DirtyHarry

There are cities in this market too far away for an over-the-air signal, Cambridge and Athens being among them. I don't know why the Columbus stations don't put up lptv translators and then feed some special content to those distant areas.

Three things going on here: 1. These retransmission fees are indeed causing people to cut the cord. I was like the proverbial frog in slow boiling water. We went from $80, to $110, to $130 and I kept toying with the idea of cutting the cable with each increase. But when it hit almost $170 with all the other fees at the end of the bill, including retransmission fees, that's when I had enough. I think $30 was added on top of the cable bill for retransmission fees and for sports fees. No thanks. (Medium package only plus 100 gig internet, no phone, no bells and whistles, only one cable box, no DVR. Now I only pay 40 bucks for the internet.) 2. Cable companies should design their tuner boxes like satellite companies were doing before. Keep the local stations in your lineup so it is seamless, but have that signal come in through an over-the-air antenna instead of through the cable box to give people the opportunity to avoid those fees. If TV stations balk, then just pull them off the system. I don't think anybody will miss them at this point. 3. My cable company, before they sold out to another cable company, was actively pushing you to drop tv. They wanted you only as an Internet customer and they wanted you to stream. If you wanted cable, they wanted you to go through YouTube TV. Internet they say generates 80% of their profits, with very little effort spent on service calls and that sort of thing compared to TV which generates only 20% profit, but gives them all sorts of grief administratively.

I wish people would better be able to make the distinction between the city proper and the metro area / market. The population of Youngstown has been cut in half, maybe even more, but not the metro area. In 1970, the population of Metro Youngstown was 396,000; as of 2020, the metro area population is 357,000. So the population is down, but nowhere near drastic levels. (The population was actually up a little bit by 1990.) Don't you think Tegna would be a better fit, given WFMJ's newspaper heritage? There are also economies of scale to be had that way. Hopefully the banksters will be shooed away and it can be back to business as usual.

It's very common to be running with the old logo these days and not go through the trouble of updating them. Kmart, Kroger, Sears, Macy's, Marathon, Exxon and many others do the same thing. I know that's retail, but that's where logos get a lot of exposure like tv.

I think they should do it like radio. Maybe 5 minutes of serious news at the top of the hour, the rest being like the Morning Zoo or a talk show. Talk, banter, in studio guests, whatever act is having a concert down at the local theater or arena, Jack Hanna with his animals, maybe a band. I'd also hire a bunch of interns, give them iPhones and every time there's a car accident I would send them out to film all the gore. People love that stuff. Let the other channels do boring news, I'd do Action News 19 on if I we're running a station. Totally entertaining and sensational. There was an article in the Dispatch this morning about some guy who got mad that Giant Eagle closed at 10:00 p.m. and rammed his stolen car through the front entrance. I'd put that on some kind of a carousel and loop it the entire day. Now that's good TV. LOL

Marshall is reportedly gay, so I don't see what the big deal is. I think he's married, but I'm not sure what that means anymore. Anyway, I saw it as poking fun at himself. Of course, when something goes viral like that, how do you defend yourself when you don't really want to wear your gayness on your sleeve? It seems to me that whoever was getting outraged over that should have been taken aside and given some context.

Without Columbus, Sinclair wouldn't be what it is. Back in the old days they put nothing into WTTE and it was still like a cash machine for them. But when they merged with River City is when things really took off. What I can't understand is when big corporations purchase a crown jewel property, and then destroy it by cheapening everything after they take over. It seems to me that what you do when you buy a property like WBNS is that you let them keep running things like they always have and keep the high level of investment they have always had going. I wonder if Marshall needed some meteorology help over there, and Jym came over to help him. And don't forget 10TV has been like Tom Ryan, Carol Luper, Luann Stoia and a few others ending up at Channel 6. (No offense.) Channel 6 isn't getting the has beens anymore.

It can also be bad when it's the other way around. Like in these small markets where they have some ancient old man and some wet behind the ears 20 year old (who looks like she should be getting him coffee) at the anchor desk. Up to 20 years difference is not bad though when the man is older. The same can't be said when the woman is older. It's just kind of creepy for some reason. It gives off either a Mrs. Robinson vibe, or like your mother is leading you by the nose. Anything more than 10 years difference when the woman is older, just doesn't seem right to me. I'm not saying get rid of older women, just find somebody more age appropriate to pair them with.

I wonder if Yolanda had anything to do with recruiting him. I guess he was still living in Powell, according to LinkedIn. That Andrew kid has some potential. Good voice, good presentation skills, he just seems out of place there. He would be more at home at a place like Channel 6. Channel 10 is just too serious for someone like him. I also never like when they pair a young guy with an old woman. It just doesn't flow well for some reason.

That was quick. Makes me wonder if she got whacked. I wonder if she just sucked at meteorology, which shouldn't really matter since, after all, it's only tv. It's not like these guys are forecasting to plan for troop invasions or anything like that. During his last gig, I remember him being a nice enough guy, but he didn't have any kind of an "it" factor. Just another boring everyman TV personality. He should fit in very well over there. I hope he doesn't like racy pictures of prepubescents. (That was a joke by the way.)

Because Sinclair is based in Baltimore, her husband works in Baltimore and Columbus has always been one of that company's most important stations.

Yeah, but the Sinclair corporate brain trust is in Baltimore. I'm thinking that she's staying local and she's going to a competitor; that's why the secrecy. I just threw the Sinclair thing out there because either Baltimore or Washington would be a good gig if they want to live out there. But then again, coaching in pro sports is the kind of job where you move around a lot so I can see staying in Columbus.

I wonder what happened here. Just because Tegna is in limbo they couldn't meet her salary demands? Not looking quite as hot as she used to? Her husband works for the Baltimore Orioles. I wonder if she's going to work for Sinclair.

Ashlee Baracy is gone from WBNS. I wonder if this has anything to do with it. But then again, her husband is a coach with the Baltimore Orioles. Could she be going to work for Sinclair after her non-compete is over?

No such thing as coincidence.

TV is going to have a real problem because of momentum depending on where you get most of your programming. I mostly stream these days, so that's what the TV stays on. I don't go to over the air TV a lot because that's a few extra buttons you have to push. They need to figure out a way to make this all seamless so that it flows together. Likewise with cable. I should be allowed to purchase a package without all the local TV channels to save from paying all those other stupid fees, but have a seamless way to go back and forth between cable and over the air.

Their construction permit is perfectly adequate for covering Sioux Falls and maybe 50 miles out unless it's some weird directional pattern they have to use. What they don't have is a 2000 ft tall super tower, so they can't get way-way out like the other stations. But how important is that anyway? You can probably get a lot accomplished using translators. And who knows? Maybe Forum will put up the money for a new tower or lease space on one. Or maybe buy one of the existing towers.

Makes sense to me that something might be up. A lot of people laughed when Weigel started dipping their feet into owning network affiliates. If you can build a decent station on an LPTV signal in South Bend, it's doable here with a full power station.

They know what they're doing, I would think. They can leverage a lot of what they do in Fargo for their new station. Maybe ABC is sick of duopolies so maybe Forum gets the ABC affiliation in Sioux Falls. Like WTHR being owned by the Wolfes was almost like having local ownership, maybe the same thing here. Locally-owned ABC instead of a chain station with cheap, diverse, wet-behind-the-ears talent. I think Sioux Falls is a great city, by the way. $1.4 million is petty cash for them.

TBD? Who watches that channel? All I see on there are stupid YouTube videos. Don't kid yourself. 75% of the interest and hype about sports has ALWAYS been about gambling. They're just making things formal now.

They're like radars. Nice toy to have for marketing purposes, but not a necessity.

Why? Were they pushing the envelope, engineering-wise?

They had another one of these segments on the 11:00 p.m. newscast, 8/4/22, beginning after the 23 minute mark. The first guy complains about the theme music, the next woman thinks that people from out of state should be banned from buying lottery tickets and they keep joking about the theme music right into the commercial. Hilarious. .

I wonder how the economics work. It's got to be pretty expensive to put up a 2,000 ft Tower in some of these places, which you need out there because you need to cover a lot of sparsely populated territory.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, times have changed. Just like towns don't really need 10 newspapers anymore, do you really need three or four TV stations covering the same news with the same kind of boring newscasts? It's not like they do any investigative reporting or that there is anything interesting enough to cover on the municipal level. At the same time, having your own talent gives a station personality. Otherwise, it's just a jukebox of stuff being played from a server. If it was my checkbook and I were spending the money, I would have consolidate everything in the background, but have separate anchor teams, studios and sets just to give it the facade of being a different newscast.