM 830. WBZ-TV has minimal to no relationship with AM 1030, an iHeart station. KYW-AM has an extensive news and weather partnership with WCAU, not KYW-TV.

The “KCAL9 News” brand is clearly being retired. Obviously the station will still be KCAL9 outside of news, but the news operation is going to be renamed “CBS News Los Angeles” across both stations.

Maybe they’re doing all sorts of rehearsals and the like behind-the-scenes. Assuredly a lengthy series of mock newscasts to try to iron out any bugs and glitches and make sure everyone knows what they are doing. You can’t just flip a switch and instantly have a round-the-clock news service right off the bat.

Pretty much this, it’ll likely be a mishmash of things until something permanent can finally be rolled out. WWJ is going to be the interesting one here, given they never really used the 2016 pack to any sort of degree prior.

Looks more like a transitional phase upon which the "WCCO" name is slowly retired in favor of "CBS News Minnesota". I dare say even the name "The 4 on WCCO" is transitional. KCNC may be getting the "CBS News NOW" graphics next week out of necessity alone. It's not like that station is stuck with running on the 2016 look when they rebrand.

And WWJ-TV has gone all-in as "CBS Detroit" (h/t @DetroitTVNews)

KYW in Cleveland (now WKYC) was the first station to use the EWN name in 1959, so Westinghouse had the first-use service mark. To keep it active, they might bury it in KYW station promos not unlike what WAGA has done for decades under Fox ownership. (“Be an Eyewitness to News on CBS News Philadelphia!”)

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Or “CBS (name of city/region)”. The way CBS is pushing this across the chain, I expect them to push the non-owned affiliates to go in the same direction, either as “CBS” or “CBS (city/region)”. It’s something that I’ve debated @channel2 on in the discord as she values the brand integrity of the affiliates and the legacy brands of the O&Os, which I totally get. At the same time, harmonization is not new, from the time ABC had their O&Os all adopt the same Circle 7 in 1962, to when NBC pushed the same news sets throughout their chain in the 1970s to when CBS had their affiliates use Rockwell as their CG typeface in the 1980s. The only difference here is the presumed excising of the channel number and retiring of call letters as brands in favor of a unified approach. It’s revolutionary in US broadcasting but is so commonplace elsewhere. Moreover, CBS has a clear and obvious brand issue with KDKA, WBZ, KPIX, WCCO and to a lesser extent KYW as stations that have to share a branding with their onetime radio sisters. It’s in theory not bad unless the radio station gets bad publicity a la Wendy Bell flaming out at KDKA 1020 and KDKA-TV has to issue statements that they had nothing to do with Wendy’s employment. It’s an awkward licensing agreement between Audacy, iHeart and Beasley Les Moonves made that never should have happened (but at the same time everyone would be grousing at KDKA 1020, the fabled “first radio station”, being forced to change their call sign. Look at the awkwardness of KOMO 1000 being forced to rename itself KNWN). Moreover, CBS going with a unified “CBS” branding solves issues with brand awareness that have dogged the network since 1994, especially in Detroit. It’s also why I see them pushing the renaming before “CBS News Detroit” launches, to help get the marketing campaign underway and help to better promote the news service. It also helps the O&O chain’s laggards—WFOR, KTVT, WBBM and WCBS—a chance to start anew, they literally have nothing to lose. The chain’s successful stations—WCCO, KCNC, WJZ, KDKA and to an extent WBZ—will handle it in a transitional way, but the viewers will adapt. I highly doubt anyone in Pittsburgh proper is going to be no longer watching KDKA simply because they no longer call themselves “KDKA-TV 2”. Thus, I expect the network to pressure the major chains—Gray, Nexstar, Cox, Sinclair, Tegna** and Scripps—to adopt these branding conventions on their CBS affiliates wholesale, which will set up an interesting confrontation between the groups and the network that @Weetershas been predicting on the discord for awhile. (“Why should we have to brand our stations as ‘CBS’ and act like the network owns us when we can fall back on NewsNation, the CW and Antenna?”) ** Fate of said company still TBD.

It depends on how badly Daystar needs the money. After Harold Camping's 2012 apocalypse prediction failed, Family Radio had several of their 92-108 FMs (inc. Newark, Philly-Trenton and Annapolis) reassigned as commercial in order to get quick cash. Daystar might be well advised to do the same.