Adam MadMan

The sad thing is, it's still more competitive than WRDC ever was.

Looking online, the only major Spanish station in the market is Univision affiliate WLLC-LD, which doesn't have an in-house news operation. Also, WSMV used to run Telemundo on its second digital subchannel, but dropped it in 2010.

Update to the Hearst Media Production Group news: the Litton name is being retired, as HMPG becomes a unified producer for all Hearst-derived TV programming. Litton's website now redirects to a subpage on Hearst's site. Three Litton alumi are taking executive roles in the new subsidiary (founder Dave Morgan and CCO Peter Sniderman retired at the end of last year): Former Litton CCO Bryan Curb is now executive vice president and general manager of E/I programming. Angelica Rose McDaniel, formerly exectctive VP of strategy and creative development, will oversee entertainment. Chris Matthews has been named CFO, more or less the same role he had before.

Gray has announced new appointments for WGCL/WPCH: Kim Saxon from WBTV as news director and Josh Morey from WBRC as creative services director.

IMO, the idea of trying something different isn't the issue. If anything, I'd gladly welcome experimentation. I feel like local stations can produce more than just news and lifestyle shows, and making different kinds of programming would at least help stem the loss of viewers to streaming at least somewhat. That said, the implication I get from this new show is that it's basically gonna be a clone of The Daily Show; that is, a "comedic" retelling of current events while cracking a bunch of wheezy, stale political jokes done better elsewhere. That's not an experiment, that's just cheap and dumb. At least, that's just my guess. If I'm wrong, feel free to tell me. Believe me, I'd be happy to hear it.

Hearst has launched Hearst Media Production Group to make programming for multiple platforms. Frank Biancuzzo is heading the new department, and Litton Entertainment and Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien will be part of its output.

I was listening to Nexstar's earnings call while working, and at one point he mentioned that only 16% of people in the country recognized the NewsNation brand, even admitting that 84% of the US "has no earthly idea" what it is. At least he's honest that nobody's watching...

Jonathan Katz is gone from Scripps.

Oh my GOD. They actually used a fan logo for their official website!?

That makes sense from that market's perspective. The video I shared said that WWLP did this sort of thing in the past, but that joined Nexstar in the Media General buyout, so I believe they did this at least three times before (I'd say four if not for the pandemic). WJZY, of course, joined Nexstar just before the shutdowns, so they didn't get to promote the event that year.

Same thing's going on in Western Massachusetts.

Not that it matters anymore; Sinclair bought Fisher, and Sinclair only cares about TV; hell, they just announced they'd sell off their only radio assets. Hence why this application's been made.

Sinclair is giving a big push for its diginets Comet, Charge, and TBD, and apparently it's been doing well for them. The same article suggests that Stirr is being used as a testing ground for future diginets.

MeTV has been on a roll. They've been consistent in getting top-notch shows, they produce a late-night movie show, and they've even added a classic cartoon block with Warner Bros. and MGM shorts, something I don't think anyone was expecting. I can see them coming out just fine. After all, Weigel's been adamant about expanding their reach, and they've been buying stations in markets beyond the Great Lakes region they'd long restricted themselves to as a means to that end. That MeTV's been doing well in certain demos doesn't surprise me at all. A lot of their programming doesn't really have any equivalents on other OTA networks, even the Big 5, and they just know how to pick the best shows.

I remember hearing somewhere that Sinclair liked that MyNet didn't force retrans like The CW did. For all the good it did them. The telenovela thing bombed like a B-52, and nothing else they did besides SmackDown afterwards fared much better. Now it's basically just prime time reruns, assuming the local affiliate doesn't just shove it off into late nights. Sinclair bet on the wrong horse, which is a shame, considering some of their stations could've been prime CW affiliates. While WCWB (now WPNT) and WTVZ didn't have a prayer thanks to CBS owning WPCW and WGNT respectively, I've heard of some other cases where The CW landed on a weaker station due to Sinclair's initial disinterest, like KCWX in San Antonio (though KMYS did eventually realize their mistake and swapped networks a few years later).

That's my market. Better keep my eyes peeled.

Lisa Knutson just did an interview for TVNewsCheck about the National Networks' strategy.

Newsy still has to deal with contracts with MVPDs, which prohibit Scripps from moving the network to OTA right now. Once those contracts end, then and only then can Newsy start airing on OTA. As for QVC, it seems like that may just be temporary until contracts run out or Doozy and Defy replace them.

Yeah, just looking at all this, you get the feeling that the decision to dump Qubo and Ion Plus (and Shop) was less about not wanting more channels and more about not wanting to deal with the headache of migrating those networks into the Katz operations, since they just went ahead and started two new dignets anyway. That being said, I remember Adam Symson mentioning in the same webcast where that one user raised the question about Qubo and Ion Plus that he was glad to lower the average viewer age of his networks to being below that of the alphabet networks, if still older than streaming. But considering much of the programming on the existing Scripps networks plus these new ones, I get the feeling his words about "younger audience = better audience" were nothing more than the usual press fluff to get the panicking investors off his back, because I'm pretty sure 90% of these shows skew older.

WBTS/NECN anchor Joy Lim Nakrin is leaving at the end of March. She'll be working for Court TV starting in May.

Thankfully, there have been some internet sleuths who have recorded the switchover and put it on YouTube. Apparently, it happened right in the middle of an airing of Franklin in most markets. Honestly, if I hadn't known about this from other forums, I'd have guessed this was some BS edit done by some anonymous troll. But no, this actually happened (in most markets, at least).

Thanks to Xfinity, we now know what some of the standalone Ion Plus stations will be airing: No real surprise, most of them will be airing Court TV.

The Ion subchannels are all in widescreen now. Figures they wait until now, when the subchannel networks are about to be replaced by the Katz stuff at the end of the month.

I've heard rumors that Inyo or Scripps may end up returning the licenses for the Ion Plus affiliates to the FCC, so I think that may be what happens. If not, then I can see Scripps moving Court TV to those channels, since they've been pushing the name for a while. My big question is how this will affect WIFS in Madison. They've been running Ion Plus on their main signal, and actually added Qubo recently - just in time to have Scripps yank it away from them. At this point, I think WIFS will probably move Ion to the main signal. No idea what'll replace the other signals, if they even do replace them.

When he said "mature", I'm pretty sure he meant "not grown as a brand". Of course, his company decided they don't want to grow the brand, and have put it in the line of corporate fire, like in those stereotypical Mexican executions you'd see on TV. And as for the whole kids thing, Symson said in that same call that he wants diginets to go for a younger audience - which makes the Qubo decision all the more baffling, at least to me. Even if the brand isn't that desirable, Nickelodeon was in a similar state in the early 80s before it turned around under Viacom. Obviously, the times are different now, but it still seems wrong that they're trying to go "younger", yet have decided to leave the youngest viewers of the bunch to digital services such as Netflix and YouTube, like they want over-the-air TV to die off. Basically, it just makes Symson's talk of "going younger" seem like the usual insincere corporate speak, which I'm 99.9999% sure it is.