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/

On 9/18/2023 at 1:01 PM, tyrannical bastard said:

Had Akron & Canton succeeded in getting other network affiliates on the air in the 50s and 60s, they could have been a stand-alone market as well.  They were slated to get a VHF frequency on Channel 11, but that was held up in the freeze, and later was re-assigned to Pittsburgh and became WIIC (WPXI).  That could have been WAKR, but they opted for UHF and soldiered on as an second ABC affiliate for the market, at WEWS's dismay, but allowed them to take some levity in their schedule while WAKR generally cleared everything.

 

Ironically, the only part of WHIZ's original ownership is the 102.5 frequency, which originally served Zanesville as WHIZ-FM, but was moved to the exurbs of Columbus to become part of that market.   It served as an automated country format, the new home of WWCD (after getting displaced from 101.1) and is now a hispanic station.

 

The current WHIZ-FM was sold to Marquee along with the other stations (AM & TV) as well.

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

21 hours ago, CircleSeven said:

New petition. This station took the spectrum auction money to move to VHF-low. It now wants to go back to the "U".

 

Religious broadcaster in South Carolina, WGGS-TV was on RF 16 when it sold its spectrum during that auction a few years back for $44.3M. The station elected to move to VHF-low RF 2. 

 

They've sinced filed to vacate VHF 2 for UHF 29.

 

 

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.

On 9/17/2023 at 2:25 AM, SS8609 said:

Scripps should simply make a move on KXGN and spin off the radio stations. If anything, I think that the Billings and Glendive markets, as well as Great Falls and Helena, should be merged since KXGN and KTVQ are essentially one and the same minus the separate KXGN operations that can easily be collapsed into the Billings mothership, and which wouldn’t be any different from Cowles acquiring KYUS from the Marks estate and merging it into KULR, for which KYUS is already a semi-satellite, since KYUS’s COL of Miles City sometimes gets associated with Glendive. As for Great Falls and Helena, since CBS, ABC and Fox already have full-power signals in the former and LPTV satellites in the latter, with the reverse being true for NBC especially since the old KTGF went bye-bye in 2009, it would also make sense to combine those two as well.

 

Nielsen can easily replace the voids where Glendive and Helena disappear by splitting Waco and Bryan-College Station into two markets, since Waco is a Baylor and Cowboys market and BCS revolves around Texas A&M and is closer to the Texans (BCS viewers also get most of the Houston stations on cable, whereas Waco has long gotten DFW stations from cable including WFAA and KERA), and also splitting off the Lewiston/Pullman and Moscow areas into one market with KLEW and KWSU.

 

This could, however, result in some interesting circumstances in the Palouse with Daystar’s KQUP potentially either attempting to move north to Spokane or sell off to a commercial operator such as Cowles or Morgan Murphy with intentions to expand one of the Spokane stations to a semi-satellite of either KHQ or KXLY (and both groups already control the NBC and ABC duopolies in central Washington). And in Waco, there would be no PBS station, which may prompt KERA or KLRN (or perhaps even Baylor which long abandoned KWBU) to look at buying or converting a station to a PBS satellite in central Texas.

 

And if Puerto Rico becomes a state, Nielsen can accommodate the vast San Juan market - likely to be in the top 25 or at least the top 30 - by collapsing Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, whose stations somewhat feed off one another corporate-wise, into one market. This could trigger some potential sales here though as well as terrain issues given that both Shenandoah Valley markets are split by the Blue Ridge mountains and Shenandoah National Park, though combining the two may give ABC/ESPN more market leverage for ACC football telecasts involving UVA, maybe not as much as Roanoke with Virginia Tech, but certainly just as much or more so than smaller SEC markets like Columbus, Ga. (Auburn) or Columbus, Miss. (Mississippi State).

 

Of course, this all remains speculation, but it could very well be a possibility down the line.

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.

On 7/26/2023 at 8:47 AM, LexTVandRadio said:

Didn't WOAY re-brand as TV50 for many years going with their digital channel, then the station went back to channel 4 even though they are on digital channel 30. 

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.

On 9/25/2023 at 1:14 PM, nycnewsjunkie said:

Welcome aboard. Just so you know, much of this was already discussed here.

 

This all relates to Scripps’ new overall strategy for their lower-rated small market stations. Anchor positions are being eliminated, and except for weather segments, most of those newscasts are pre-recorded, w/ segments from MMJs and Scripps News. KATC is the latest station to implement this strategy.

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.