nathannah

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.