Samantha

They've filed to do this again as of June 1 after dropping the idea last year. https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/public/tv/draftCopy.html?displayType=html&appKey=25076ff37f8fa68f017fb2ee03ad295e&id=25076ff37f8fa68f017fb2ee03ad295e&goBack=N Meanwhile, WMEB Orono ME seeks to move from VHF 9 to UHF 22.

Renard is clearly in the game for Syracuse and nothing else. Similarly, BEK Sports Network probably only has eyes for Grand Forks. Really curious what Estrella wants. I see only two channels they'd want: 11 Yuma and 32 Flagstaff. Maybe 9 Walla Walla. The Flagstaff station could be paired with KVPA-LD in Phoenix to force must-carry for Estrella TV. Not much else in this list that has a lot of Hispanics. Weigel will want stations that attribute to large markets as part of its national mux growth strategy. Alexandria MN 7 sticks out to me here, as do the Silver City channels. They could also go for Eagle River 26 or Wittenberg 31, which are in the Wausau area. Tonopah 9 also could be used with them to get into Las Vegas, though Rxdio is clearly gunning for Tonopah. The other Nevada sticks would go into Reno (Winnemucca) and Salt Lake (Ely) DMAs. Eagle River 26 is one of a handful of brand new allocations. It was sought by Gray shortly before Gray bought Quincy; it onsold WAOW but not WYOW, which gave it the Rhinelander-area transmitter it desired. (WMOW provides much the same service, thus why Gray hived WYOW off.) So there really isn't an obvious local bidder for it. Freeport IL 9 could and probably should be used to revive WIFR as a full-power station. This allotment was also requested by Gray. You might recall WIFR was sold for spectrum and converted to an LPTV. Not much of this list coincides with Gray's portfolio of stations, though Sun Valley ID could be used to expand the service area of KMVT. Sinclair's participation here is intriguing. Walla Walla 9 would not provide that much additional benefit to KEPR. Of the Montana stations on offer, one is in the NBC Montana service area (Butte 24) and the other two in the Great Falls DMA which has KTGF-LD as its NBC affiliate. Would they want to build high-power satellites in Price or Vernal, Utah?

The FCC released the list of 13 bidders (7 with complete applications, 6 with minor fixes needed) for TV auction 112 in a couple of months. Complete Gray Television Licensee, LLC Major Market Broadcasting of North Dakota, Inc. Marquee Broadcasting, Inc. Radiant Life Ministries, Inc. Renard Broadcasting Corp. RxDIO.com LLC TV-49, Inc. Incomplete BEK Sports Network, Inc. Estrella Television License LLC Sinclair Television Group, Inc. SJL Television Inc. Ventura Media Communications, LLC Venture Technologies Group, LLC A 14th bidder, Redwood Empire Public Television, Inc., was rejected.

Kent Dana has died. He was 80. https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2022/04/19/kent-dana-legendary-anchor-three-phoenix-tv-news-stations-dies/7362375001/

It's real but they did a ton of really cheap station-side editing...

WJAR went into their news archives and dug up a rarity that lasted just 5 months... the WLWC TV 28 News at 10!

I am adding a link to one of the applications to this thread as they have hit the FCC. The total purchase price is $488 million plus or minus working capital. https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/views/public/assignmentDraftCopy.html?displayType=html&appKey=25076ff37fc69b3c017fe1ae7c523465&id=25076ff37fc69b3c017fe1ae7c523465&goBack=N

https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2022/04/05/kris-pickel-fired-arizonas-family-phoenix/9478247002/ Kris Pickel is out at KPHO/KTVK due to a "business decision".

This is the WHCP "Bubbity News" of our time.

I've been thinking all day on this one, and yiiiiiikes. It's rare in 2022 to see a company with this much of a "moral"/"family" lean get into the business of full-line broadcast TV stations (ones with network affiliations and newsrooms). It's also a bit alarming because there is far less tolerance for that than there was even a generation ago. I'm reminded of when WPGA cut bait from ABC in 2009. Granted, they were a small operator that could very well have been muscled out by the shape of events in the intervening decade-plus anyway (especially because they did eventually go bankrupt and they were not willing to pay reverse comp), but one of the two reasons WPGA dropped ABC was because its programming had failed to meet Lowell Register's "family" standards. The last operator left that can be said to be cut from this sort of cloth is Bonneville, one of the last "boutique" TV companies, and that's a company that also happens to have an actual century of experience in broadcasting (and an alignment with a regional-national TV network much in the vein of INSP). That's not saying that such wouldn't be a bad fit in theory for some of the markets on offer, with Pocatello and Tulsa standing out in particular as fertile ground for something like that. But in the moment we are in in media, affiliates exist because of tradition, public service obligations, and their news output. They have a reservoir of inherent trust that every other medium would kill to have these days, and they provide vital regional news and weather services. Sure, the networks don't truly need affiliates any more to reach much of the country, with three having SVOD platforms and the fourth going the FAST route and local TV combined being out-revenued by Google. But Disney+ won't give you the weather down the block, and try hearing about your local high school teams on Paramount+. These are the things people turn to local news for, and among the purveyors of such content, TV has the steadiest economic picture. Imagicomm/INSP has no experience with any of these three things. They've been in two lines of business that, while about television and TV programming, don't coincide with the bedrocks of American local TV at the "spoke" end: a TV channel that shows Westerns and the distribution of family-friendly entertainment content. In this day and age, it's hard to be anything but skeptical of new entrants into this marketplace. There were probably some serious shudders today, especially at Memphis and Tulsa, where the company is going to be running much larger concerns than the ex-Northwest outlets, a fair number of which just outsource the production of local news programming anyway. The problem is that PE companies see TV stations as assets to ride the downside, squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, and then discard the dry lemons to people who are deluded into seeing value or need them as dumb pipes for other types of services (and Imagicomm may well be in that business). They don't understand the social value of TV. They don't get what makes people who care about the news business tick. They don't get that this world needs lemon juice, badly, and they aren't making many more lemon trees. And, particularly as interest rates rise and chill M&A activity, there aren't going to be many real fruit growers out there to fill their shoes.

A few notes here in re: @Kenneth Kissel's comment. CBS has done something no other network does. They don't have a network news division and the local stations, they have News and Stations which are one leadership group and are integrated. This makes sense because, as O&Os, editorial responsibility for both lies with one company. It also makes sense given that both needed to do something different badly. CBS as a whole has gone big on a federal brand that is sprawling and consistent. News and sports share big pieces of their visual language with entertainment, etc. The local stations haven't yet had a revamp of their looks to integrate them into this, but that has to be coming (watch for Detroit later this year). Also, why city name? It helps distinguish the social media pages from other stations that are also CBS affiliates and it improves search and app rankings if people search for, say, "Pittsburgh news" or "Denver news". This is especially apparent with the NBC, CBS and Fox groups in re: websites and app names and branding, but you'll see increased city/region name usage across a lot of station groups—"ABC15 Arizona", the "Very Local" OTT channels from Hearst, etc.

This is Gray, so "My Little LPTV: U-Relays are Magic" is probably the answer. Of the BX LPTVs, they could use a U-relay in Montgomery, but they don't need an LPTV in the other markets (and indeed one they don't own a network affiliate in). They could always put Circle on WBXC; the network has no place to hang its hat in that market, and the LPTVs are all unremarkable diginet trees.

@ChesapeakeTVand I are pretty much in agreement. It's Peters. When you see full-page newspaper ads like this with copy like this... Who else could it possibly be? https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857000/ Peters LOVED flowery newspaper ads. I had already clipped three of these for KOLN/KGIN (10/11 Strong debuted 1977), KMST (It's a Must, used 1991–92), and WTXL (This is Our Place from 1984), and I was able to nab another five from WEAR Clearly Yours (1979), WXLT 40 is Yours (1980), KVIA 7 Together (1983), WQAD One Quad-City (1984), and WSPA In the Center of it All (1990). https://www.newspapers.com/clip/48745979/the-strength-of-nebraska-1011-strong/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75942435/looking-toward-tomorrow-its-a-must-a/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/29141556/tallahassee-this-is-our-place/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857200/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857208/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857232/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857336/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857453/

Might delay things, but I do not expect issues from petition for declaratory ruling given that this is fairly routine for people with clean ownership records. This has included some large companies like iHeart.

Thanks for posting, Dan. I think every single person who has said something in this thread (including myself) would say we really appreciate your work. I don't know of anyone else who had that many concurrent campaigns on the air in the same market. A lot of craft goes into making all that work, and this thread exists because we want to recognize the people that produced it.