nathannah

And don't forget that there isn't as robust an observer network (or even WeatherBug) for smaller markets where you can confidently provide solid number ranges, the weather office has to cover a wider swath of geography with some variation, especially to the northwest of Marquette, and that this is usually an area that measures snow in the tens of inches rather than fractions. These broader ranges are pretty well expected and were still generally used in even middle markets up to the 2000s. Also WLUC does more detailed regional breakdowns outside the 7-day, along with with ski reports, so the finer details are in the forecast, if not in that graphic. It's certainly better to provide a range rather than what stations do with those '(station number) degree guarantee', which pointlessly forces mets to have a solid number for the next day or else (most of them contribute to charity if they hit it but like most of these gimmicks such as 'round up for the hungry', just donate the money and do promos about the big donation).

CNBC has announced a CNBC+ service today which will launch in the spring; no pricing yet, or if the existing Pro service will be discontinued, but it'll feature a full-time market feed across the world's CNBC channels.

The situation with Wisconsin has an explanation though, as WKOW's sister stations did in the past start out as semi-satellites of it (with the FCC's blessing) and over time, broke off on their own as investments were made by their owners to break off the cord, as it were, with Madison, and Shockley and Qunicy had those resources to provide that support to their stations. It seems like all that AMG has is cheap programming and no desire to expand at all, so they've contracted two generations of progress with WXOW/WQOW/WAOW to basically return them to the state they were in the 70s, but with an ugly 2020s centralcasting twist. A red flag for me with the Quincy/Gray merger was the lack of fight to keep WYOW and letting it go for a pittance to Gray; it felt very out of character and there didn't seem to be any regulatory reason to do so. WEAU and WSAW are the strength of both their markets, but I can see good reasons for WMTV doing weekend morning newscasts for them at the very least, because some markets just really don't need them to begin with, and at least with E/I being opened up to the 5am hour it's literally better than nothing. And agreed; WBAY does some Gray things, but outside certain touches they know what keeps them on top and adding new things that keep that dominance, and Gray is smart enough to leave well enough alone with them; it helps that their building and staff just plain can't support doing much more than what they do in their market outside the obvious Packers coverage lead.

This could've been a private message. The initialism is explained in the video and everyone else here keeps the video subject matter to a minimum because it's more exciting to see what's going on. If you don't like my posts, simply ignore them. No need to call me out for being vague when everyone has a certain style in this fun thread; this isn't Twitter or a competitive Reddit, and I refuse to tamp myself or my writing style down to meet a certain robotic 'standard' of posting. (mods feel free to remove this if it's distracting)

New from Cyle Dickens from KWQC, some mid-80's motion graphics to a nice period beat from a BPME videomag.

It's the only reason before RTC they could really justify one television station in the market outside of Sarkes Tarzian using it for experimental purposes.

And most of it really is security concerns because there's a certain contingent of people who would love to go on TV and suck up a week of airtime for calling something 'fake news' or attacking someone on-camera. Post 1-6, along with the morning after morning headache of security costs, it just makes more sense to just bring everything inside. Of course, CBS never justified needing 1515 at all except for the Redstone ego to get use out of a space no longer used by their dying brands (Moonves would have never agreed to a move like that), while over time GMA just got sick of the headaches that are Times Square knockoff characters and other things that make a live broadcast with an audience outside just hard to manage. And Fox is pretty well-self explanatory. Comcast has an outright lease on 30 Rock so it's private property to do what they need to for crowd control.

WFFT is the ultimate example of a news operation only existing because of network mandates; if Nexstar doesn't acquire WANE and have to sell WFFT, WLNS would've long ago been centralcasting their news. It's not competitive with WANE or WPTA, the station is still run otherwise as if it's 1990 and Fox having sports is a pipe dream, and Allen has invested nothing into the news operation outside the time they did add newscasts; I'd argue they divested resources from the station as outside their news and Fox, it's pretty much Justice Central all day on a transmitter outside the Kelly and Mark slot because WPTA's Quincy dork age had them somehow cut the show and Nexstar wasn't going to cut the WANE advertorial show. I'm shocked they didn't just go the 35 minute route with one newscast and continue to do 5pm/6pm shows. WLFI seems to be the odd one out only because they don't have any other affiliations outside The CW distracting them, and this just feels like a deck-shuffle move until the eventual Allen bankruptcy petition which asks Fox to waive their news-carriage requirements.

The move is happening unless Disney suddenly decides to talk a large loss on dumping a state-of-the-art studio facility they've been planning for over a decade, no matter the feelings of an EP or booker who just needs to adjust to a new commute and a shiny new studio and stop yapping misinformation about how mean Ginger was to her terrible co-worker to the Post.

There's video out there of it, but Leon Harris struggled through the 6pm show on WRC tonight; they had to do an audible to network stories and extended weather segment through the last 20 minutes. Hope what ever happens, he's okay.

With every edition of World News Tonight invariably for some reason running down New York's crime roll almost daily, it would be interesting to know if WABC gets complaints about how several minutes of the national newscast just rehash the A-block of the 6pm show and because of that, viewers tune out of WNT because they've already seen those stories five times in the last three hours. It's like...yes ABC, a big parade is happening on Thursday. It's always a security event. I don't see how tonight's example (a guy goading another dude for his money and the other dude starts a knife fight with him in the subway) has anything to do with anything outside those two men, nor why it has national impact.

Did it ever really launch though? One day I found it on Spectrum and I've never seen any live programming on the network outside a map loop in Spanish. I've seen terrible half-assed 'launched to satisfy regulators and Latino groups' networks like HGTV Hogar before, but at least they had translated content...I barely saw anything live from this network at all.

After reading another TVNC op-ed about how 'news directors must lead the AI revolution'...it really feels like most of these soothsayers and execs just don't care. I've already seen a concrete company buy a bunch of smaller outfits and blatantly use AI voices and imagery for TV ads to sell their product in multiple markets and it looks jank and terrible; I'm sure they've plunged to 'only if desperate' status. Let's see what happens when AI has to dare tackle unique market quirks like KUSA's and KARE...it'll probably explode when it has to market around the WNEP talkback line.

But what do you about the channel still owned by News Corp in Australia? Unless you toss a lot of money at Rupert to buy the Sky branding outright, that's still a fly in the ointment.

The problem with MSNBC is well before the opinion days when the affiliates were pitched on MSNBC helping to jumpstart their web efforts and giving them a solid place to highlight breaking news with affiliate coverage taking more precedence over sending network folks out, and a promise not to compete with them... A promise that crashed with TWA 800, Diana, and then was done with 9/11 (and Zucker and the network egos shooting down affiliate spotlighting because they HAD to be there). All the affiliate spotlights are but a memory, and for better or for worse a few platforms and Wordpress control local news websites. And for the most part they never promote MSNBC because that ship has sailed with NBCNews.com. Since then the affiliates have seen it both as competition and dragging down NBC News because of those broken promises; NBC News Now seems much more accommodating and proper to them and their needs, along with whatever disasterpiece of a national news website their owners foist upon them. I do think NBC News Now is the future for NBC News, while MSNBC will end up with some kind of shift away from NBC. CNBC I could finally see just becoming a dayside-only network or for that CNBC World merger to take place; maybe its future with properties like the MLB and NBA moving to in-house management of their teams will be having CNBC during the day, those games at night on cable providers, like back in the 80s when time-share made more sense. Outside the Reddit oddballs there has never been a need to cover the market after the bell, no matter what they've tried outside of Kramer. I'm curious about Oxygen though with the severing of their connection to the mothership and if they just become a licensed brand to throw true crime around or stay over-the-air. And with no mention of Universal KIds even as a Peacock vertical, it's done.

It's doubly bizarre as USA Network is launching in Canada on New Year's Day as part of their various cable network shuffles, but it's just Discovery with an anonymized coat of paint.

It's escapism dreck that makes a lot of money and isn't ending soon, and Andy Cohen's made them a lot of it. I can't blame them for keeping that at least in-house, and I suspect if E! still had the Kardashians that network wouldn't have been spun-off later.

Lately TVNewsCheck's TV station rundown has been lousy with run-for-fun stations and godcaster deals, but Nexstar made a move in Myrtle Beach, grabbing WMBE-LD for $300k from spectrum speccer Lowcountry 34; it's certainly not for their current VHF 5 signal to pair with WBTW (VHF 13), nor for their irrelevant AceTV affiliation...but they do have a UHF 22 CP, so either it'll be an in-market WBTW translator or WPDE's going to have to find something else for 15.2 soon besides the CW unless they weren't covered by Sinclair's master agreement.

KLKN was already cut down as much as it could under Citadel and its sister stations are literally holding up a company that's waiting for a deal to prop them up after Tegna flamed out. What viewers there are left either will move to 10/11 or to News Channel Nebraska; at this point the only difference between KLKN and NTV is 'can you watch it or not' and if you get both, 'which one has the better schedule', or 'I just watch for ABC shows, whatever else they have I don't care about'.

Since Countdown never has a steady panel from season to season you can really just assume anyone not named SAS, Shams Charania or Brian Windhorst won't be back next year and whatever Inside does, they'll adjust to that style. Or that they'll just finally ditch "Countdown" altogether for the branding. It's also for the best since ABC has the Finals and we can finally get them past the conference finals (that first post-Finals "Gone Fishin'" is gonna be fun!).

The goodbyes for everyone on Scripps News yesterday.

PBR has ditched Merit Street in a rights payment dispute, just a week after there were more cuts, including Dominique Sachse departing.

Scripps stations are starting to roll out replacement content for the Scripps News hours and WTMJ is in scramble mode; Kelly goes back to 2pm, and In Real Life (a grab bag of Scripps News docs) airs at 3; WDJT sold them off Inside Edition, which goes to 3:30pm. Frankly they shouldn't move Kelly, but WTMJ shouldn't have even gotten the show in the first place. WGBA already dispensed of the Scripps news hour earlier this year so no changes for them.

The weekend evening newscasts aren't much of a loss with all three of their networks pre-empting with college sports freely, and the 7am-9am block was Fox exclusive, but they're certainly a skeleton crew to begin with there. And they seriously either need a new facility (saw it in May and the neighborhood is in a lot of flux) or to re-merge into WFSB. It really does feel like the stations in Springfield have become more and more just Hartford-New Haven market extensions, and for a long time the success of the Patriots could hide the struggles; not so much now.

•Sinclair CW stations will not be carrying the CW/NewsNation simulcast and the plan is for The National News Desk to go from 8pm ET to late night (technically midnight but they say they'll be going on all night).