nathannah

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).

It isn't; the daytime schedule is just all repeats of their primetime reality dreck and some of their international shows, which could all just be a Peacock vertical.

Or just air NBC News Now; we're literally talking about thousands of viewers with channels like CNBC, FBN, Bloomberg and Cheddar. I have never understood the obsession with keeping primetime audiences when said audience is gone now. After hours trading is just all meme stock crypto bros no advertiser wants anyways. And the reason it's still in SD, even on the app is to drive people to the $30/month Pro app like it's still 2005 and nobody is streaming regularly.

Norah's at 1515 tonight.

I feel like Oxygen's move to OTA, it's more likely to move there down the line with it or as a rebranding of an existing OTA subchannel. I can't see Universal Kids continuing outside a Peacock vertical for sure once the next RTC cycle ends.

Writing on the wall for EAM, I suppose; they're realizing the overhead for a web presence is much less than that of a television station, and I assume the proceeds will only help the ministry. Gotta be a bit shocked they went to Nexstar when VCY America and TCT still in an acquiring mood; they could've easily $1-and-debt'ed the operation out to another godcaster, but they found a good commercial offer. And it also gives Nexstar a chance to see if moving around channel numbers to use WJW's 8 on UHF works, and just have everything hosted off the 55 transmitter, sacrificing VHF 8 to 3.0 lighthouse duty.

Yeah, but I'd like to know if stuff like this was factored into their current affiliation agreement, and that they can still opt out of CW programming out of spite. You don't really see this with many of the Big Four stations and it would be get the attention/letter from affiliate relations.

WBAY will be pushing ET to late night next week for extended hour-long 6pm shows through the election, and likely quite a few other stations throughout Gray; kinda a shock that WANF doesn't have have anything at 7:30 and has TBBT reruns instead.

The National News Desk is going primetime on their CW affiliates on Election Night it looks like, in order to pre-empt the network's own NewsNation simulcast (or push it off to air to nobody on Charge/Comet subs).

WBAY has GrayOne promos but a lot of their graphics systems have been down lately (their traffic information for instance) so it looks like they're still on some Media General-era (and even Young) systems actively being upgraded.