nathannah

They tried "On Your Side" as the main branding during the Wexler Trainwreck period when they tried to appeal to nobody but Waukesha County and 'bleed it leads for the entire A-block' fans ("TMJ4 News On Your Side" was how it was displayed); it was dropped the moment Wexler got pushed to the radio side (it was their consumer branding for a long time, but it's been dropped for 'Call 4 Action'), and it can be safely assumed it won't return. And they would've dropped TMJ4 when they got the Scripps graphics, but they didn't and also tweaked the existing logo.

Unfortunately the way it goes now is an NFL Network-exclusive game has the syndicated rights go to the producing network (CBS/NBC split the production/announcing duties this year), so either WMAQ or WBBM retain it no matter what. Thier only hope is WLS sub-licenses MNF games. This October might not be too bad though; they can easily do comprehensive Cubs postgame shows there and if they get far, expect that to steamroll the entire schedule.

They're letting go ten hours of primetime, six hours of Litton E/I hell that any station would drop the moment the FCC says it's OK, and a mediocre five-day-a-week talk show which only got press as a schedule mention. I don't think anything is in peril there, and they'll be fine; the only variable here is that the 7pm film block that did OK in the 80's would be pummeled in 2016 and they'll have to figure out something new here.

WTMJ is finally picking up The List and RightThisMiinute post-Olympics to complete the Scripps-ization process in their 3pm slot; FABLife's long-running zombie state there ended last Friday (it goes to 1:05am after the Olympics to finish out its run in shame). WGBA did the same scheduling for their 4 p.m. slot as of this Monday and are backfilling Crimewatch Daily to 2pm post-Olympics (they were double-running L&O:CI after Days leading into TMZ Live).

Kevin Frazier from ET does the same thing for Litton with Game Changers; it's pretty quick and good work. Just come into a studio for a couple hours, introduce a bunch of human interest pieces in front of a portrait-set LCD panel, and there's your easy money. There are so many issues I have with Litton and their insane abuse of the E/I edicts to monopolize the market, but these are simple resume ticks to help you show you do more than morning TV.

I assume it has the same arrangement as CNBC had with dLife for a few years, where that company produced a show about living with diabetes that aired Sunday nights until the current regime came in to change around their Prime schedule and wanted the time for their own. dLife still airs on the web, so I assume like "Your Business" it maintained a diehard and loyal audience and dependable advertisers week to week, and Sunday mornings are basically MSNBC's time to try to not compete hard with NBC due to "Sunday Today" and "Meet the Press", thus "Your Business" and their most wonky news shows are geared to a niche, but loyal audience. "Your Business" has certainly outlasted all of those lousy "pay-for-play" three-minute paid placement shows where companies had Terry Bradshaw or another old athlete promote a business that cable news was lousy with in the 2000's (my bank did one of those fluff-filled profiles with Bradshaw and it was a complete 'what are you doing with our deposits?!' moment).

Too bad most of the deals involve networks already snapped up by Scripps and Sinclair, and with Bounce, several markets which are just plain percentage-filling without viewer impact. In Green Bay WFRV is getting Bounce TV, which is nearly wholly incompatible with the demographics of Northeast Wisconsin, since Laff, Escape and Grit were already long snapped up. Same with Eau Claire/La Crosse with WLAX/WEUX. It just seems like such a johnny-come-lately deal I'm surprised they didn't also mention any of Luken's networks.

That was a very dire period when Journal bet on a rash of syndicated shows in 2007 and 2008 that bombed badly and were gone by the new year in 2009. Imagine coming out of Days of Our Lives and running two hours of paid programming on weekdays going into the 5pm show, or your entire afternoon lineup is sponsored by Ronco. That was WGBA that year for the former, and WACY for the latter. It's the big reason they strongly went for Packers show/preseason rights for the next cycle in 2011 for both WTMJ and WGBA; literally without it I was under the mind then that it was better to just bureau GB and run it as a WTMJ semi-satellite. Thank goodness they recovered.

So basically say goodbye to Antenna TV and hello to six shopping channels, Sonlife and LATV all packed in nicely pixelated 408i in a blatant pre-auction cashgrab. Still galls me that they threw off WeatherNation for a channel that has three slots on Charter (Sonlife).

Please stop with the KSL ridiculousness. SLC in general would know if KSL was in any threat of losing the NBC affiliation, and if you think they're going to take ABC, switching out football and well-rated family programming for the TV-14 DSLV TGIT block, lack of sports and Olympics tells you all you need to know; it's not happening. NBC is happy with KSL and will be for years to come.

Usually has to be station-based so that it has tangible 'movement' and tracking throughout the day since the NWS only updates hourly. If you have a Weatherbug or Weather Underground-based station, all the better.

It's already a technical satellite of KUTV since it carries a KUTV rebroadcast mapped to 2.1, so either way with KUTV or KJZZ they'd have no issue with that at all.

KMYU is so far out of the main SLC market Sinclair will definitely claim a failing station waiver rather easily (and MyNet is the ultimate security blanket in keeping a station out of the top four which would kill a deal). Without Sinclair it either becomes spectrum bait or goes back to the dark days of 2009 when it was running Retro TV to few. Worse comes to worse the St. George transmitter gets LD'ed to cover only St. George proper and the deal easily goes through.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.