When I was working in radio Ed Hopkins was our voice guy. That was back in the '80s...

There's a difference between an older employee volunteering to work for peanuts versus receiving an insult offer to stay aboard.

That's often an invitation to an age discrimination lawsuit. Early retirement is seen as a cheaper way of easing out older talent.

In addition to saving on veteran talent salary and benefits, younger talent is seen as more compliant about doing the crap that owners like Tegna foist on viewers like their obsession with social media.

Original post corrected to mention that it's Saturdays only (for now, anyway.)

With the most highly-contested US Senate race in the country underway, WMTW is adding a 7PM Saturday newscast on its CW-affiliated sister station WPXT starting August 31. Gotta grab as many of those sweet 2020 campaign dollars as you can...

It makes a lot of sense. Comcast makes NECN available to competing cable operators in New England, so this isn't unprecedented.

Fun fact - Steve Minich has been here in Portland at WMTW since 1991.

And before them Dish was the outlier for playing hardball with broadcasters and other content suppliers.

If you missed it, it's available on demand here: https://www.wbtv.com/video-gallery/community/ I was thrown by the use of Howdy Doody in the retrospective until I remembered that WBTV was a secondary NBC affiliate for the first several years of its existence.

WSVN's Bob Leider obit https://wsvn.com/remembering-bob-leider/

WRC is owned by Comcast (Xfinity), which might offer a clue as to why it's carried despite low viewership.

The Viacom-owned free (for now, anyway) streaming service Pluto TV already carries a number of diginets; I wonder if Court TV will join the lineup eventually. It could help with distribution in areas where a number of these diginets don't have wide distribution.

After the Charlie Rose scandal CTM lost its momentum. All the anchor shuffling since then is an outgrowth of that.

The best advice for any CTM or CBSEN anchor not named Gayle King is, rent, don't buy. As for the moves, I'd say that, if you're gonna be in third place, might as well try to establish a niche for yourself.