IM42A

Dawndy Mercer Plank announced Thursday that she is leaving WIS in Columbia SC: https://www.wistv.com/2023/09/28/love-letter-dawndy-mercer-plank/

Was there ever any thought given to a combined Akron-Canton-Youngstown market? That could have been viable.

Unless someone up that way still has an old rooftop antenna that had low-VHF capability to pick up WYFF in analog days, receiving WGGS on OTA 2 would be very difficult. Almost all newer "digital" antennas (an antenna is neither analog nor digital, that's mostly just marketing hype) only receive high-VHF and UHF. You can still get antennas that have low-VHF elements, but it's a hat trick. Televes has a special antenna that includes this.

Charlottesville and Harrisonburg were indeed one market for a short time back in the 1980s IIRC. It's hard to understand why they would continue to be two markets, when they could easily combine into a larger one. Right now, WHSV has to cobble together four networks with a mix of subchannels and LPTVs, moreover, I'm pretty sure their NBC station simulcasts WVIR's newscasts. There would be issues with the terrain --- Charlottesville stations couldn't easily be received in the West Virginia counties, WHSV has enough challenges with the mountains separating it from Pendleton, Grant, and Hardy counties, and as of 2018 (most recently publicly available Nielsen map), the latter two counties were assigned to the Washington DC market anyway. Dumb question, is it necessary to have a set number of markets? I'm confused by the suggestion that adding the San Juan market would have to be compensated for in some way.

They did indeed. I never figured that one out, unless they were (a) seeking to forge a brand new identity (in which case new call letters would seem to have been called for) because WOAY was known to be a very low-quality station, albeit with historically much local content or (b) thought somehow that a high-UHF channel number would be "catchy", possibly seeking to glom onto WVGV/WVNS being on channel 59. At any rate, they're now back on PSIP channel 4. You also have the anomalous situation of WCHS and WOAY both being ABC affiliates within 50 miles of one another. In the analog days, WOAY could easily be received in Charleston, and the local cable carried it. Don't know how easy it is to receive in Charleston being digital and on UHF. When WCHS was CBS, it served as the default affiliate for Bluefield-Beckley-Oak Hill (at least large parts of it), which made sense as WCHS was more or less equidistant from Huntington and Beckley.

This sounds kind of like EuroNews, where voice-over in several languages is used for the same video targeted to different audiences, with no anchor. I believe WCPO Cincinnati did something similar back in the day, with Al Schottelkotte doing voice-over with video and photographs, with minimal anchor-desk shots.

Zanesville is the ultimate "infill" market. By all rights, they should be part of the Columbus market, but WHIZ has been there forever, and it's kind of a legacy thing. Parkersburg, and to a lesser extent Lima, are also infill markets, as is Lafayette IN. Infill markets are intriguing, in that they typically have a single news operation, and with the advent of subchannels and co-owned LPTVs, you get basically the same news on all channels. Harrisonburg VA is another case in point. You would think that Harrisonburg and Charlottesville would be a single market, but except for one year back in the 1980s, they've always been separate.