WRTV Merged with WISH

[EVVTV12 204]

Circle City Broadcasting now owns RTV6 in Indy. And early word is, just about everyone at RTV6 minus a few people, won’t be around for the late news this evening. 

[Georgie56 3661]

It seems like everyone at WRTV was fired.

 

Edited April 1 by Georgie56

[Recovering Producer 410]

18 minutes ago, EVVTV12 said:

Circle City Broadcasting now owns RTV6 in Indy. And early word is, just about everyone at RTV6 minus a few people, won’t be around for the late news this evening. 

 

Looking at Zeam, it appears s like they did a WRTV/Scripps 6pm newscast 

 

And a WISH/CCB 7pm newscast (that is an overmodulated hot mess) 

[TVLurker 389]

I can't believe nobody wants to save traditional broadcasting. This is sad.

Edited April 1 by TVLurker

[evv_mlis 34]

I'm watching the 11:00 WRTV show live. This is embarrassing. One story they say WRTV. Another one they say RTV6. Then you see the StormTrack 8 weather on the ticker. The 6 bug with the ABC logo is ridiculously big. 

[MichiganNewsGraphicsJunkie 1158]

1 hour ago, Georgie56 said:

It seems like everyone at WRTV was fired.

 

I looked at serveral WRTV Facebook/X profiles and those that posted said it was their last day... Disgusting

[MichiganNewsGraphicsJunkie 1158]

WRTV has a new logo (basically WISH's spinning logo, but with a blue 6)

 

 

Edited April 1 by MichiganNewsGraphicsJunkie

[H-Town TV Fan 250]

I'm not even from the DMA, but man, that is brutal! This is a sad sign of the times in the traditional broadcast TV world.

 

I feel so sorry for everyone who was let go on such short notice...

Edited April 1 by H-Town TV Fan

[24994J 5888]

There was a separate thread posted for WRTV adopting the WISH graphics. That is, frankly, such a secondary part of this story, especially since the implementation has been so bad. Everything about the change can be discussed here.

[mre29 1967]

What I want to know is why Scripps chose to sell to Circle City. Did no one else (Gray, Hearst, Sinclair, etc.) show any interest? Did any of them even know Scripps was looking to sell this one station?

 

[Recovering Producer 410]

5 hours ago, mre29 said:

What I want to know is why Scripps chose to sell to Circle City. Did no one else (Gray, Hearst, Sinclair, etc.) show any interest? Did any of them even know Scripps was looking to sell this one station?

 

My personal guess is that there was direct outreach between the parties involved in these sales and these stations were never on the open market. Whether Scripps approached purchasing companies first or vice versa is something we’ll likely never know.
 

That’s strictly speculation, but based on the two operations and the single market owners Scripps sold to.
In both cases, those operations only paths to better operating costs were buy a competitor or be sold to one. And if you look at Scripps debt load and stock price … cash is a good thing to get. (Even if they announced the Inyo and Lexington purchases which eats up a solid amount of the money made from these sales. But those are both purchases where the long term operating costs will be substantially lower than the properties they sold.) 

[tyrannical bastard 4676]

Dujuan McCoy is a special kind of awful.  I know WRTV has been the red-headed stepchild of Indianapolis for a long time, but for it to go like this is brutal.

 

The worst thing about it, this is what local owners are doing to TV stations.  The same can be said in Fort Myers with the McBride Family.  Now there are still good owners out there like the people who own WFMJ and Capital Broadcasting in Raleigh, but the entire industry is still doninated by companies like Nexstar who are spreading awful in an unprecedented way.

Edited April 1 by tyrannical bastard

[FiveNews 481]

If you can stand to watch, here you go.

 

 

[tyrannical bastard 4676]

7 minutes ago, FiveNews said:

If you can stand to watch, here you go.

 

 

The only molecule of tolerability is that they restored the "6" that Scripps took away.

 

This is giving me sub -Temu vibes all around....

[GodfreyGR 812]

I really don't understand the "cube" logo for RTV or WISH- Can anyone explain that? In the opening, it looks like "News 66 ABC".

[GraphicsMan 345]

11 hours ago, TVLurker said:

I can't believe nobody wants to save traditional broadcasting. This is sad.

It wasn’t meant to last forever. All the mergers and consolidations since 2013 from LIN and Media General to Belo and Garnett to McGraw Hill and Scripps they were all signs that the business was changing I saw this coming since.

2 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Dujuan McCoy is a special kind of awful.  I know WRTV has been the red-headed stepchild of Indianapolis for a long time, but for it to go like this is brutal.

 

The worst thing about it, this is what local owners are doing to TV stations.  The same can be said in Fort Myers with the McBride Family.  Now there are still good owners out there like the people who own WFMJ and Capital Broadcasting in Raleigh, but the entire industry is still doninated by companies like Nexstar who are spreading awful in an unprecedented way.

Local ownership won’t last long.

[Greggo 384]

Painful. The ticker telling people “You are watching WISH-TV Indianapolis” is laughable. If you’re gonna fire everyone, just simulcast. 

[Georgie56 3661]

3 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Dujuan McCoy is a special kind of awful.  I know WRTV has been the red-headed stepchild of Indianapolis for a long time, but for it to go like this is brutal.

 

The worst thing about it, this is what local owners are doing to TV stations.  The same can be said in Fort Myers with the McBride Family.  Now there are still good owners out there like the people who own WFMJ and Capital Broadcasting in Raleigh, but the entire industry is still doninated by companies like Nexstar who are spreading awful in an unprecedented way.

Don”t forget Griffin in Oklahoma.

[tyrannical bastard 4676]

1 hour ago, Greggo said:

Painful. The ticker telling people “You are watching WISH-TV Indianapolis” is laughable. If you’re gonna fire everyone, just simulcast. 

Even worse, they were still running old WRTV promos.  One of them was for their investigations unit, that still had Rachel Wilkerson in it! (She left WRTV several months ago)

[ScottSchell 423]

They claim they hired multiple people from WRTV….

[nathannah 2792]

They only offered employment though, which is a big difference, and outside a few who probably had no seniority/choice in the manner, most of them probably laughed at the terms on sight.

 

Also putting the logos like that in the footer as '8-6' is probably one of the most ironic touches I've ever seen in a press release announcing how they fired people and how they can maybe come back (good luck with that).

Edited April 1 by nathannah

[mre29 1967]

6 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Dujuan McCoy is a special kind of awful.  I know WRTV has been the red-headed stepchild of Indianapolis for a long time, but for it to go like this is brutal.

 

And if Nexstar succeeds in holding on to WTHR without losing WXIN/WTTV... 

 

[tyrannical bastard 4676]

49 minutes ago, mre29 said:

 

And if Nexstar succeeds in holding on to WTHR without losing WXIN/WTTV... 

 

I can see why it was one of the ACTUAL divestitures.  Probably the only one that mattered versus the others, and the many more that should have been marked for re-sale.

 

Who would have thought that in 30 years, WRTV would be tanked, WXIN and WTHR racing to the top of the market, WTTV luring CBS from WISH, and WISH being cast off from being LIN's "flagship" station to a local owner who has done far more harm than good in recent years....

Sinclair is probably kicking themselves for selling out all those years ago...

[EVVTV12 204]

For those who don’t know the history of RTV6, I’ll give you a little background. The station went on the air as WFBM-TV on May 30th, 1949, as Indiana’s first TV station. The first program was “Crucible of Speed,” a documentary about this little race called The Indianapolis 500. After the program ended, a live broadcast of The 500 followed. They started as CBS, went to NBC in ‘56, and ABC in ‘79. After the station was sold to McGraw-Hill, the call letters changed to the famous WRTV, or “We are TV,” in 1972. 
 

The station had many other first: record programming on video tape, news gathering on mini-cams, microwave relay trucks, satellite truck, digital news cameras, video on demand, website, mobile website, cable news channel, producing a newscast for a different station (WRTV6 News on WTTV4) and until the mid-80s, the number one station in the Indianapolis TV market. 
 

I could go on, but we don’t have the time or place really. Yes, RTV6 is not what it once was, but they were always proud of the history they started in Indiana. And all of that was gone in a matter of minutes. 

[nathannah 2792]

The odd thing in all this is that Scripps is still going to be in Indianapolis because they're asking to purchase WIPX/WCLJ outright; do they want to enforce non-competes and just restart the news operation there as an independent station gunning for the Pacers rights and released from network commitments? There's so much about the deal we still don't know about somehow, but without any WARN act period this may turn out to be a massive legal headache for both companies and that staff (I have to assume the only literal 'they can't leave' person left was their engineer).