mrschimpf

Considering that he's the Republican front-runnner, I can't say I'm surprised.

According to FTVLive, it sounds like they tried to get interviews from the other candidates in order to give it some sign of "balance". You can tell that they haven't been a Sinclair station for long because balance isn't a 4-letter word to them like it is to the corporate folks in Hunt Valley.

 

Their entire branding since 2007 has been about "balanced news coverage" so this was definitely out of left field for them. Pretty much everyone in the GB-A market except WFRV brands on presenting both sides for major stories, even if it's just five seconds of a random bystander saying the opposite.

Sinclair's Wisconsin stations were ordered to air an extended 25 minute Trump interview with Sharyl Atkisson during their Sunday newscasts. I guess we now know which candidate Sinclair execs like the most

 

http://www.ftvlive.com/todays-news/2016/4/4/sinclair-turns-stations-over-to-trump

 

WLUK has done all they can to stay away from the "Fox News" stereotype as much as possible for years...they must've wanted to throw up disclaimers that corporate would never want. Milwaukee and Green Bay though really had no say without in-house news departments, though they have the big advantage of nobody watching them on Sunday morning at all so it was easily buried.

Fixed.

 

Hearst isn't that badly into infomercials from what I see usually though (WISN usually still sticks them in late night/weekend afternoons and nowhere else). Maybe when the house-flipping ballroom seminars come in they'll sell a couple additional slots, but usually not the case with Hearst.

Also what's going on with Hearst stations adding newscasts? KOCO has added a 9am and 9pm Newscasts, KMBC will be adding a 4pm Newscast and lengthening their 9pm Newscast on KCWE to 60 minutes, KCCI, KETV, among others are the recent 9pm News on Me TV additions.

 

It's syndication not doing well; Hearst is finally sick of NBCU bungling their talk shows and ABC throwing away the old General Hospital slot and leaving them to program talk shows that last a season. Next year's offering in place of Meredith by NBCU is Harry Connick Jr., which only seems to have the safest ad buyers excited and not actual people. With Netflix, sitcoms that used to be anticipated in syndication are getting shrugged off (witness the major downgrades to Modern Family's timeslots this year as the show hits its older drafting stage), so better to replace those shows with newscasts than low-rated shows.

This move is also in response to NBC announcing that the Access Hollywood/Extra pair will move to "their station" effective the start of next year. Whatever show gets the shaft will probably get some fringe slot on WLVI for the time being.

 

Extra is a Warner Bros. show though; do they just have some odd preference of only associating with NBC O&O's where available? It just seems to a be a relationship that remains because NBC O&O's are the only ones that seem to put Extra in actual timeslots where people watch.

 

Don't forget, CBS Corp. still allows KOVR to program CBS programming from 7-10pm PT. I think that CBS can make an exception and allow WSBK to experiment with a 9-11pm slot for the CW.

 

CBS's CW affiliates haven't taken on the alternate scheduling, which has been a limited experiment in middle markets. 10 p.m. as-is is already pretty much a timeslot where the #1 show is 'Earlier DVR Recording' so I can't see that happening. KOVR works only because that's programming airing earlier where the competition is entertainment talk and the Sony game shows.

* WLUK will expand its weekday morning and late-evening news blocks on September 21, extending Good Day Wisconsin by a half-hour to 4:30 a.m. and adding a half-hour 10:00 p.m. newscast (the first time WLUK has aired news in that timeslot in more than a decade, if anyone knows when the original 10:00 p.m. newscast was cancelled, please reply).

 

I want to say when King of the Hill got into syndication, around 2002-2004, between that period of time, when they double-ran KOTH at 10 p.m., that's when they ditched the news when Emmis was in a budget-cutting mood around then, along with the last years before John Chandik retired.

 

Another newscast change is WTMJ is getting rid of the 3 p.m. newscast as of tomorrow (the infamous 'sound-off', affiliate wire report and debate hour which seemed to only appeal to grumpy suburban shut-ins on the phone and Facebook) for FABLife; once WTMJ and the Journal-Sentinel were broken apart and they lost that five minute segment, along with the new Scripps management beginning to play down cross-promotion of Jeff Wagner's radio show on the AM side, the writing was on the wall (they claimed the decision was made before Scripps took over). Another thing in that JS article is that WTMJ is still in the process of finding a new anchor to take over for Mike Jacobs; most stations would have just given Steve Chamraz the job and moved on already.

 

Consider this The Curious Chase of Chase Cain. A little over four weeks after joining WISN as its new morning anchor, Cain has mysteriously and abruptly left the station.

 

http://www.duanedudek.com/blog/2015/08/20/the-mystery-of-wisn-morning-anchor-chase-cain/

 

Either he missed the southern part of the country deeply and got homesick (judging from his past work that's where he's usually been), or he did something so egregious or went too against-the-grain for them that WISN let him go, and they were easy on Dan Needles when he had his legal issues a couple years back. Right now I'm watching the morning show and because he's gone and Melinda Davenport's on vacation, morning anchor Thema Ponton is basically running the show alone with 'breaking news' guy Tim Elliott, along with weekend meteorologist Jeremy Nelson and it's being run like it's a weekend edition, along with a blank rejoin with no personnel call-outs.

 

He really didn't have much beyond 'social guy' though coming into the market; outside of that cred it was a hire for WISN that just really didn't pan out.

The post-Journal exoduses from WTMJ in Milwaukee continues at the start of the Scripps era; reporter and weekend morning anchor Tom Murray is leaving the station to work in the ministry of a church in suburban Oak Creek before the new TV season. Either God called him there or sent the word to him he wasn't going to get a weekday anchor job once TMJ finally figured out who the heck will ever replace Mike Jacobs.