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Hurricane Florence


GoldenShine9

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Straight up rebroadcast. Saw a WPDE talent ID run before Steve started.

 

I really can’t believe that WNCT, WITN, and now knowing they aren’t, WPDE, aren’t doing wall to wall coverage with the amount of corporate resources they have available. Both markets are half underwater and the water is only rising.

 

Even throw some coverage on WMWB owned by Armstrong 'sometimes uses WPDE to do his awful 3am corporate obligation show' Williams, they're literally doing nothing. ABC is in repeats this week. Sinclair clearly has no idea how to handle a disaster situation. Compared to WWAY and WECT fighting together to stay on the air and the Raleigh stations covering wall-to-wall, this should be another strike in whatever the FCC is doing to SBG post-Tribune. In the past they had the worst E/I commitment measured, so this is hardly a shock from them.

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Until recently, WRAL was available on cable in Greenville...either WNCT forced them off when they were still CBS, or the switch to NBC made them disappear.

 

Given the troubles the stations in Eastern North Carolina are facing, the Raleigh stations are further away from the destruction and better able to penetrate the affected viewers. Suddenlink or Spectrum should make them available to viewers, especially if their local affiliates are not able to broadcast.

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WCTI is doing the majority of their newscast (at least at 6 & 11 tonight) from outdoors in New Bern, but they toss to Lindsey Mastis at WJLA to do national headlines. She may spend 5 minutes or so doing that. Otherwise it is information about what's going on in the area and ways to help out.

 

[GALLERY=media, 1085]IMG_0049 by appleachian posted Sep 17, 2018 at 11:24 PM[/GALLERY]

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Until recently, WRAL was available on cable in Greenville...either WNCT forced them off when they were still CBS, or the switch to NBC made them disappear.

 

Given the troubles the stations in Eastern North Carolina are facing, the Raleigh stations are further away from the destruction and better able to penetrate the affected viewers. Suddenlink or Spectrum should make them available to viewers, especially if their local affiliates are not able to broadcast.

Media General filed a complaint on behalf of WNCT to have WRAL's significantly viewed status stripped in Pitt and Lenoir Counties, which once granted required syndex and network exclusivity to occur on cable. Around the time this was granted by the FCC the affiliation switch occurred and it was WITN's choice to enforce. WITN chose to enforce it (I can't really blame them).

 

It was then up to Suddenlink to keep WRAL's non exclusive programming. WITN themselves told me they are carried on Mediacom(?) cable in Elizabeth City, which is in the Hampton Roads market, but their network and syndex is blacked out by the cable company because of a request from WAVY. The cable company still carries the local content though. Suddenlink chose not to do the same with WRAL in Greenville. They are already forced to carry WRAL in the Rocky Mount system so they have a carriage deal and already have the signal in their system. I personally took this to the top and the response given to me from the Suddenlink market VP is that they felt it was a poor use of their resources.

 

Suddenlink did the same thing in Arkansas; I think they removed a Fort Smith station from something technically in the Little Rock market or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, there were complaints made that the stations assigned to the market weren't sufficiently covering severe weather events. It fell on deaf ears.

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Given that market is already huge with them being the stations all the way from Jacksonville, to Rocky Mount, to the Outer Banks, they have trouble covering it normally, let alone when there is a hurricane going on.
The Outer Banks is in the Hampton Roads market and Rocky Mount (and Tarboro) are in the Raleigh/Durham market. It has to be pretty bad before WITN or WNCT will go there, and usually that's only WITN because WNCT has been dropped in a lot of outlying areas. WNCT was actually dropped in favor of WRAL in Ahoskie a few years ago.

 

The DMA is Beaufort, Bertie, Carteret, Craven, Duplin, Greene, Hyde, Jones, Lenoir, Martin, Onslow, Pamlico, Pitt, and Tyrell Counties. It's big, but Charlotte's DMA is bigger.

 

As close as 10 miles outside Greenville puts you in the Raleigh DMA.

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In the past, weak affiliations and complete lack of them, as well as the uber-dominance of WRAL have tended to give preference to out of market stations. As the marketplace has shifted, and affiliation holes filled in, market boundaries have gotten stronger in the out-of-market stations have been pushed out because of it.

 

Parts of Greenville can easily pick up the Raleigh stations by antenna. Even one town over in Farmville, most of them are still on cable.

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In the past, weak affiliations and complete lack of them, as well as the uber-dominance of WRAL have tended to give preference to out of market stations. As the marketplace has shifted, and affiliation holes filled in, market boundaries have gotten stronger in the out-of-market stations have been pushed out because of it.

 

Parts of Greenville can easily pick up the Raleigh stations by antenna. Even one town over in Farmville, most of them are still on cable.

The first paragraph describes Wilmington perfectly although WRAL got back into the market via WILM-TV. In the Greenville/New Bern market we've never lacked any affiliations. We've had 3 VHF's since WCTI signed on in the 60s. The clout WRAL carried being in the state capital as well as having a superior product got them plenty of viewership here. Media General strong-armed them off cable using questionable evidence. I believe they have since done the same to WFMY in Durham and Chapel Hill and tried to do it to WECT in Cumberland County when WNCN was still NBC.

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The first paragraph describes Wilmington perfectly although WRAL got back into the market via WILM-TV. In the Greenville/New Bern market we've never lacked any affiliations. We've had 3 VHF's since WCTI signed on in the 60s. The clout WRAL carried being in the state capital as well as having a superior product got them plenty of viewership here. Media General strong-armed them off cable using questionable evidence. I believe they have since done the same to WFMY in Durham and Chapel Hill and tried to do it to WECT in Cumberland County when WNCN was still NBC.

 

Before WRAL affiliated with NBC, it was the surrounding markets that held NBC back....WPTF/WRDC and even WNCN were at a disadvantage to WITN, WXII and WECT. The same could be said in Charlotte with WPCQ (now WCNC) being a VERY weak NBC affiliate at the time, which only made stations like WXII, WFBD/WYFF and WIS stronger.

 

WJKA's weakness (as CBS) led to more viewers for WBTW (and WRAL as a CBS station), even WNCT before WJKA signed on.

 

Desperation was probably the reason WNCT forced WRAL off cable in the Greenville area....they were in 3rd place and didn't want WRAL siphoning off more viewers....

 

Digital television has sort of limited the coverage these super-stations once have had, (even WMBF doesn't cover Florence, SC OTA...once a key city in their market) and satellite has pretty much wiped out the overlaps (by using county lines and zip codes).

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Three stations are currently running on diesel and may go out. WWAY engineers were at the Tx site while the WECT and WSFX lost power and the WWAY engineers switched them to generators. The transmitter site is remote and the areas flooded so it may be some time to get then stations back on air when fuel runs out.

 

https://www.wwaytv3.com/2018/09/17/wway-off-the-air-still-streaming-news-online-other-wilmington-stations-to-follow/

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WCTI has an update posted to their website that looks like it was done by WJLA....the graphics are the same but the only difference is a "News Channel 12" bug....

 

Since this was one of the former Bonten stations, they really haven't been assimilated much into the "Borg", which may explain for their hiccups in coverage despite efforts. Coming out of this and back into normal operations may put the "Sinclair-i-zation" into high gear....

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Considering they have no studio they aren’t doing a bad job. Still covering news events and still filling the newscast slots with local presence.

 

I’m curious what they’re going to do about Fox, though. It is still off the air OTA and off the sat providers. Don’t know about Spectrum but Suddenlink is using WVAH/Charleston, WV in its place.

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WCTI started producing their newscasts with the aid of WPEC's satellite truck today. Graphics and other elements are being inserted elsewhere, and the feed going to the WCTI transmitter is a straight simulcast of WPDE aside from the local newscasts.

 

WCTI moved over to a leased truck from DCI (Diversified Communications Inc.) yesterday for producing the "studio" feed.

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Here’s an interesting article how WCTI remained on air and they relied partly on WJLA and WPDE. When they were able to get back on air they broadcasted from parks, churches, FEMA HQ and a community college library. A Tennessee sister station drove to bring 100 gallons of fuel for the transmitter.

 

https://marketshare.tvnewscheck.com/2018/09/24/sinclairs-wcti-covered-hurricane-florence-despite-flooded-building/

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