C Block

KMGH moved Jeopardy from 6:00 to 3:30 in the late 90s sometime after the switch to ABC. It went back to 6:00 in 2006 when Oprah moved to KCNC, though they kept the Jeopardy reruns at 3:30. KMGH got rid of Jeopardy and Wheel shortly after Scripps bought the station and when Scripps was in a big push to get rid of as much syndicated programming as possible.

I don't think you can draw much from URL purchases. Remember years ago when NBC purchased nbcdenver.com and everyone thought that meant KUSA was going O&O? Those were the days.

That might still be true to a degree in the afternoon and prime access. But at 4am? That's not really the case except for maybe Fox affiliates. I think we'll see more big three affiliates drop news before 5am and run more national news.

I think the overall trend of stations expanding and adding more newscasts at all times of the day may be coming to an end. It was certainly true in the last decade or so that more news was the most cost-effective programming most stations could produce. A lot of stations also kept expanding in the early morning as a trick to boost ratings for later hours. Now that advertising revenue is way down all across the board, plus with the producer shortage, it may not be worth it to even bother with things like news at 4am anymore. A newscast is only worthwhile if people are watching and if you can sell the ad slots. The pandemic definitely changed things too. People aren't commuting as much, and I don't think there's as big of an audience at 4am anymore. (There never really was a big one to begin with.) Some cities have been hit harder by remote work than others, but in San Francisco, nearly all stations permanently canceled their 4am news during the pandemic. KTVU is now the only one on the air before 5am. I'm surprised this hasn't happened in more markets yet. As for holidays, it really all depends on the station group, the holiday, what day of the week the holiday falls on, and the whim of management. Holidays actually have higher ratings than you'd think because so many people are sitting at home with nothing else to do. Most places where I've worked, I think they've tried to strike the right balance of offering some kind of news product while keeping expectations in check. I also know some stations where the managers are so hard-wired that they demand running their full schedules even with a skeleton staff, holidays be damned.

Who is making millions in local TV these days, even in market #1?

I read the whole petition. It’s a bit weird and reads more like a high school essay at times. It does a lot of conflating FNC with FTS and the Dominion suit, but it doesn’t really make a very clear connection between FNC and WTXF other than that both broadcast Fox News Sunday. The petition would be stronger if it could point to specific examples of false election claims being broadcast on WTXF via Fox News Sunday, Level 1 and 2 cut-ins, and/or NewsEdge packages during that timeframe. There might be some instances of such a thing, but even so, it’s probably a far cry from what was being broadcast on FNC at the time. Don’t get me wrong – NewsEdge definitely does sneak slanted reporting through its PKGs that it passes along to affiliates almost every single day, but I don’t know if there was much during that time that rises to the same level of libel as Sidney Powell on Maria Bartiromo’s show. I don’t know how far this will go, but it’s still interesting, and another headache for the Fox legal team. The FCC’s notion of license holders having a duty to the public might be a product of a bygone era, but it’s possible the FCC could take this seriously. Is a corporation that settled in the biggest defamation lawsuit In American history worthy of holding an FCC license, even if the defamation didn’t happen on FCC-regulated airspace? It’s an interesting question, and while this whole thing might not go very far, perhaps it’s still worth exploring in an FCC hearing.

I never worked with her, but I universally always heard that she was great to work with.

Legoland has been very aggressive with their media campaign. They've been buying up ads and pitching a lot of stories to TV stations wherever they open up new locations. When the one opened up here, we did a few stories and segments on it. I got tired of all things Lego and passed on any of their other pitches about new exhibits or events because I didn't really see much news value in them. It's very possible that Lego bought ads on WCBS from the sales department and then turned around and pitched the news department to do a live shot out there for 'newsworthy' reasons, unbeknownst to either news or sales. This is an unfortunate circumstance that makes it look like Lego paid for the ad and the segment even though it's likely they paid for the ad but not the segment. Or, maybe I'm giving WCBS too much of the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps they are pay-for-play. In that case, it's inexcusable.

I'm pretty sure that's from the network DC set. And no, I doubt that was live – it was probably taped too.

I'm pretty sure there's still a hiring freeze at Disney.

Sorry, but I'm not a fan. This doesn't feel like much of a substantial improvement. It very much has a "designed by committee" vibe to it. The opens are too busy, and the 3D elements already look just slightly out of date. The supers and fullscreens are fine, but nothing amazing. I think the KABC/KGO look is still the best of the bunch by far.

Here's a collection of most of the new "This is CNN" promos. I think there might be some CNNI-specific ones that aren't on here. https://www.cnncreativemarketing.com/cnn-uncut/#open-overlay These are fantastic – CNN at its best. With this ad campaign, I can look past the pretty bland and underwhelming update of their chyrons.

My immediate guess for the reason for this shift is simply that there are fewer people around in newsrooms who are now doing even more things, so making fancy, bespoke graphics falls by the wayside. You'll still see plenty of OTSes on the network evening news, but they have full art departments to pull stills from each story or design matching elements to make them great and worthwhile. Local stations are far less likely these days to have their own in-house graphic designers, so OTSes are made by the newscast producer. Producers aren't graphic designers – they're more than likely picking pre-made graphics from a library, which are usually IMO poor quality and never story-specific. Producers are also tasked with so many other responsibilities to the point that OTSes or other unique presentation elements are just farther down the list of priorities. I wonder if there has also maybe been some consultant research done on this as to whether viewers aren't impressed by them anymore. Does the same OTS with the same moody picture of the thumbprint and police lights really do anything to advance a crime story? Or an OTS that says nothing other than "New at 5"?

I think this is about right. Much like Denver and St. Louis, I could see where they might shift around some of the evening newscasts on KUSI to not compete with KSWB. A primetime block on KUSI might make sense. They then can keep the morning blocks the same and compete with one another and differentiate them with "unique talent" even if much of the content is the same, and cheap. The whole point in all of these duopoly markets is to simply maximize ad inventory, not about maximizing the potential for new content.

Erica Hill-Rodriguez will be named KTLA's new news director. She was most recently the news director over at KTTV. https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-hill-rodriguez-706559b/

More turmoil at KTTV – acting news director Pete Wilgoren is out. By my count, three LA stations are currently without a news director (KTTV, KNBC, KTLA). Yikes.

Great, they can beat KTVU at 10pm on the Friday before the Fourth of July. But that's not a trend. The fact is that KTVU still frequently has triple (or more) the audience of KRON at 10pm, and often more viewers at 11pm than all the other stations combined. Don't believe Lieberman's assertion that KTVU ratings are "cratering" in his mind. He makes up 80% of his "reporting" and doesn't have access to the numbers. He even claimed recently that KRON was beating KTVU at 11pm – only problem is, KRON hasn't had an 11pm in years. With that said, KRON's primetime block has cultivated some sort of following, especially after KGO cancelled their 9pm show on KOFY. There are more eyeballs on KRON's 8 and 9pm than on the CW shows. If Nexstar cheapens the CW programming as widely reported and also forces KRON to air it, then that seems like a perfect recipe to sabotage what success they have.

That's not really true. It has happened in some isolated incidents. But Rich Lieberman keeps making up his own facts to claim otherwise.

I'm not so sure KRON would be too happy about becoming a CW affiliate. Their primetime news block has actually gained some traction since it launched a few years ago.

I'm not so sure of that. Fox has more than $4 billion in cash on hand, which is plenty to cover the settlement. In perspective, $787 million amounts to about two weeks' worth of revenue for the entire company. What I imagine probably will happen, though, is that you'll probably see Fox be less willing to make new investments in its operations and some overall belt-tightening in the medium term.

The TV on the gym treadmill was stuck on KRON this morning, and I thought it was weird that Darya and whatever that guy's name is were both anchoring from separate newsroom cams this morning. It could also always be just a minor lighting update like what KGO just did a few weeks ago. I haven't heard anything either way.

I'm confused by that KYW look. Why bring back a throwback logo that few people probably remember? It seems counterproductive to what I thought was CBS's ultimate goal of unifying all the stations' branding and eventually de-emphasizing channel numbers. Yes, I know they want to have local elements in there too, but this just feels like it's going in the opposite direction. Also, why let stations pick their own colors? The whole point of standardizing graphics equipment on Chyron Axis is that you can roll out different animations and monitor graphics for all kinds of news topics really quickly to all the stations. Other station groups have done this for years. Stations like KYW and KDKA with one-off looks are going to perpetually have a mismatched look or will not be able to benefit from the resources of hubbed graphics.

It's certainly different, and honestly, not that bad. I think UK viewers lost a lot more in the merger than World viewers did. The story selection is different with more UK stories. However, in my view, this has been going on ever since the pandemic anyway when they substantially started doing a lot more simulcasts between the two channels. The balance of international-to-domestic stories is more in line with something like France 24 than it was of the old BBC World News. The format is very different. They've ditched their super traditional format in favor of lots of live elements. They run very few PKGs and instead do a lot of live talkbacks with correspondents and various experts. It almost harkens more to an American rather than British style of cable news. It feels less polished than the previous format, which was heavy on the well-produced, lengthy reporter PKGs, but it does feel more engaging and immediate with all the live presence. I think this is actually a good strategy. My Comcast isn't filling the shorter ad breaks, so I'm seeing the "Around the UK" segments that run at about ~10 minutes past. In the past during joint newscasts, the anchor would just read a few UK stories during this opt-out. But now, they've decided to run shortened evergreen stories from BBC's local stations. I think they feel super awkward, and they probably should just go back to what they used to do. Also, the newscasts sometimes have awkward endings as sometimes they might be in a live interview at the end but still have a hard out at :26. Some people on the UK forums are really panning the lack of any kind of visual rebrand. The logo's a little different, and there's some inconsistency with show opens from hour to hour, but it's otherwise the same music, graphics, and studios as before. It seems like a bigger visual refresh will probably happen later. I can forgive any kind of visual inconsistencies given that behind the scenes, the BBC is probably more focused on trying to figure out what the day-to-day operations of the merged channel will be like.

I’m sorry, but that pee-stained Spirit Airlines vibe looks awful. They should have been forced to use the same colors like everyone else.

There was definitely a push initially that every O&O would contribute some kind of content on a regular basis to Fox Weather. Obviously that didn't happen with everyone. As I see it, a big reason for that is that all the O&Os have so much live news to worry about themselves and barely enough meteorologists locally to fill all of it, so I doubt a lot of the local mets wanted yet another thing dumped onto their workload with nothing for them in return. What has happened, however, is that Fox Weather will request live shots from O&O reporters who are on weather live shots, and O&Os are also able to request live shots from Fox Weather correspondents.