We’ve been thinking about this ever since and have some observations about the situation.

One of the biggest realities is that the opportunities for television news managers to gather are fewer than ever. The collapse of the RTDNA’s annual convention would be the leading example of this argument. We’ve written before about this topic, so we won’t totally revisit it here. But there is little doubt that not having an annual meeting focused on broadcast news leaders from across the country has limited opportunities to share best practices and socialize.

And despite our best efforts to encourage more news directors to attend the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas, we didn’t see a sharp uptick in their attendance last April.

Is this a problem qualifying for “end of the world” status? Of course not, but it is a definite loss.

We’ve noticed that a number of news directors make the effort to attend other ongoing conferences. For some, this is a focused conference for groups of professional journalists, such as NABJ, NAHJ, NLGJA, etc. For others, the annual conferences of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) are events worth attending each year.

Those can certainly be opportunities to network and socialize, but they typically aren’t geared specifically towards newsroom leaders and the challenges they face.

Also worth pointing out is that with newsroom budgets being scrutinized and squeezed for every penny, the budget for travel and professional development is usually the first to be trimmed—or eliminated entirely.

With this shift has come a narrowing of opportunities to meet people outside the ownership group a news director happens to work for. We know that most groups have regular conference calls. But these weekly or monthly gatherings are mostly centered on the dispensing of policies or wisdom from corporate staff, rather than truly open forums.

Some groups do an annual in-person meeting that is part in-service training and part company pep rally. At least these kinds of events present some opportunity for more face-to-face interactions, both formal and informal. But there is zero opportunity to learn what might be working elsewhere or to commiserate over what isn’t working anywhere.

Plus, you can’t really “let your hair down” when your corporate bosses are in the same hotel meeting room for a couple of days.

Again, we are not suggesting here that this change has led to any serious deficiency in the local TV news business, just a loss of opportunity to make the lives of the people who lead these operations better, or even easier.

And dare we say the quiet part out loud: these jobs aren’t easy. Aside from leading the editorial charge each day, there are also the aspects of the position that require one to be an HR expert, a financial analyst, a logistics professional, a video critic, and a host of other roles that have seemingly little to do with, you know…the news.

Sometimes just venting is essential to retaining one’s perspective, if not overall mental health. And it’s nice to do so with someone who understands the demands of the job and has maybe worked through whatever crisis you might be dealing with on any given day.

This is why we think that any reduction in opportunities to network and build a broader circle of colleagues is a greater loss for the industry and the people called upon to lead it. We’ll add that this is our viewpoint, and as always, your mileage may vary. But in checking in with our own circle of newsroom denizens, we’re hearing the same sentiments expressed.

So here is a suggestion: reach out to a few colleagues in the next few days and check in on them. Ask how things are going, how they’re doing personally, and whether there’s anything — big or small — you can help with.

You’ll be surprised at how much it will be appreciated, and how much you’ll get out of the experience.

And if you don’t have anyone to do this exercise with, or if you want a new perspective, drop us an email at editor@tvnd.com. No charge, no catch. We’re always happy to talk about TV news — or, come to think of it, almost anything really.

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“Steve Austin…Astronaut. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better….stronger…faster.”

It has been a week since Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” held his first meeting with the show’s team. You’ve likely heard that it didn’t go well. We wonder if invoking “better, stronger, faster” might have changed the outcome.

Perhaps that was what he was hoping for when he walked to the front of the room, pulled out his phone, and began reading remarks to the team.

Maybe if CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss hadn’t been notable by not being there to introduce her new hire, Mr. Bilton. Maybe if Scott Pelley hadn’t canceled a previously planned vacation to be in that Monday morning meeting. Maybe if there had been other correspondents in the meeting (there weren’t).

Maybe it all wouldn’t have led to the moment that triggered Mr. Pelley to say exactly what was on his mind.

But it wasn’t the first indication that Mr. Bilton was thinking along the lines of “We can rebuild this fifty-eight-year-old institution. We can make it better…stronger…DIGITAL.” (Just as every news executive has said in the past decade.) Bilton telegraphed his intentions in the initial email he sent the entire “60 Minutes” staff the previous Thursday, coming just after what would be called “the Black Thursday massacre” had taken place.

In the course of a single day, the “60 Minutes” team would learn that not only Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who had been the first to tangle with Bari Weiss publicly, would not have her contract renewed. But that wouldn’t have come as much of a shock to anyone.

The real shock came when word got out that fellow correspondent Cecilia Vega was being let go. A bigger tremor followed when the entire “60 Minutes” leadership was told they were being fired as well. That would include Executive Producer Tonya Simon, Executive Editor Draggan Mihailovich, and other veteran producers, including the person behind the show’s digital growth. (Why yes, “60 Minutes” has heard of digital. It’s actually been doing pretty good numbers there.)

This wasn’t just a small change for the very tight-knit group working on what is still television’s most-watched news program. It was a wholesale sacking of colleagues who were, by all accounts, very respected and admired.

For correspondent Scott Pelley, a former anchor of “The CBS Evening News” and a 37-year veteran of the network, it was all “impossible to believe.”

We’re hearing from Pelley for the first time in a sit-down interview with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro in a recurring feature the paper calls, “The Interview.” The paper published the story, along with a video of the interview, yesterday (Sunday) morning. (If you haven’t read or watched it, you can do so via this free gift link. We would certainly encourage you to do so.)

The interview conducted by Ms. Garcia-Navarro is both detailed and wide-ranging. Throughout their discussion, she asks many of the questions that anyone interested in just what led one of the most prominent broadcast journalists of the day to confront the man selected to be his new boss — in a scene dramatic enough to end his career.

For his part, Pelley appears to be more than ready to talk about what he thinks about recent changes at CBS News since Bari Weiss’s arrival last fall and explains why he chose to speak up in the first meeting with the program’s new Executive Producer, Nick Bilton.

(We assume that you, dear reader, are familiar with the details of that meeting by now. If you need a refresher, we’ll point you to our previous coverage, linked here and here.)

What comes across most in his interview is that Scott Pelley cares deeply about the program he has worked on for the past 24 years and, perhaps even more so, about his colleagues there. He also believed his strong challenge to Nick Bilton during that meeting just one week ago was consistent with the program’s internal dialogue tradition, and that his remarks weren’t intended to be made public.

Perhaps Pelley had more than a little naivete in failing to realize that those remarks would lead to his termination from CBS less than 36 hours later. (Garcia-Navarro did not ask about earlier reports that Pelley had prepared a resignation letter.) He says that when he was invited the next day to a meeting with Bilton, Weiss, and other CBS management, being fired was “the furthest thing from his mind.”

Pelley then adds: “Some reporter I turned out to be.”

What we now know at the one-week anniversary of that fateful meeting is that ever since it ended, Nick Bilton has been busy doing damage control inside the “60 Minutes” offices on New York City’s West 57th Street. Dylan Byers, writing for Puck last Friday, called Bilton’s efforts “a charm offensive.” He’s held meetings with several staff members, including most importantly, the show’s three remaining on-air correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim.

Bilton delivered another staff-wide email by week’s end that was notably different in tone from all his previous communications. Key to that email was Bilton’s declaration that he was committed to “maintaining the journalistic independence” that is a key part of the “60 Minutes” legacy as the program approaches its 59th season on the air.

Byers reports that Bilton’s efforts seem to have worked, leading to the joint statement from Stahl, Whitaker and Wertheim, stating that the trio would be staying on because, in their words, “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.” They went on to make their terms quite clear: “If we can continue doing the work that made this show what it is— committing acts of independent, fearless journalism and storytelling—we’re here for it. If not, we leave.”

On Sunday evening, another Puck columnist, this time William D. Cohan, published the first interview with Lesley Stahl about her thoughts on the past week's events and her decision to stay with the program, even though her pending contract extension has yet to be finalized.

In his NYT interview, Pelley’s accusation of editorial interference was detailed with a single example of what he says was Bari Weiss asking for changes to his February story about the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two protestors to the “Operation Metro Surge” operations in Minneapolis. It is Pelley’s contention that Weiss sent a note to then-EP Simon asking for the protestors to be made “to look more violent” in video shown in the story. Pelley refused to make the changes. CBS now says there was no political motivation and the four changes suggested by Weiss were part of the normal editorial collaboration.

Meanwhile, five days would seem to be a fairly quick education for Nick Bilton in the fine art of managing television talent. It’s a job we’ve done for more years than we want to count, and experience helps. We’ve had on-air talent scream at us, sob at us, and pretty much run the gamut of human emotions, including once being shoved into a wall by a former football player who was angrily insisting that we were being just too negative while trying to motivate a newsroom to put a better broadcast on the air.

We’ve said many times over the years that it takes a specific genetic makeup to have both the ego and confidence needed to regularly put one’s face in front of a camera and perform as a journalist. It is a required performance on top of the reporting skills used by every journalist in gathering and editing the story.

As if to remind us of this point, we’ve just watched the first episode of Rich Eisen’s new podcast series titled “This was SportsCenter” for ESPN and Disney+. In the premiere episode, Eisen goes one-on-one with former SportsCenter anchor and colleague Dan Patrick. Patrick recounts a lunch with then-ESPN President Steve Bornstein, who said to him, “You’re just ‘f-ing’ talent.” (The full word was used at the time.)

Patrick had heard Bornstein say this line before. But this time, Patrick says he responded with “Steve, do you think I could do your job?”

Bornstein thinks for a moment and says, “Yeah.”

Patrick then says, “Do you think you could do my job?”

Bornstein thinks for another moment and responds, “No.”

Patrick: “Then don’t call me ‘f-ing’ talent again.“

And he never did.

The takeaway is that being on television and being any good at it isn’t something that just anyone can do. No matter how easy it might look. Frankly, the real skill that the best have is making it look so damn easy most of the time.

According to Dylan Byers’ reporting on Puck, Nick Bilton received a three-year contract to become the new Executive Producer of “60 Minutes.” It will pay him $2.3 million a year to lead what will either continue as the most-watched non-sports show on television or become just another once-mighty relic of the dying medium of broadcasting.

He’s certainly had a hell of a first week on the job.

Whether Mr. Bilton can rebuild the franchise and make it better, stronger, and faster remains to be seen. He will have to do so now under much more scrutiny. That will also be true for the woman who hired him and made him “The Six (plus) Million Dollar Man.”

Lee Majors only had four seasons as Colonel Steve Austin before his series was canceled.

Because friends, the audience always has the final say.

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The first headline from this past week was the surprise announcement that Roger Goodell, the normally affable Commissioner of the National Football League, was putting himself on the equivalent of the “unable to perform” list and was declining an invitation to appear before a June 10th hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee about the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. The committee’s chairman is convening the hearing, the always pugnacious Jim Jordan of Ohio.

And for his part, commissioner Goodell is skipping the hearing, citing a note from his lawyer stating that he can’t appear “due to litigation related to the topic of the hearing.” What that means in English is that the commish doesn’t want to have to defend the practice of moving NFL games over to places like Amazon, Peacock and Netflix, which wasn’t quite imagined some 65 years ago when the Sports Broadcasting Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The law is what gives the NFL (and other professional sports leagues) their limited exemptions to the nation’s antitrust laws. That’s what allows the league to collectively bargain the TV rights to all 32 teams’ regular- and post-season games. But the law was written back when a whopping three national networks were the only way that fans could watch professional football games on television.

Needless to say, the TV landscape has changed just a bit since those days in the Kennedy administration.

And some members of Congress do not like that watching some games now requires multiple paid subscriptions to streaming services. To be clear, they weren’t thrilled about games being on cable when ESPN picked up its first NFL package. That little problem was addressed by allowing a broadcast TV station in each team’s home market to air the ESPN game over the air—for a more-than-modest fee, of course. (The same solution is still used for any game not part of the broadcast network’s NFL schedules.)

The Trump administration has put the league under scrutiny for the ongoing shift of NFL games to streaming services in recent seasons. First, the Department of Justice was reported to be investigating the league’s potential “anticompetitive practices.” Then the Federal Communications Commission asked for “public comments” from consumers about their experiences with the shift of NFL games from broadcast TV to streaming.

So naturally, Congress wants to ride in and get its members’ faces on the record, asking some tough questions of the league and some experts on the topic.

Apparently, those experts will include Outkick.com founder and talk radio mouthpiece Clay Travis, who is always down for some of the rational, reasonable discussions sports talk radio is known for. (Why yes, that is sarcasm right there.)

For his part, Commissioner Goodell’s lawyer explained the league’s position on the subject of the hearing: “The NFL’s decision to license a few more games to widely adopted streaming services is simply a reflection that those platforms now offer significantly more reach than the current pay TV ecosystem and that broadcast television remains the foundation of our media distribution.”

He could have added (but didn’t): “Until those streaming guys pay us a lot more money for our product.”

In fact, the matter being litigated is what will keep the Commissioner from appearing on Capitol Hill. It centers around the league’s popular “Sunday Ticket” package, where you can pay to watch every game, on every Sunday during the regular season. “Sunday Ticket” moved from its original home for 29 years on the DirecTV satellite service to the YouTube TV streaming service in 2023. (That’s YouTubeTV, the paid streaming service — not the free YouTube.com featuring all those cooking videos.)

The lawsuit in question has a twisting history. It began as a class action lawsuit against both the NFL and DirecTV covering the years from 2011 to 2023. The central claim was that the league and the satellite company wouldn’t sell either individual games or just a single team’s season (which many fans would want). Instead, it forced subscribers to buy a package that included all of the teams’ games every Sunday. In June 2024, a California jury found against the NFL in the case and awarded some $4.8 billion in damages. But two months later, the Federal judge in the case tossed the verdict on a technicality, claiming that two witnesses used flawed economic data to calculate damages before the jury. The case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

And so, it’s a “no-go” for the Commish to sit before Congress on June 10th.

Also this past week, headline number two was an interesting development about watching the games of another professional sports league on television, and this time it’s the Stanley Cup Championship of the National Hockey League that is underway, featuring the two teams from the traditional Hockey towns of Las Vegas and Raleigh?

So much for the growth of Canada’s greatest sports export.

The NHL’s championship series is airing on ESPN and ABC. That would be all well and good, but just as the Stanley Cup was getting underway, on June 1st, The E.W. Scripps Company, owners of some 54 television stations across 36 local markets in the country, pulled its stations off of the DirecTV service in an all-too-familiar “retransmission negotiation dispute.” That’s when a broadcaster can’t reach a financial agreement with a multichannel video program distributor (MVPD), such as a cable or satellite TV provider, to carry the broadcaster’s TV stations.

Scripps owns a significant number of ABC-affiliated stations in its group, including KTNV, which serves Las Vegas. This “blackout” of the station on DirecTV means that subscribers to the satellite service will not be able to watch ABC's telecasts of the Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup. Such blackouts are a common effect of these retransmission disputes, and sports is usually one of the things that brings the broadcaster and MVPD back to the bargaining table.

But in this case, TheDesk reported first that ESPN was going to make all of the Stanley Cup games available via the ESPN app, including to those DirecTV subscribers in markets like Las Vegas, where the local Scripps-owned ABC affiliate would not be available due to the blackout from the “retransmission negotiation dispute.” This meant that hockey fans who are also DirecTV subscribers could still see the games—just via a different way than they normally would on their local ABC station.

It’s the first time we are aware of where a network owner, in this case Disney, owner of both ESPN and ABC, has allowed the network to effectively “bypass” its network affiliates to deliver sports programming directly to the audience via its streaming service. That means DirecTV subs who might otherwise be deprived of watching sports programming because of what’s known in the television business as a “retrans dispute” will still be able to do so — just via a different source.

This will not sit well not only with Scripps but with all ABC affiliate owners, who will definitely see this as a betrayal by their network that benefits the “other side” in future blackouts over “retrans disputes.” Expect to hear more about this going forward.

And finally, ABC is also carrying another major sports championship this week.

That would be the NBA Finals, featuring the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks as they play for the Larry O'Brien Trophy. Knicks fever has gripped NYC hard in the first week of June, as the Knicks haven’t been in the championship series since 1999. For its part, ESPN and ABC have substantially beefed up their NBA coverage, and for the first time in eight years, there isn’t a “Presented by YouTube” sponsorship plastered all over the Finals.

It’s a welcome change after years of so many YouTube logos appearing on the court and in TV broadcasts. In the 2023 finals, fans could see nine different YouTube logos at the same time.

So far in 2026, basketball fans who happen to be DirecTV subscribers in places where Scripps owns the local ABC station won’t be seeing those YouTube logos, or for that matter, the games themselves at least until Scripps reaches a new deal with DirecTV.

Hopefully they won’t miss seeing Spike Lee courtside being very happy—or very sad, as the case might be for his beloved New York Knicks.

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It was a broad sample of the best work of 2025 from 13 regions across the United States and a 14th that covers all of Canada. (Fortunately, our North American neighbors are still speaking to us when it comes to recognition of quality journalism.) And it sure seems like the awards are the main thing keeping the RTDNA relevant after it shut down its annual convention last October, in favor of an odd “world tour” where association leadership is now just showing up at other annual gatherings held by various journalism and industry groups. (The next appearance will be at the IRE conference later this month).

We’ve previously written here about the challenges facing the RTDNA, and we’re sorry to say that we don’t see any clear path for the association to reinvent itself, at least not in the near future. That’s a shame, because the broadcast news business could use a strong and vibrant RTDNA that advocates for the essential nature of “The Fifth Estate” and helps train the leaders it needs.

But in scoring the list of regional Murrow winners for 2026, we were struck by what seemed to be a noticeable trend. Like any current C-average high school student, we did some research (meaning we just asked Google’s Gemini AI chatbot) and had our hypothesis confirmed. There has been a sea change in who is winning more of the annual plaques bearing the name of the patron saint of broadcast journalism.

At least in the group owning the TV stations that win them.

The 2026 regional Murrows featured only one TEGNA-owned station winning the “Overall Excellence” award: KGW in Portland. The group took home a total of 50 regional Murrows, won by some 16 TEGNA-owned stations. (And of course, that’s really now correctly said as “TEGNA, a wholly-owned, but not-directly-operated subsidiary of Nexstar.”)

The usual TEGNA newsroom standouts took home their above-average haul of Murrows. KARE in Minneapolis led the group with 9 awards, KING in Seattle scored 7, and KUSA in Denver captured 6. But none of those were in the Overall Excellence category, which is still seen as the biggest prize awarded in each region. (Each of the regional winners goes on to compete for the national Murrow award in each category. Those will be handed out this October.)

One year ago, TEGNA had three stations win regional Murrows for Overall Excellence. Some 23 stations amongst TEGNA’s current portfolio of 64 stations won at least one Murrow, compared to only 16 this year. But lest we assume it was just an off year for the TEGNA newsrooms, perhaps due to the distraction of being acquired by Nexstar, the reality is that things have been changing for years.

Back in 2022, TEGNA won a record 96 Murrow Awards across the association's 13 regions in the US. Half of the regional Overall Excellence winners were TEGNA-owned stations. In that same year, 27 of the group’s newsrooms won at least a single Murrow. By the following year, 2023, the group’s total had slid to 84 regional Murrows, and in 2024, the total slid further, down to 73. Then in 2025, the total dropped to 59, before another drop to just 50—or just slightly over half of 2022’s total.

In that banner year of 2022, we may have wildly speculated to a few colleagues that there was something a tad suspect about the dominant performance by the TEGNA group in the competition for Murrow winners. To be clear, the RTDNA’s rules absolutely, positively prohibit judges from evaluating award entries from their own corporate ownership groups. So that kind of cross-promoting of sister stations within the same group couldn’t possibly have been going on.

Forgive the digression into the conspiracy thinking that is running rampant in so many aspects of life these days.

The reality is that while TEGNA’s dominance of the Murrow awards has slipped in recent years, there has been a simultaneous rise in challengers from other station groups — one in particular — that have shown the same willingness to field a large number of entries each year, and have steadily increased their total of wins.

The one in particular would be Atlanta-based Gray Media, with its footprint of 180 stations in 113 markets. In this year’s competition for regional Murrows, some 41 different Gray stations won a total of 93 awards, including 4 for Overall Excellence. That’s not a surprise, given the group’s strong focus on investigative reporting by all of its stations. It’s a playbook championed by Lee Zurik, Gray’s Senior Operating Officer for News Strategy and Innovation.

Gray’s WVUE in New Orleans collected a strong haul of 9 different Murrow awards in RTDNA Region 9’s Large Market division. Gray’s other big Murrow winner was WMTV in Madison, which won a total of 6 Murrows in the Small Market division of Region 4. Four Gray stations took home the Overall Excellence award, including WANF in Atlanta, WCSC in Charleston (SC), WDBJ in Roanoke, and WRDW/WAGT in Augusta (GA).

But the big group winner for the Overall Excellence award was Hearst Television, with 6 stations taking that title: KCRA, Sacramento; KOAT, Albuquerque; WBAL-TV, Baltimore; WDSU, New Orleans; KCCI, Des Moines; and WCVB, Boston.

And a tip of our press fedora to WCVB, which pretty much dominated the large-market division in Region 10, winning 9 of the 14 categories awarded there. It won the crown for the most regional Murrows collected by a single TV station.

Other groups to have stations cited in the Overall Excellence category included two stations each for Nexstar (KXAN, Austin and KHON Honolulu), Scripps (WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee and KSHB, Kansas City), CBS Stations (WBBM-TV, Chicago and KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh) and the aforementioned Morgan Murphy (KXLY-TV Spokane and WISC-TV in Madison).

Finally, groups with a single station winning for “Overall Excellence” included Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL-TV in Raleigh, Griffin Media’s KOTV in Tulsa, Sinclair’s WJAR in Providence and Weigel’s WBND in South Bend.

Once again, we offer our sincere congratulations to all the Murrow winners. We could follow the lead of some online industry pundits who like to throw shade on awards like the Murrows. And yes, the audience doesn’t really care who is (or isn’t) an award-winning station.

But our view is that the Murrow awards acknowledge that there is still a body of great work to be celebrated in broadcast journalism. And that’s even if it’s true that “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.”

At least, according to that newly minted broadcast industry sage, Mr. Nick Bilton.

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Put more succinctly by the closing question of the late Jerry Springer: “So what have we learned here today?”

Let’s start with the obvious platitudes: No one player is bigger than the entire team. If you never want to know what it is like to be fired, then be your own boss. And if you’re going to stand up for what you believe in, prepare to pay a price for your convictions.

All of these quotes could apply to the situation that unfolded at “60 Minutes.” The chain reaction began days before the Monday morning confrontation that featured Scott Pelley challenging his new boss’s attempt to channel his inner Kevin Bacon-as-ROTC-crowd controller from the movie “Animal House” and assure the “60 Minutes” team that he was hired to lead to, in essence, “Remain Calm, All is Well.”

For his part, Pelley decided to go all “Eric Stratton” (As played by Tim Matheson in the same movie) before the Faber College Pan-Hellenic council and deliver a dramatic defense of the program he’s worked on for the past 24 years. Lines were drawn, positions were taken. No one was backing down.

To carry our absurdist movie analogy a little further, CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss dutifully played the role of Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College, and skipped past putting Pelley on the equivalent of “Double secret probation” and proceeded directly to having Bilton parroting the Dean’s speech of “You’re Out! Finished at Faber! I want you off this campus by Monday Morning!”

Bilton delivered the message via a termination letter, seemingly intended for a much larger audience than just Mr. Pelley and, probably, his lawyer(s). Even Megyn Kelly noted in a post on X that Bilton sounded “needy” in his lengthy explanation of why Pelley was being let go. She notes that simply saying: “Dear Mr. Pelley: You’re fired, effective immediately” would have been far more impactful.

She makes a good point.

All written correspondence about any termination, whether to the employee being dismissed or to the remaining staff, should typically be done with as few words as possible. That’s management 101 kind of stuff. It may seem a tad cold to do so, but any HR professional would tell you it's the best way to go.

Bilton makes a point of telling Pelley that he is being terminated “for cause.” Not being privy to all the conversations that may have happened behind the scenes (though it sure sounds like most of them have been made public by one or both sides in the matter), we have to wonder aloud exactly what would support that justification.

No matter how insubordinate or “rude” Mr. Pelley’s comments were in the Monday morning staff meeting with Bilton, such speech would be difficult to categorize as making it impossible for anyone to do their job. Heated discussions take place in newsrooms on a pretty regular basis, and by all accounts over the years, the offices of “60 Minutes” have been no exception.

For his part, Bilton is reported to have said during the Monday morning confrontation: “I have no problem taking a job in a place that I am not welcome in.” And he told Pelley directly in front of those witnessing the face-off between the two: “You are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people. I want that to be clear.”

Sorry Nick, but your actions indicate the opposite.

Yes, we’ve read that Pelley refused to meet privately with Bilton and/or Bari Weiss before the Monday morning session. However, Pelley did not ignore the invitation to a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with the two and other CBS management. Whether whatever was said in that gathering led to Pelley’s defenestration, we don’t know. Oliver Darcy of Status.news reported that meeting, which “lasted less than 30 minutes,” was “contentious.”

Darcy notes in his story, “A person close to CBS News leadership told Status that there had been a genuine effort to find a way for Pelley to remain on the show, but that management believed Pelley was not interested in working with them on that front. To be fair, he had effectively dared them to fire him.”

This leads us to wonder if this was perhaps Pelley’s goal all along. One clue was when, in the heat of the Monday confrontation, another CBS News executive tried to intercede on Bilton’s behalf, saying: “This is not actually productive. This is not an interview.”

Pelley’s immediate response: “It’s working for me.”

Scott Pelley definitely had a contract with the network that reportedly paid him millions of dollars a year. The statement he publicly released following his termination (A copy of which was published online by Status) includes the specific claim that “new management has specifically instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” That sure sounds like Pelley was already unhappy with the program's direction before Bilton’s arrival on Monday morning, bearing free bagels.

What better way to be fired from a contract you might want to get out of, while exiting in a proverbial “blaze of glory,” that serves as both standing up for his colleagues in particular — and journalistic ethics in general. That sure sounds reminiscent of Eric Stratton’s declaration of “You can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!”

As we initially noted, the biggest questions remaining post-Pelley’s departure from the program concern who else on the “60 Minutes” staff might decide to follow him out the door. Correspondents Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl haven’t said what their future with the program will be, and Jon Wertheim certainly wouldn’t relish the idea of being “the last man standing” when everything is said and done.

Should he desire to, Pelley can likely land somewhere new before the end of the week. Any number of outlets would happily fund the kind of long-form storytelling he built his reputation on, and it’s difficult to imagine CBS wanting the additional PR headache of enforcing a non-compete on top of everything else already in the public record.

At the very least, he could start a Substack. Plenty of recently displaced journalists have ended up there.

We’re told it’s not bad work.

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For those of you in a news blackout over the last 48 hours, we’ll remind you that back on Monday morning, Pelley had been very outspoken in the first “60 Minutes” staff gathering under Nick Bilton, the just-appointed Executive Producer of the venerable TV newsmagazine. Pelley’s strong challenge of Bilton came during what was probably intended as a casual introduction and “get to know you” session, instantly making headlines after the session ended some 15 minutes after it began.

There was much chatter around the television news industry on Tuesday about the substance and tone of Pelley’s grilling of Bilton, and in turn what might be the path forward — if there could be any — for both men.

Since the announcement last week, many have questioned the hiring of Nick Bilton, a journalist “of some 25 years’ experience” (as he insisted to Pelley) but with zero of them spent working in a television newsroom of any sort. Pelley pointedly picked up on that theme during the Monday morning face-off and, depending on your point of view, either took up the defense of the program’s storied legacy of journalism or mandated his own termination from both “60” and CBS.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Pelley delayed a scheduled vacation to be in his office today, where he penned a resignation letter that he never delivered. CBS News leaders set up a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with Pelley and Bilton, along with Bari Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, and an HR representative joining by speakerphone.

The Times reported that meeting turned contentious and ended with no clear resolution. Status.news has the most detailed accounting of what transpired during the meeting, but the full story is behind the publication’s paywall. (We’ve said it before on multiple occasions: Status is a daily must-read about this business. Definitely worth the paid subscription in our view.)

By Tuesday night, Bilton had delivered a termination letter to Pelley (and apparently sent copies to various media outlets, including the Times, which published it online here). Bilton bluntly informed the remaining “60 Minutes” staff, “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley.”

Having been on both sides of the desk in situations that end in termination, we understand that Pelley’s actions may have left Bilton with little choice. But the more interesting detail to us is that Bilton states in his now-very-public termination letter to Pelley that the correspondent was “terminated for cause, effective immediately.”

With no knowledge of the terms of Mr. Pelley’s employment agreement, we do wonder under what grounds the CBS Legal Department would support the immediate termination for cause, based on what has been reported to have happened to this point. Such a move would very likely mean that the network intended to fight paying Mr. Pelley whatever his contract might state he was owed upon leaving the network. Given that Mr. Pelley probably has (or soon will have) excellent legal representation of his own, this would suggest that many billable hours could follow.

What could also follow is any number of other names, both in front of and behind the camera, following Pelley out the doors of the building on West 57th Street that houses the “60 Minutes” offices. The events of the last 36 hours, as Oliver Darcy of Status wrote on Tuesday night, have thrown the program “into an unprecedented and existential crisis.”

We don’t think he is overstating the situation in the least.

The NFL’s first Sunday of the 2026 regular season is set for September 13th. “60 Minutes” usually debuts its new season on that same day, or the next Sunday at the latest. With reports that no new stories are completed (or are near completion) for the upcoming season, our question is this: Will the program’s iconic stopwatch start ticking right after the announcer says “CBS Sports thanks you for watching this presentation of the National Football League?”

Ironically, while all this was going on in New York, down in Washington, the White House Correspondents Association announced that their annual dinner that was interrupted and ultimately canceled by a lone gunman back in April will now be held on July 24th. Association President Weijia Jiang (whose day job is being a CBS News White House Correspondent) said the decision to reschedule was made “after thoughtful consideration and input from our members.”

While the celebration could not be rescheduled in 30 days as President Trump had insisted would happen after the initial event ended in chaos, according to a post on the President’s Truth Social account, the dinner will now be held in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in DC, adding “a building and ballroom that I built.” Mr. Trump confirmed that he will attend the rescheduled celebration.

Which might lead some of you to ask the same question that is on our minds:

“When it comes to the state of American journalism, just what the hell is there left to celebrate?”

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And by all accounts, it did not go well. Even though Nick brought in bagels for everyone.

The first word we got on what happened was from Oliver Darcy in a rare “special early edition” of his indispensable Status newsletter. (Kudos to him for not slapping the overused “Breaking News” label on it.)

Darcy’s reporting was based on an audio recording of what he labeled as “a stunning confrontation” by none other than veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, who has been with the program since 2004. Pelley, who you will remember was also the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” from 2011 to 2017, and was arguably the most successful anchor to sit in the chair since some guy named Cronkite, and (for a while at least) a successor named Rather.

Nick Bilton wasn’t too far along in his remarks to the assembled team before Scott Pelley began grilling him like a cheese sandwich. Of all the reporting we’ve seen on what happened for the rest of the meeting, Darcy’s Status has the most detailed account of just what went down. But it is behind a paywall, so we will also point you to the later New York Times story. The Times also received a recording of the meeting. (Someone inside was busy with that recording!) Click here for a gift article link to read the NYT story, even if you aren’t a subscriber.

From the Times: “For me, the journalism is the journalism,” Mr. Bilton said, according to the recording. “That is why I am here. That is why we are all here.” Bilton later warned that the broadcast television industry that incubated “60 Minutes” would soon be obsolete. “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?”

Bilton went on to defend his new boss at CBS, Bari Weiss: “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”

And with that, Pelley pounced with the money quote that will be remembered most from today’s kerfuffle (as we’d call it in the Midwest): “She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Things did not improve from that moment on. (Again, check the NYT story link above for their full reporting of what else was said.) Bari Weiss was not in the room, but at one point, Charles Forelle, who Weiss has installed as the Managing Editor of CBS News, tried to interject on Bilton’s behalf and told Pelley he was “being rude.”

As the encounter between Pelley and Bilton had taken on the tension of a vintage Mike Wallace interview, Forelle told Pelley that “This is not an interview.”

Pelley shot back with “It’s working for me.”

There was more, until finally Bilton wrapped things up by thanking everyone for “being so welcoming” and encouraging them to “enjoy the bagels.” After he departed, the staff in attendance applauded Mr. Pelley.

You may be surprised to learn, as we were, that the whole meeting lasted “roughly 15 minutes,” according to the New York Times story. Seems like that much drama would have taken a little more time.

After the meeting, we assume that there was a debriefing between Mr. Bilton and Ms. Weiss. Though there is no recording of it that has surfaced, we would speculate that it went something like this:

(BariW): “So Nick, how did your first meeting with the team go?”

(NickB): “JFC, Bari—that was the very definition of a hostile work environment!”

(BariW): “Yeah, they were going to need to take their frustrations out on someone. And that someone wasn’t going to be me.”

(NickB): “Your absence was notable. One of your flacks said that you were prepared to come, but they asked you not to—because of the staff’s ill feelings around last Thursday’s firings.”

(BariW): “Sure, well that — and the fact that one of my team of bodyguards was out today, I think he was working his other job down in Jersey at Delaney Hall.”

(NickB): “Listen, Pelley is loaded for bear. But I stood my ground and told him that ‘I would not be intimidated in front of this group of people.’"

(BariW): “Good for you! How did that go over?”

(NickB): “Like a fart in church, Bari. I thought Forelle was going to have my back. He didn’t help when he called Pelley rude. And he did it more than once.”

(BariW): “Well, Nick, you knew the job was going to be tough when you took it. And when Pelley wouldn’t respond to our calls asking to meet with him privately, you had to know that today was going to be tough.”

(NickB): “Tough?? This morning was a gunfight at the O.K. Corral!”

(BariW): “Sorry. Things will be better the next time you go back in there.”

(NickB): “Oh, I’m not going back in there. Not until you can spare a couple of those bodyguards!”

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By the end of the business day, the list of departures would include not only the inevitable “no new contract” for correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who had been the most visible in tangling with Weiss since “L’affaire du CECOT” last fall, but also her fellow female correspondent, Cecilia Vega. The youngest correspondent on “60 Minutes,” Vega is hopefully headed to a better job—perhaps somewhere behind an anchor desk. (We always had her pegged to be David Muir’s ultimate successor back when she was still over at ABC News.)

The behind-the-scenes bloodbath went deeper. Executive Producer Tanya Simon’s long ties to the network couldn’t save her job (she is the daughter of legendary CBS News correspondent Bob Simon). Simon was joined in the HR exit interview line by uber-respected Executive Editor Draggan Mihailovich and Senior Producer Matthew Polevoy. With the departure of correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, it stands to reason that others on the producing staff might be reassigned, shown the door, or depart on their own accord. The fate of the remaining staffers, including those whose faces are seen at the beginning of each episode, is still to be learned.

Make no mistake, those departing are all extraordinarily talented journalists who have helped make the most successful television news program for years, if not decades. Oliver Darcy, reporting on Status, detailed the scene inside the “60 Minutes” offices on Thursday as word of the departures spread.

But you see, they had to be moved aside to make way for Ms. Weiss’s remaking of the program. That plan included announcing her handpicked candidate to lead “the franchise” (a position that was never posted anywhere we saw). Certainly, the person selected to take on such a successful program and lead it into the future would have strong credentials in broadcast journalism, right?

Meet the new Executive Producer of “60 Minutes.” His name is Nick Bilton. Like his new boss, he was once a writer at The New York Times. (A technology columnist, so he’s definitely a future-thinking kind of guy.) Also, just like his new boss, Ms. Weiss, he has never worked in a broadcast television newsroom. He has “directed and produced” documentaries for HBO and Netflix. He alluded to his bona fides as he was interviewed by The New York Times about his new role (alongside Ms. Weiss), by name-checking the man who started the broadcast:

“Look at Don Hewitt and how he came up with the idea for this,” Mr. Bilton said, referring to the program’s creator. “He loved documentaries, but he did not have the patience to watch two-hour-long versions of them. So he came up with ‘60 Minutes,’ which was a series of short documentaries.”

If you were perhaps wondering, as we were, what kind of ego Mr. Bilton brings to the job, consider this response when he was asked by The Times what the end result of the changes he might bring to what he called “the most important news brand in American life.”

”Quite frankly, phenomenal.”

Bilton’s name sounded familiar to us when we first read it, and then we realized that in his writing career, he had penned the 2013 book, “Hatching Twitter.” It chronicled the early years at the social media start-up that changed how everyone thought about what could be conveyed in 140 characters. We found the book a decent read. Lachlan Cartwright, writing in his “Breaker” newsletter last night, (sorry, it’s behind a paywall) reports that Nick Bilton’s career history is “colorful.”

Cartwright detailed how, as a tech writer, Bilton was “known for being MIA when big tech stories broke, generally lazy, and filing infrequently. Within the broader tech journalism world, Bilton is reviled for trying to claim credit for breaking open Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud (that title goes to former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou).”

Well, those are exactly the qualities you’d be looking for in a leader for a franchise that he calls “the most important news brand in American life.”

We won’t be shocked if there are more departures from the legendary program’s offices. And we’d rather not think about whether the iconic stopwatch that opens and closes each edition of “60 Minutes” might finally run out of time.

A high school student journalist may have delivered the best warning on that unthinkable fate during last Wednesday night’s News Emmy awards presentation. Santiago Campos correctly called out the situation (while accepting a scholarship named in Mike Wallace’s honor). It’s worth your time to read what he said — and the reaction he got. (Click here to link to Variety’s story.)

Also of note at this week’s end:

Our friend and chief chronicler of the moves of television news executives, the esteemed Rick Gevers, reports that former CBS News and Stations President Adrienne Roark has been defenestrated from her most recent gig as Senior VP and Chief Content Officer at TEGNA. Her departure comes just 15 months into the job and one full day after the appointment of new TEGNA CEO Pat Paolini to lead the Nexstar-owned but not operated subsidiary, as that whole legal mess plays itself out over the next months or years, as the case may be.

Later on Thursday, The Wrap reported on additional departures from TEGNA's C-suite. No word on a group of TV news execs that Roark quickly installed as regional VPs of Content, early in her brief tenure at TEGNA. We’d imagine those folks are now feeling about as much job security as the remaining staff at “60 Minutes” is heading into the summer months ahead.

Interestingly enough, Roark was replaced in the President’s office at CBS News by ABC veteran Tom Cibrowski. At least somebody in the Broadcast Center has some, you know, broadcasting experience. But his portfolio these days seems mostly about playing “I-gore” to Weiss’s “Dr. Frederick Franken-shteen” in the worst possible remake of one of our favorite comedy films.

Look, we get it. Change is the only constant in life. So we’ll close here by quoting the legendary sign-off of Linda Ellerbee from her days anchoring “NBC News Overnight” (1982-1983). It seems even more appropriate on this final Friday in May.

“And so it goes.”

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Yes, we know that summer doesn’t officially start until the 21st of June, but does anyone think the proverbial starting gun for summer isn’t the arrival of Memorial Day? And this summer might be a doozy.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service, apparently still has a few scientists working who study climate change. NOAA is forecasting an 80% chance that a strong “El Niño” climate pattern will develop by this July. Should that come to pass, the fear is that the world will continue to see even higher temperatures for over a year, including the oddly opposed phenomena of a weak hurricane season this year and a truly brutal winter weather season next year.

Which seems, to us at least, a pretty interesting corollary to the television business at the moment.

Given the fact that the Republican primary race in Kentucky, which just unseated Representative Thomas Massie, has been labeled as “the most expensive in history” with a projected spend of $32 Million in the contest, one can only imagine how many total political dollars are going to flow into broadcast television later this year. The fight for control of both chambers in Congress is going to be an expensive endeavor in democracy and a political advertising windfall for many local television stations.

Should this “El Niño” of political advertising come to pass, regardless of the final numbers on Steve Kornacki’s “Big Board”, the cold reality of next January will be the start of a non-political year that will be brutal for budgets and the subsequent cost-cutting efforts to meet those inevitably lower revenue projections.

And that will be on top of the ongoing consolidation in the local television business, which still seems inevitable in some form, depending on the outcome of the now-uncertain union of Nexstar and TEGNA.

And on that front, there was some interesting news this very morning, with the announcement that TEGNA, which is still doing business in the odd dimension of being owned by Nexstar (as a subsidiary) — but not allowed to be directly operated by Perry Sook and Company (per that judge’s order), has itself a new CEO.

The TEGNA board named Fox Television Stations veteran Patrick Paolini as the company’s new CEO. Paolini has a long career with Fox’s owned-and-operated stations in major markets such as New York City, Philadelphia, and, most recently, Washington, DC. He was a corporate VP of sales at Fox for the last few years, a role he left just last week. We have to assume that Mr. Paolini has been promised something to get him to leave his long tenure at Fox to join the uncertain situation at TEGNA, even if it is the CEO’s office.

The previous occupant of that office was one Mike Steib, who has been curiously quiet since Nexstar’s lightning-fast close of TEGNA back in March of this year. Steib, reportedly along with the rest of the corporate officers, submitted their resignations from their positions when they were “cashed out” of their TEGNA stock positions. But when the legal decisions of U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley dropped a “not so fast there folks” edict on the acquisition, none of the nameplates on the executive offices in the TEGNA HQ changed. That left Steib in an odd limbo, not being CEO but still around. Today’s announcement says that it will end this Friday.

Of course, for its part, Nexstar isn’t at all happy with the situation it finds itself in. The company’s legal brief, filed last week in the federal court of appeals over Judge Nunley’s injunction, states that Nexstar is in “a straitjacket”. At the same time, it has to hold TEGNA at arm’s length, as the lawsuits against the merger from DIRECTV and a significant group of Attorneys General from various states proceed to trial. It added a stark prediction about the future, stating that it is “more likely TEGNA will not survive while waiting for the transaction to be vindicated.”

So welcome aboard, Pat Paolini, who said in today’s press release that he is “honored to be joining TEGNA,” adding, “I am excited by the opportunities ahead.”

We’re pretty sure that the passengers boarding the RMS Titanic for its maiden voyage back in 1912 said pretty much the same thing.

Nevertheless, the ongoing legal battle over the ultimate fate of Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of TEGNA’s 64 local TV stations continues to have an oddly chilling effect on the buying and selling of other properties while the thermometer rises this summer. The pending smaller deals with Scripps and Gray swapping stations and Gray buying some stations from Byron Allen, the newly crowned king of buying his way into late-night network television, have crossed the finish line with the FCC.

But you aren’t hearing about any new deals being done these days, and it is likely you won’t through the dog days of summer ahead. At least not until there is some clarity from some corner about what the regulatory environment is likely to be after the resolution of the Nexstar-TEGNA deal, one way or the other.

The only thing we know for certain is what an unnamed executive told Matthew Belloni of Puck.News, for his “What I’m Hearing” column: “The business reinvents itself every five years’ is no longer true. The business reinvents itself every five months, if not quicker.”

That executive was talking about the movie business in Hollywood. He could have just as easily been talking about any aspect of the media business right now. Especially since, at least according to our calendar, five months from now will put us well past this coming summer of overheated discontent — and right on the eve of the November elections.

MEANWHILE… (To borrow one of Stephen Colbert’s signature bits)

Speaking of discontent, we have to note here the odd moves by Paramount/CBS in the wake of Colbert’s final edition of “The Late Show” last Thursday night. First, there was the seemingly petty decision by the “CBS Mornings” broadcast on the very next morning to completely ignore Colbert’s final broadcast, as if it didn’t happen. According to Belloni’s Puck column (again): “It wasn’t an oversight.” The ghosting of the story was a “specific directive from CBS News President Tom Cibrowski.”

If that wasn’t petty enough for the network’s overlords at Paramount, there was the perhaps even odder story of CBS trying to squash YouTube videos of Colbert’s surprise weekend appearance hosting “Only In Monroe.” That’s the same community-access cable show in Michigan that Colbert appeared on just before starting his time on CBS’s “The Late Show” some 11 years prior.

Our friend Matthew Keys over at TheDesk.Net reported this strange story arc that began with YouTube taking down videos of Colbert’s “Only In Monroe” show appearance, seemingly due to copyright claims. Admittedly, Colbert positively roasts his former network employer with the help of some celebrity friends who appear in the program. But it was never made clear what the substance of CBS’s claim to having copyright of the video actually was. By Memorial Day, it appeared that the network was backing off its purported ownership claims, at least for the time being.

And we’re all waiting to see what Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss does with (or to) the gang across West 57th street in the offices of “60 Minutes.” That’s assuming that she still has any say over that part of the CBS News operation, given the recent reporting from another correspondent at Puck. This time, it’s Dylan Byers who scooped that Bari’s stumbles on the TV side might lead to her portfolio being trimmed a bit.

Well, at least there is now room for Bari to move the “60 Minutes” crew across West 57th Street and into the CBS Broadcast Center, given all the space CBS News Radio vacated when it signed off for the final time last week.

For our money, the place where this summer is the longest and hottest one to survive will be — as the network itself used to like to say: “Only CBS.”

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Don’t get us wrong, we are happy for the 330,000-plus passengers who ride the LIRR each day. Having been one of them years ago, we understand all too well what a huge disruption to that service means for the people who call Nassau and Suffolk counties home—particularly those who commute into New York City each day for work.

But we were really looking forward to watching the local coverage of the strike over a few more days, maybe even a week (or two at the most). As this was the first full strike on the LIRR since 1994, it was a truly major breaking news event in the nation’s largest television market.

Watching the coverage play out on the first weekday morning of the strike was a bit of, well…it was a bit of “a motorman’s holiday” for us. (Please forgive the cheesy railroad fan reference.)

Because of Long Island’s unique footprint within the number one television DMA in the country, there were no less than eight major local TV newsrooms providing coverage of the Monday morning commute of May 18th, 2026. That’s when the 330,000-plus folks who normally take the LIRR would have to find another way to get where they needed to go.

It was one of those rare occasions when a major breaking news story was scheduled and predictable. (At least to anyone who has lived in the market for more than about a week or so.)

So on this particular Monday morning in May, the local television news outlets would flicker to life with their coverage of “StrikeWatch 2026.” (We don’t believe anyone actually called it that; we were remembering being part of the coverage of an MTA strike in NYC back in 1980, when we absolutely called it “StrikeWatch ‘80.”)

Let’s start at 4 am on Monday morning. And that is where our criticism begins. As we just noted, this was not a surprise story that snuck up on every assignment desk in the market. The LIRR’s unions walked off the job at 12:01 am, the previous Saturday morning. So by the time Monday morning rolled around, the strike was well into its third day. And yet at 4 am, we saw only two local television stations on the air with their live coverage. WCBS-TV (or CBS New York, if you prefer that insipidly ridiculous branding for what locals will forever know as “Channel 2 News”) and Nexstar’s CW flagship in NYC, WPIX-TV, branded as “Pix 11 News.”

To their credit, WPIX starts its news at 4 am every weekday, which makes a ton of sense in a market where many people make long commutes from the outer suburbs into Manhattan every day. Obviously, starting a morning newscast at 4 am is smart thinking when you are competing with so many local TV outlets. (No consolidation here down to two, or even one local TV news department!)

Let’s describe the full landscape for those of you unfamiliar with it. New York City is at the center of what is often referred to as “The Tri State Area,” which encompasses the five boroughs of New York City (that’s Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and the proud boyhood home of both Colin Jost and Pete Davidson, the unforgettable Staten Island) Then there are the 13 counties from Northern and Central New Jersey that make up the southern part of the Tri-State. Add in one county from the state of Connecticut (though to be fair, that is Fairfield County, home to some of the wealthiest enclaves in the country, like Greenwich, Darien, Stamford, and the like).

Despite the area being long known as “The Tri State,” there is actually a fourth state included in the DMA because Pennsylvania’s Pike County is within the “designated market area.”

Beyond those, there are at least nine other counties in New York State within the market, aside from the five boroughs of New York City, each of which is its own county. That includes the closer suburban counties of Westchester and Rockland, extending northward into the Hudson Valley to Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, Ulster, and Sullivan counties.

Finally, Nassau and Suffolk counties extend 120 miles eastward, making up the stretch of land known as Long Island. With a population of about 3 million, if it were its own media market, Long Island would rank about 7th overall — the same as Washington, DC. But as part of the New York City DMA, it is served by the five local broadcast TV newsrooms from New York City, along with the local 24-hour operation of Spectrum News/NY1. Out on Long Island itself, there is the nation’s oldest 24-hour local cable news operation in News 12 and the smaller TV news operation of Newsday TV, from the largest newspaper on Long Island.

So out of eight major local TV newsrooms, serving the 7th largest television market in the country, only two of them thought that the first morning of a total shutdown of the nation’s largest public transit rail service warranted starting coverage at 4 o’clock in the morning. (A small disclaimer here, we didn’t get to watch News 12 or Newsday TV first thing, so we don’t know exactly when they started their live coverage. And Spectrum News isn’t available live outside of its cable footprint.)

WABC-TV’s (ABC 7) “Eyewitness News” and WNYW’s (Fox 5) “Good Day NY Wake Up” both took to the air at their regular 4:30 am start times, and inexplicably, WNBC-TV’s (NBC 4) chose to start up its “Today in New York” at the leisurely time of 5 am. WNBC is following the new pattern of a growing number of the NBC Owned and Operated stations (at least in the Eastern time zone) in rolling back the normal start of their morning news to 5:00 am.

Even with these “regular” schedules in place, this would seem to be one of those occasions (at least to us, anyway) where you might consider pre-empting whatever was on the program log to get a jump on covering what we might call “the big story.”

Anyway, once all of the players had gotten on the field (as it were), it was a pretty competitive morning of news coverage. It was apparent to us that there had been some planning for this being a busier Monday morning than usual. Additional reporters were working, fanning out across much of the Long Island Rail Road's footprint to capture the situation and, of course, the frustration of commuters trying to get where they needed to go amid a mostly inadequate supply of transit alternatives.

The resulting 30-mile-long traffic jam made for good use of the live helicopter shots that were staples of the morning coverage. WABC’s John Del Giorno, aboard the station’s “NewsCopter 7,” seemed to do the best job in capturing the scope of this situation. On the ground, the inevitable parade of classic characters in the countless live “man (and woman) on the street” interviews was entertaining. In our scanning, we only caught Newsday TV making the solid choice to actually board an NYC-bound bus and document the long trek throughout the morning.

By 7:00 am, the network flagships (WABC, WCBS, and WNBC) all punted to their national morning shows as they would on any other weekday morning. We’d wonder just what it would take on the “Breaking News/Richter scale” to get them to stay with local coverage all the way through the morning hours, as their non-network competitors do each morning, and did on this particular Monday.

Which leads us to this sidebar question: When will Perry Sook’s “Nexstar Nation” of local TV stations (no matter how large said “nation” might get) decide to use the resources of its co-owned CW and NewsNation networks to produce a national morning and/or evening newscast? Even rival Sinclair has figured out this strategy by producing “The National Desk” across its stations’ daily schedules.

And they don’t even have a minimally watched 24-hour news network competing for eyeballs and relevance in the marketplace.

Back to NYC, where the same intense coverage of the LIRR strike repeated on Monday afternoon, as the local newsrooms came back on the air with the very latest updates on how commuters were trying to make their way back home. This would be complicated by the breaking news story that was coming out of San Diego, where word of an attack at a local mosque had left three victims dead. We genuinely wondered whether, if we were leading a local newsroom in New York City, we would have made the decision to take the network’s special report coverage in the 4 pm hour, rather than stay with the local story and provide updates on developments in San Diego. We’d like to think we would have chosen to stay with our big local story.

By the time of the late newscasts at 10 and 11 pm, the late-evening announcement of a tentative agreement to end the strike was the main focus of the coverage we saw. But word of a “phased restoration of service,” which wouldn’t begin until Tuesday at noon, meant that there would be at least one more day of morning news coverage that would be mostly commuting-focused.

We were hoping to see how the coverage of the strike would evolve over the course of a full week. The first couple of days, the stories write themselves. But when you get to a third, fourth, fifth weekday of an ongoing strike, the headlines with “no new progress to report in the talks…” are the truer tests of the editorial creativity in covering an ongoing story of this size and scope. (Thus, our mock indignation off the top at the negotiating parties who settled as quickly as they did.)

But with the announcement of the settlement, by tomorrow morning, the newscasts will undoubtedly return to their regular pattern of coverage, including the ubiquitous “Traffic and Weather together” appearing every so many minutes of each hour, starting at their regular times.

Hopefully, the traffic reports will no longer be featuring a 30-mile backup on the Long Island Expressway. Just the usual ones that make commuters on the island feel the regular amount of road rage.

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Given that CBS Chairman William S. Paley and his network President Frank Stanton were somewhat obsessed with presenting their network as the “more refined” of the three networks that dominated radio and television broadcasting at the time, the nickname of CBS becoming known as “The Tiffany Network” would likely have been accepted by the two men, if not actively promoted by them. Paley, in particular, was known as a man of great taste in the high-society circles of New York City in those years, having married and then divorced Dorothy Hart Hearst in July of 1947. (She had previously been the wife of John Randolph Hearst of the Hearst newspaper family dynasty.) Paley, a notorious womanizer his entire life, would then marry socialite Barbara Cushing Mortimer (known to all as “Babe”) some four days later.

While CBS’s color TV system would be adopted by the FCC in October 1950, following a decade-long development of the technology, the outbreak of the Korean War would interrupt its full deployment to the public. One weakness of the CBS system for color TV broadcasting was its incompatibility with the many black-and-white sets already in use at the time. By the time the Korean War started winding down, the rival color TV technology that RCA and its NBC network developed would be approved by the FCC and ultimately become the standard for color television in the United States.

But the moniker of “The Tiffany Network” stuck with CBS, which had ridden the post-World War II boom in television to surpass its long-time rival, NBC, which had dominated the radio era of American broadcasting. Though CBS had built a strong reputation for its news coverage during the war and beyond, the network’s first breakout star would emerge in the early 1950s — in the person of one Arthur Godfrey.

Godfrey, who had come from being a popular morning radio host in Washington, DC, would become the most heard and seen figure on CBS radio and television networks in the early 1950s. At his peak, Godfrey was on CBS some six days each week on various programs and brought in millions of dollars in ad revenue for his employer.

Bill Paley privately thought that Godfrey’s homespun appeal was too “low-brow” for his network and pretty much despised Godfrey, who responded by openly criticizing Paley and other CBS executives by name on the air. But given his level of success, Arthur Godfrey would be kept on the air by CBS, with his radio show ending in 1972.

By 1972, CBS was the nation’s most-watched television network, having built itself during the 1960’s on mass-appeal hits such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat Junction.” It was where Ed Sullivan would introduce various acts to the nation each Sunday night from a Broadway theatre that hosted his “Toast of the Town” variety show, which would ultimately be renamed simply “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It was on that stage, once known as The Hammerstein Theatre, that the nation would be introduced first to Elvis Presley and then to four lads from Liverpool, England, who would call themselves “The Beatles.”

The Broadway location, then known as CBS Studio 50, would be shuttered in 1971, with the end of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” by then the longest-running variety show in American broadcasting history, having aired for some sixteen years. The facility would reopen in 1993, when CBS would hire a young David Letterman away from his late-night show on NBC to become the star of his own 11:30 pm weeknight program: “The Late Show with David Letterman” from the newly refurbished studio, now rechristened as “The Ed Sullivan Theatre.”

When Letterman stepped down as host of “The Late Show” on CBS in 2015, he was succeeded by Stephen Colbert, who would host the program from a revamped “Ed Sullivan Theatre” for the next decade. When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” ends its run later this week, and the lights go down in the former Studio 50 for the final time, it will also effectively mark the end of “The Tiffany Network.”

Not that Colbert’s departure is the only factor in that ending; this week will also see the shuttering of the CBS Radio network, with the last top-of-the-hour newscast airing late Friday night. The same radio network that William S. Paley’s father, Samuel, would purchase a stake in, along with his business partners, back in 1927, to promote the family’s “La Palina” brand cigar business. Son William proved to be gifted in the nascent field of broadcasting, quickly growing the “Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System” into a major network with over 110 affiliated stations. (The word “Phonographic” was later dropped from the name, leaving it as just the Columbia Broadcasting System, abbreviated as CBS.)

CBS Radio would evolve over the next five decades to ultimately become a network news operation, built on the company’s portfolio of 50,000-watt clear-channel radio stations in major cities across the country. CBS would sell off its group of local radio stations to Entercom (now known as Audacy) in 2017. But the radio news operation, which came to prominence in the late 1930s, leading up to and through World War II, with its on-the-scene coverage transmitted by shortwave relay back to a nation waiting for every update. It was during this time that a young reporter named Edward R. Murrow would become a known voice through his dispatches from the rooftops of London, which were targets of German aerial bombardment.

CBS Radio’s news division would, in turn, lead to CBS News on television, where Murrow would launch his weekly “See It Now” program, which would tackle a wide range of major stories of the day, including the notable confrontation with a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy on his ruinous crusade to purge the nation’s government of the illusory threat of communism.

CBS News would complete its move into television with the launch of “The CBS Evening News” in 1949, the same year that rival NBC would debut “The Camel News Caravan” with anchor John Cameron Swayze. Radio anchor Douglas Edwards first anchored the CBS newscast, and he was replaced by former UPI radio reporter Walter Cronkite in 1962. Cronkite would be at the anchor desk when “The CBS Evening News” became the first network TV newscast to air for a full half-hour each weeknight. He would stay in that post through the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the landing of man on the moon, and the Watergate scandal that brought down U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Cronkite, who would be dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” would step down from the anchor desk after nearly two decades in 1981. He would be succeeded by Dan Rather, the network’s reporter in Dallas at the time of Kennedy’s death in 1963. He would anchor the broadcast for the next 24 years, breaking his predecessor's record. (Including a brief two-year detour when he was forced to share the anchor desk with Connie Chung.) Rather would ultimately be removed from the anchor chair following a controversy surrounding unauthenticated documents questioning the service of President George W. Bush in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The report, which aired on the network’s 60 Minutes II program, was ultimately discredited and led to the termination of Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, in 2005. Rather would leave CBS News a year later. He was replaced as anchor of the Evening News by veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer temporarily.

The search for a successor to the dominant years of Cronkite and Rather anchoring “The CBS Evening News” went through Katie Couric, the first woman to solo-anchor a network newscast, then to Scott Pelley for a half-dozen years. Pelley would be relieved of the anchor desk for a role with the network’s 60 Minutes program in 2017, and would be succeeded by Jeff Glor for the next two years. By 2019, it was Norah O’Donnell’s turn to anchor the newscast, which she would do for the next six years. O’Donnell was replaced at the desk by a pair of men, John Dickerson from the network and Maurice DuBois, who came from the local news operation at WCBS-TV in New York City. The duo would last not quite a full year, as CBS's corporate parent, Paramount, would be acquired by David Ellison’s Skydance, and Ellison would install Bari Weiss as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. Weiss would, in turn, name CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil as the latest person to anchor the CBS Evening News, starting in January of 2026. His initial months in the role have been at the center of a broader controversy surrounding Weiss's moves in the leadership of CBS News.

Those moves include the “repositioning” of the editorial stance of “the house that Murrow built” to allegedly be more appealing to an audience leaning to the right on the country’s political spectrum. Also on the immediate horizon is a highly speculated “retooling” of the news division’s venerable weekly flagship broadcast, “60 Minutes.” The first of those expected changes could follow the show’s 58th season finale, which aired just this past Sunday night.

We expect that, at some point in the future, broadcasting historians will point to this week as the moment when “The Tiffany Network” officially came to a close. Its time of death will be fixed somewhere between the endings of Stephen Colbert’s run with “The Late Show” and CBS News signing off the radio for the last time, alongside whatever “creative destruction” is ahead for both “60 Minutes” and “The CBS Evening News” in the days and weeks to come.

It is a pretty safe bet that William S. Paley wouldn’t recognize the place that he once built into what it has become.

More’s the pity for that. We intend to have a toast on Friday evening in honor of its passing, and invite you to do the same.

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We joked at the time that local television sets must have had the tuning knob welded in place.

At this particular moment, we were well aware that a handful of stations had been calling themselves “The One and Only,” followed by the station’s channel position. This positioning had begun at Post-Newsweek Station’s flagship, WTOP-TV, circa 1974, and eventually spread to its other stations, including the then co-owned WPLG in Miami. Now a local news-focused independent station owned by Berkshire Hathaway, WPLG still calls itself “The One and Only.”

But our take in the early 1980s was not to directly copy “The One and Only”, but to be shorter and a bit more declarative. We decided to pitch the idea of building a station campaign centered on the more direct tagline “There’s Only One,” followed by the station’s call letters or channel number. We considered the idea very strong and felt pretty good about it when we made our case.

It was one of the more memorable large swings of our nascent career, and it bombed so badly that the scientists working on the Manhattan Project would have likely been impressed. In so many words, we were politely told that it would be much too strident and arrogant to have the station suggest that “There’s Only One.”

Fast-forward to this past week in 2026.

This week featured the annual television tradition known as “the Upfronts.” The series of days where NBC, Fox, CBS, and ABC each took their turn on various Manhattan stages to present their 2026-27 programming slates to a room full of media buyers and local station managers. The tone, by most accounts, was notably optimistic. Scripted programming seems to be making a modest comeback. Sports rights remain the architecture around which everything else is hung. A few new faces took the stage in new executive roles. Seth Meyers roasted his Comcast/NBC bosses at Radio City Music Hall. Jimmy Kimmel did the same at Disney/ABC’s presentation, comparing the networks to “a bunch of dirty, starving little chihuahuas under the table waiting for a chicken leg to drop.” It was a little like a man joking about the roof leaking while the living room fills with water. The overall vibe, if you squinted and held your breath, was something resembling confidence. Not exactly a victory lap, but not a funeral either.

Then YouTube showed up.

YouTube’s “Brandcast” didn’t arrive with a hint of apology or a whiff of defensive posturing. CEO Neal Mohan took the stage at Geffen Hall with the composure of someone who already knows how the game ends when he announced, “Welcome to the YouTube era.” The company has deployed the phrase “There’s Only One YouTube” for three consecutive years now, and what initially read as mostly chest-thumping is beginning to sound less like a boast and more like a geographic fact. When you hold 12.5% of all American television viewing (according to Nielsen), that figure puts you ahead of every broadcast network, every cable channel, and every other streaming service — you’re not really making an argument anymore. You’re reading the scoreboard.

A few years ago, the conventional wisdom treated YouTube as a phone screen, a laptop distraction, something the kids watched in their bedrooms. That story is no longer operative. The television set — the 65-inch one in the living room — has become YouTube’s primary screen. Viewing on connected TVs has outpaced mobile growth for several years running, and the platform now streams more than a billion hours of content daily on television sets worldwide. In the U.S., YouTube isn’t a digital platform that sometimes ends up on TV. It is a television platform, full stop.

That’s what the Brandcast was really selling to advertisers on Tuesday night: the living room. Not the algorithm, not the creator economy, not some futuristic vision of what media might look like. The actual television set in the actual home. YouTube got there, and it did so without holding a single FCC license.

Which brings us to the local broadcaster and the question nobody in that business particularly enjoys discussing.

If YouTube is now the dominant force on the largest screen in the American home, and if local television stations continue to serve their local content to local audiences, the question of why those stations maintain anything less than a full-throated YouTube presence is not unreasonable to ask. Local newscasts, morning shows, community franchises, the 6 o’clock block that used to anchor an entire evening’s viewing — where is all of that on YouTube, in full, uploaded consistently, available on the living room TV to anyone who wants it?

The honest answer is: barely anywhere, and for reasons the industry would rather not say out loud.

The economic model doesn’t cooperate. YouTube’s revenue share for standard channel monetization returns somewhere between $2 and $8 per thousand views for most general-content channels, with news content often coming in at the lower end of that range due to advertiser category sensitivities around news programming. A local station deploying an “all in” strategy for putting its content on YouTube would spend real money on staff time, rights clearances for any music or syndicated content, and workflow management. In turn, it would recover only a fraction of what it yields from the same content on broadcast. The math does not work.

But that framing misses the larger problem: ignoring YouTube doesn’t add up either.

Many local stations are still operating as though their primary distribution asset is the over-the-air or cable channel. For any viewer under 50 who has cut the cord — or more precisely, never bothered to attach it in the first place — its cable carriage might as well be the equivalent of sending a telegram. Its OTA signal may be faring a little better, given that it's free to receive, but the number of viewers who don’t even know how to receive channel 5, which is actually 30.1, is astonishing.

For most viewers, “watching television” means streaming video, and for the largest share of those viewers, that means watching YouTube.

The question is whether it’s the local station’s content or someone else’s. Every month, that question answers itself in YouTube’s favor while the station studies the monetization spreadsheet.

The industry's argument against full YouTube distribution is also partly a retransmission consent argument in disguise. Stations have spent twenty years building the leverage that forces MVPDs (cable and satellite operators) to pay for carriage. If the content is freely available on YouTube, the argument goes, it undermines the exclusivity on which retrans is built. And at present, that “retrans” money is what’s keeping most local television stations profitable.

There’s something to that argument — except the MVPD bundle is losing subscribers at a rate that makes retrans anything but a growth strategy. You do not preserve a burning building by refusing to open the windows.

What a serious YouTube strategy would require from a local broadcaster is not a revenue model that replaces broadcast economics. It would require accepting that YouTube is, at least for now, a reach-and-relationship investment — a way to stay in the living rooms of people who have already left the linear dial — with monetization that follows the audience, not the other way around. A few group owners have experimented at the margins. None have committed in the way the audience migration would actually warrant.

Forty-plus years ago, our pitch to use “There’s Only One” was swatted down by a boss we really enjoyed working for, when he pointed out, “This won’t work because we just aren’t the only one in town.”

YouTube spent this week telling the advertising industry again, politely but directly, when it comes to viewing in the living room (not to mention on every other screen), well, “There’s Only One.”

And while local television broadcasters would argue that YouTube isn’t yet “the one and only” place they need to be, can they really still afford not to be?

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Wayne took from our item that we were primarily endorsing the idea of local stations producing fewer hours of news on their programming schedules, which, to be fair, we did cover as part of our original premise. He emailed to ask the obvious and intriguing follow-up question:

“What would replace all of this local news content if some of it went away?”

The reality is that there aren’t a lot of viable options to fill out the daily programming schedule in 2026. The syndication market, as in the roster of programs produced by third parties to purchase for airing on local stations during hours that the “big four” networks don’t program, is a mere shadow of itself from decades past. Daytime talk shows are an endangered species, with Kelly Clarkson, Sherri Shepherd and even Steve Wilkos (one time security sidekick of the late Jerry Springer) all ending their daily programs, in a broader pull back by NBCUniversal from the syndication market which included ending the venerable “Access Hollywood” after 30 years in production.

Local stations know, on albeit a smaller financial scale, what the networks are admitting out loud: the economics of producing original programming don’t add up to making a profit these days. Even CBS admitted as much as the reason for giving Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” its walking papers this month. Even if you doubt with reasonable skepticism the loss figures that Paramount/Skydance threw out in July of 2025 (and count us among those who do) to cancel Colbert and later, their decision to put Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” in the 11:35 Eastern late night slot is way too familiar to local TV station schedulers who played earlier seasons of the show in their overnight hours since 2006.

Apparently the CBS pick up of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” along with the “Funny You Should Ask” show from his Entertainment Studios, gave him the confidence to drop $120 million on what’s left of the once high-flying BuzzFeed digital media company. This would be the same Byron Allen, whose group of local TV stations were recently reported to be selling off everything they could — just to stay afloat.

But back to our main story here, what killed off the marketplace where local TV stations could find high-quality programming to put on their schedule?

Hard as it may be to believe, it has been 15 years this month that Oprah Winfrey ended her daily talk show that had been a huge success for some 25 years prior, pretty much running all competitors off the air during its run. Oprah wanted to find her next fortune in owning her own cable network. OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network is still around, but underwent a major restructuring back in 2020, moving from a 50/50 joint venture of Oprah’s “Harpo Productions” with Discovery Networks to successor WarnerBros Discovery now owning 95% and Harpo controlling on 5% of shares in the joint venture. And of course, if and when Paramount/Skydance closes on its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, then OWN would become part of the David Ellison-controlled media empire.

These days, there are only four remaining shows in the syndicated space that Oprah once dominated: The Jennifer Hudson Show (WarnerBros TV), The Drew Barrymore Show (Paramount/CBS), “Tamron Hall” (Disney/ABC), and “Live with Kelly and Mark” (Disney/ABC). We’d argue that none of them are even close to being in the same league with Ms. Winfrey’s show in terms of influence and audience. The best performer is probably “Live with Kelly and Mark” which benefits from its lead out from “Good Morning America” status on many ABC affiliates across the country for the last 38 years, since it debuted as “Live with Regis (Philbin) and Kathie Lee (Gifford)”.

Of historical note, “Live with…” didn’t air on all of the ABC Owned stations at 9am until 2013, when it would replace “The Oprah Winfrey Show” at Chicago’s WLS-TV, which had been Oprah’s original station since she debuted on “AM Chicago” in 1984. Industry legend Dennis Swanson, who was then running WLS, put “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on the air a year later.

“Live with…” originated as “The Morning Show” some five years earlier on WABC-TV. It represented the pinnacle of what was once a staple of television stations in many markets, the local morning talk show. One of the giants in that space was “The Morning Exchange” which came to dominate the ratings on Cleveland, Ohio’s WEWS-TV. Starting in 1972, the show would be seen as the inspiration for ABC’s “Good Morning America” some three years later. The Morning Exchange was created by Don Perris and William F. “Bill” Baker who worked at WEWS. Baker would go on to lead WJZ-TV in Baltimore, then owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting, where he would give a promising young talent her first shot as a host of a new talk show that would be called “People are Talking.”

Her name was Oprah Winfrey.

So what has nearly killed the syndicated programming business over the last twenty years? Obviously, a dearth of cultural phenomenons like Oprah, along with the end of reruns of old movies being viable for local stations (given the plethora of outlets carrying movies across the cable and streaming universe) to have the long lost two or three hour programming block, fondly remembered as “The Million Dollar Movie.” Or its late night cousins, “The Late Show” or “The Late, Late Show” long before those two productions were fronted by David Letterman and a line of hosts from the late Tom Snyder to Craig Kilborn to Craig Ferguson and finally to James Corden.

But perhaps the biggest blow to the TV program syndication model came when local TV stations began producing more hours of local news. When stations saw the formula of lower costs and more ad revenue (which they would completely control, rather than sharing a substantial portion of with syndicators) achievable by adding hours of local newscasts, the hours available for other programming inevitably began shrinking.

A few stations still produce local programming outside of news, with their own daily talk and variety shows. One such example is Hubbard Broadcasting’s KSTP-TV here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, which has produced a 90-minute program each weekday called “Twin Cities Live” for the past 18 years. (The station had produced another weekday local talk show known as “Good Company” for a dozen years prior.) In 2021, the station added “Minnesota Live” an hour-long local morning show at 9am, when the syndicated “Live with Kelly and Ryan” (Seacrest, who co-hosted before Kelly Ripa’s husband Mark Consuelos joining her on the show) moved over to Tegna’s KARE.

Both “Twin Cities Live” and “Minnesota Live” are well done television programs that are said to be profitable. They are definitely elevated from the so-called “pay to play” programs found on many local TV stations. Those shows are usually vehicles that feature a host mainly interviewing the proprietors of local businesses, who appear because they are buying advertising on the local station. They are not on the same level as local productions like “The Morning Exchange” were back in their heyday, a standard that fewer shows, such as a “Twin Cities Live” actually attain.

In other words, it certainly is possible to produce decent local TV programming other than local news, but it takes an investment of both effort and money. The ratio between those two is variable, but both are definitely needed — and are often in short supply in the leaner business models most local stations now operate under.

Which brings us back to having to answer Wayne’s original question: What would local TV stations put on the air instead of more hours of local newscasts, often repeating the same stories, ad nauseam?

Damned if we know, sir. Unless Oprah is planning on getting back in the game, maybe Byron Allen has a “BuzzFeed Unleashed” in his future plans.

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Erratum: In the original version of this column, we misindentified William F. Baker as “Win” rather than “Bill” which is his correct name. Apologies for that error.

Donald Duck has been on our mind a bit over the last 24 hours.

For much of the past year and a half, the Walt Disney Company's posture toward the Trump administration and its Federal Communications Commission has looked considerably more like Mickey Mouse than Donald Duck. Under then-CEO Bob Iger, Disney wrote a check — somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million, depending on which account you read — to settle a defamation claim brought by President Donald Trump over comments ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air. The legal community's collective jaw dropped. First Amendment lawyers who believed ABC had a strong case to win at trial watched the settlement land and called it, in so many words, capitulation dressed up as strategy.

The characterization was hard to argue with.

Then came the FCC’s escalating pressure campaign against ABC. Chairman Brendan Carr launched an inquiry into whether “The View” — a program that has held a bona fide news interview program exemption from the equal-time rule since 2002 — suddenly no longer deserved that status. The trigger was a February appearance by Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. The Commission’s inquiry was directed specifically at KTRK, ABC’s owned-and-operated station in Houston.

The sequence of events that followed is worth laying out carefully, if only because the FCC would probably prefer that you not notice it.

On April 23rd, Jimmy Kimmel aired a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner on his show and quipped that Melania Trump had “the glow of an expectant widow.” Both the President and the First Lady posted separate statements demanding ABC fire Kimmel. Then, on April 25th, an armed man was apprehended attempting to breach the security perimeter at the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The President subsequently framed Kimmel’s joke as an incitement for violence.

Kimmel, on his show the following Monday night, April 27th, defended the remark as a joke about the age difference between the President and his wife — nothing more. The White House communications director responded by insisting ABC “needs to fire him immediately.” The FCC license review order dropped the very next day, covering all eight of ABC’s owned-and-operated stations. Those licenses are not due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest, with some running through 2031. The FCC’s official position is that the timing was merely a coincidence and that the early renewal demand was a natural extension of its ongoing DEI investigation into Disney. This investigation had already consumed more than 6,200 pages of documents from the company over the preceding five months.

You are invited to draw your own conclusions.

But something changed back in March. Iger stepped aside, and Josh D’Amaro — a 28-year Disney veteran who built his reputation running the company’s theme parks — took the reins as the company’s CEO. Jimmy Kimmel’s show has remained on the air across all the affiliates of the ABC network (including those of Nexstar and Sinclair, who preempted him in September 2025, after the host made a controversial comment following the assassination of Charlie Kirk). The company has not taken any action against Kimmel for his “expectant widow” remark.

And now Disney has filed a petition with the FCC that reads nothing like the company that quietly wrote that settlement check just sixteen months ago.

The Disney filing calls the FCC’s conduct “unprecedented, beyond the Commission’s authority, and counterproductive.” It argues the agency is engaging in “viewpoint discrimination and retaliatory targeting.” It points out, with some sharpness, that the Commission has shown zero interest in applying the same equal-time scrutiny to conservative AM radio talk shows that reach audiences just as large. It notes that over the past two seasons, “The View” extended invitations to JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Elon Musk, Kevin McCarthy, and Marco Rubio — every one of whom declined. And it reminds the FCC, in terms a first-year communications law student could follow, that the 2002 ruling granting the exemption “remains in full force and effect” and has never been challenged, modified, or overturned in the intervening two-plus decades.

The lone Democratic voice on the three-member FCC panel, Commissioner Anna Gomez, publicly cheered the filing. “What the public will remember,” she wrote, “is who complied in advance and who fought back.” The contrast she was implying was not subtle. CBS, facing similar pressure, pulled a Stephen Colbert interview with Talarico rather than contest the point. Conversely, Disney filed its petition for a declaratory ruling.

Whether Josh D’Amaro ordered this posture shift directly or whether it reflects a broader recalibration inside The Walt Disney Company is not entirely clear from the outside. What is clear is that the timing is not coincidental. A new CEO, seven weeks into the job, and the company that spent more than a year in Mickey Mouse mode has found something closer to Donald Duck’s register.

Carr’s FCC still controls the process. The license renewal reviews grind on. The equal-time inquiry over “The View” has not been resolved. Disney’s petition on that review asks the full Commission — not just the Media Bureau — to weigh in, and invokes the courts as an alternative if it doesn’t.

That is not the language of a company looking to make peace.

“Der Fuehrer’s Face” ends with Donald Duck waking up from his nightmare, clutching a small Statue of Liberty figurine, relieved to find himself back in America. The moral of the cartoon, stated without apology, was that freedom is worth getting angry about.

Some eighty-three years later, that still seems like a reasonable position for the Walt Disney Company to hold.

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Epilogue: Speaking of fighters, following Ted Turner’s passing last Wednesday, we’re remembering him this weekend by rewatching Keith Clarke’s excellent six-part documentary series about Turner, which is titled “Call Me Ted.” It’s available for streaming on HBO Max. Definitely worth watching.

(Editor’s Note: An AI model was used in researching some details in drafting our main article.)

And that has led us to wonder whether one answer to the shaky fate of the local news business might actually be to do less.

As we were pondering this, we stumbled upon this growing online moment from the collective creators on Substack (which has been going through its own existential crisis in recent days). The moment revolving around the concept that model Substacker Emily Sundberg has captured in this nifty mathematical equation:

The Great Slowdown > The Endless Scroll

Sundberg posits the question this way: “Have you considered publishing fewer stories?” And to answer her here, yes, we have. In fact, it is a core part of our publishing strategy. We try to average a couple of articles each week, but we are driven more by the question of whether or not we believe we have something of value to deliver to you who choose to read our dispatches.

We’ve never really wanted to be a daily publication because there are already enough established outlets in the media trade press that do a solid job covering the ins and outs of each day in that space. We read them all and try to provide some in-depth analysis of the trends and milestones we see from our perspective, having toiled away in the local television “salt mines” for the past five decades.

But as the crush of formerly employed journalists has grown, the blizzard of daily writings on Substack (and its online newsletter publishing platform competitors) has increased to the point of reaching a near “white-out” condition. And as anyone who has lived in a place where Blizzard Warnings are a yearly feature can tell you, that’s when the proverbial “poop” is really “hitting the fan.”

The term “The Great Slowdown” was coined by Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer on their podcast, “Tasteland,” according to Emily Sundberg’s widely read “Feed Me” Substack. Sundberg goes on to link to coverage in the UK’s PressGazette about how Axios published 22% fewer articles in Q1 of 2026 vs the same quarter a year ago, but had a 30% bump in page views. (You should investigate each of those underlined links for the details.)

We immediately applied this theory to the local television news business, since that is our area of interest here, and we think there may be merit in considering creating less news content while simultaneously sharpening that content produced.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, local television stations that were affiliated with a network were happy to deliver perhaps three or so hours of local newscasts each weekday. But when local news moved from being a requirement to keep the federal license to broadcast to becoming a significant profit center for a station in the late 1970s (especially if you were leading the audience ratings race), it didn’t take long before the geniuses running stations and ownership groups had the inspiration to say, “Why don’t we do more of this?”

And the explosion of local news expansion got underway. First, in the early evenings, moving from one hour to two. Then perhaps three. Late-night half-hours became the odd 35-minute windows. Mornings became, well, basically a local news marathon, as Fox stations that had no two-hour network morning show loaded up on five-, six-, and even seven-hour news blocks that more resembled the Bataan Death March of repeated news stories every weekday morning.

Then the internet came along to liberate news consumers, if we can extend that metaphor just a little longer. And subsequently, local TV news viewership has been in an accelerating free fall ever since.

Of course, we have oversimplified all this for you, but the premise of asking “Is there too much local news on your local TV station?” is one worth considering. And not in the form of supporting the current push for station ownership consolidation as the “the last, best hope for the future of local journalism” mantra currently being used to justify lifting all limitations on such consolidation efforts.

One of the things that is always in the back of our minds is considering what “the next generation of TV news” might look like. (Listen, you don’t work on one thing for as long as we have and then just quit, all “cold turkey” style.) And we think we may have found a potential prototype in the most unlikely of places. One, it turns out, that has been around for a dozen years now:

OK, before you scoff at our suggestion, hear us out for a moment.

HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” is described by Wikipedia as “an American news satire late-night talk show.” You’ll note the word “news” is right there, leaving no doubt about the program’s use of current events as core to its existence. In much the same way that Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” skewers news “ripped from the headlines.” (Of course, that was where John Oliver cut his teeth as a correspondent and anchor before launching “Last Week Tonight” in 2014.)

But consider for a moment that “Last Week Tonight” features a half-hour of one person talking nearly non-stop about what’s in the news, and predominantly about one particular topic. And those topics are definitely weighty ones, ranging from the scourge of unregulated drugs being sold at gas stations and convenience stores to the fall of X/Twitter under Elon Musk into, in Oliver’s words, “a sewer of misinformation.” It was “Last Week Tonight” that eight years ago did a deep dive into the corporate mandated news coverage aired by Sinclair Broadcast Group stations.

We admit that there isn’t a single episode of the show we’ve viewed that hasn’t brought forth some fact that we weren’t aware of. The show is well researched, brilliantly written, and methodical in its storytelling. And even though we’d listen to John Oliver read a shopping list and find it amusing, the show’s satirical punch lines never fail to make us both laugh and think hard at the same time. We’ve also noticed in this season, there has been less reliance on ending each show with an outlandish bit like getting a sewage treatment plant named for him or offering a luxury RV to a Supreme Court Justice, but only if he will just step down from his lifetime appointment to the bench.

Viewing tip: If you aren’t an HBO Max subscriber, you can watch nearly all the episodes of “Last Week Tonight” right on YouTube a day or two after their Sunday premieres on HBO. (We find it interesting that the network doesn’t see making the show available on YouTube as cannibalizing its subscription audience.)

There are a few examples of some news production that feels distantly related to the formula working at “Last Week Tonight.” KUSA in Denver’s “Next with Kyle Clark” does a solid job of presenting longer form stories, and on occasion solo anchor Clark himself delivers some pithy commentary on the broadcast. But that’s just one of a small handful of examples that might be comparable.

And sure, we get that pulling together a once-a-week program that airs late on Sunday evenings, and has no mandate to come off as “fair and balanced,” is a whole lot easier than doing it on a daily deadline schedule. But the principles at work can be studied and implemented into a local TV newsroom far more easily than you might think.

The big idea is to consider whether quality over quantity can be a bigger audience draw. The venerable “60 Minutes” on CBS, still draws some of the largest weekly audience numbers on television. (At least it does until Bari Weiss has her way with it. Reports out today allege that Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is already not having her contract renewed after infamously calling out Weiss for censoring a story last fall.)

And “60 Minutes” typically tackles just three stories in each episode. (Granted that they often take months to produce each single story.)

But if anyone remembers Ted Koppel’s era of anchoring “Nightline” on ABC, you’ll know it is possible to do this kind of approach on a daily basis as well.

In 2026, the reality is that news headlines are available everywhere. Breaking news video is almost an equal commodity now. Easily accessible technology allows almost anyone to become familiar to an audience, and potentially authoritative. Whatever uniqueness local TV news once had has been eclipsed in almost every way one can think of.

So rather than just pushing the formula that worked in the past, maybe it is time for some brave soul in a decision making role in a local newsroom to consider trying a truly different approach to covering more of “what we think we should understand” by doing less of the standard “trying to be everything to everyone” approach.

A little sharper writing with maybe a bit of an attitude might not be a bad idea either.

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If you have never watched it, or haven’t recently, we’d urge you to do so the next time you can. It is a true classic.

In many ways, the figure closest to a real-life version of the fictional Kane was William Randolph Hearst. Clearly, the movie takes some liberties to draw broad parallels to Hearst, given his immense power and influence at the time. Hearst’s use of what was labeled “yellow journalism” to sensationalize and champion causes of his choosing was legendary. The parallels between Hearst and Kane are obvious, but none stand out more than both men’s use of their media holdings to push America into a war. In Hearst’s case, it was the Spanish-American War of 1898. For Kane, it was a war with neighboring Cuba.

While scriptwriter Mankiewicz may have had Hearst in mind when he penned the life story of Citizen Kane, the figure who might have been the real-life version of the fictional character was only three years old when the movie premiered. His name was Robert Edward Turner, the third.

With his life ending today after some 87 years, the chronicle of who he was and what he accomplished seems far closer to the fictional legacy chronicled in “Citizen Kane.”

There will be many words written today and in the next few days about R.E. Turner, III. Ted Turner, as he preferred to be called, was many things in the course of his life. Attempting to capture that life in a handful of words leads one to use terms like “mogul,” “innovator,” “bombast,” “womanizer,” “outspoken,”” tycoon,” “philanthropist,” and a host of others. A quick skimming of the obituaries already published all point to Turner’s signature accomplishment as being the founder of the Cable News Network, CNN, in 1980. The New York Times goes so far as to label him as “the creator of the 24-hour news cycle.”

While it’s true that CNN brought the round-the-clock coverage of news to television, and more specifically, cable television, which was beginning its own rocket-powered journey to media dominance, the 24-hour news cycle had been around for quite some time.

“That’s one of the things that I think must be changed, Mr. Carter. The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day, and so will the Enquirer.” - Orson Welles as “Citizen Kane.”

We aren’t the first to draw the parallels between the fictional Kane and the bigger-than-life Turner. The 1995 biography of Turner from father and son authors, Robert and Gerald Jay Goldberg, was aptly titled “Citizen Turner - The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.” It is one of at least ten books written about Turner’s life, including his 2008 autobiography, written with Bill Burke, which is appropriately titled “Call Me Ted.”

But in the years before he became the billionaire who revolutionized television news and powered the cable revolution by first putting his Atlanta-based UHF television station up on a satellite to create the first “superstation.” And before he bought the MGM movie studio and its vast film library in 1986 (which included, among its many titles, “Citizen Kane”), he created channels like Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, and Cartoon Network.

Before all of that, he began his media empire by owning radio stations.

After stepping in to run Turner Outdoor Advertising, the billboard company his father, Ed, had built before taking his own life in 1963, Turner would go on to acquire an ownership interest in radio stations serving the southern cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1960s. By 1970, he would have moved into television by first acquiring WCTU, a struggling UHF television station in Charlotte, North Carolina. He would change the call letters to include his own initials, making it WRET. Not long after, he would add WJRJ in Atlanta, another struggling UHF station programming the usual fare of old movies and TV shows, paid religion, and infomercials. It would become WTCG, the flagship of the Turner Communications Group.

We should note here for the record that a few years later, in 1972, a young high school student who had fallen in love with the radio business would go to work (part-time) for WTMA (AM) in his hometown of Charleston. His first paycheck would bear the name of the Turner Communications Group. It would not be the last time that his path would intersect with Ted Turner.

By the mid 1970’s, the nascent cable television business was desperate to find anything that would elevate it from just being a way to improve the reception of over-the-air broadcast television stations. Atlanta’s WTCG was being carried into markets outside Atlanta via a growing network of microwave repeaters, largely because of its carriage of Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, which Ted Turner had bought to serve as a programming anchor for the television station. In 1976, WTCG began being uplinked to RCA’s Satcom I satellite to achieve national distribution to cable systems across the country and become a so-called “Superstation.” The Satcom satellite would become crucial to cable operators as the orbiting home of early cable networks such as Home Box Office and Showtime. In 1979, a Connecticut startup cable network promising 24-hour sports coverage would launch via Satcom. Originally known as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, it would quickly lose the entertainment programming to become simply “ESPN.”

Meanwhile, Ted Turner, who had become famous for winning the “America’s Cup” yacht race two years before in 1977, would win the catastrophic running of the Fastnet race in 1979, as captain of his yacht named “Tenacious.” The race would claim the lives of 15 sailors, and only 85 of the 300 boats that started would cross the finish line. After his return, Turner would focus more on another race, this one based on land. This one would be to get the first 24-hour all-news television network off the ground.

On June 1st of 1980, Turner presided over the ceremonial start of what he called “The news network for America…the Cable News Network.” To get it on the air, he would sell the Charlotte television station for $20 million to Westinghouse’s broadcasting arm. Ironically, just two years later, Westinghouse would team up with ABC to launch a competitor to CNN, known as “Satellite News Channel.” SNC would be built atop Westinghouse’s success with 24-hour, all-news radio stations in major markets (such as New York’s 1010 WINS) and ABC’s experience in television news. Turner rushed to launch “CNN2,” a headline news service featuring a rolling 30-minute newscast. (It would eventually become CNN Headline News.) SNC tried to buy its way onto cable systems by offering to pay a fee for each subscriber (reversing the industry standard of cable systems paying to carry programming channels).

But Turner’s dedication to the cable business and to the companies that operated cable systems would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for SNC’s growth. Westinghouse and ABC would pull the plug on the operation just sixteen months later and sell the network’s satellite space and subscribers to Ted Turner.

In its first decade, CNN would battle its way from being known as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by establishing itself as the place for “breaking news.” The network would fully complete its adolescence in 1991, when it would be the only news network to have live reporters in Baghdad, when the US went to war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The coverage was CNN’s coming-of-age moment in arriving as a global news leader. That same year, Ted Turner would marry actress and activist Jane Fonda. It would be the third marriage for each, and it appeared that Turner had finally met his match.

By the mid-1990s, Turner and his Turner Broadcasting System were major players in television of all kinds. In 1995, Ted Turner agreed to merge his media empire with the one created by the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications. Time Warner’s CEO, Gerald Levin, who had once led Home Box Office, had known Turner for years. He convinced Turner to accept $7.5 billion worth of Time Warner stock and the title of Vice Chairman of the board.

Earlier that year, we had joined TimeWarner’s cable arm to work on a project to replicate the success of that company’s creation of “New York 1,” a 24-hour “hyperlocal” cable news channel serving the five boroughs of New York City. By 1997, we had launched the first of those, “Bay News 9” in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida. Not long after, with plans in the works to launch similar operations in other Time Warner Cable areas around the country, we found ourselves in a meeting at CNN Center in Atlanta, discussing how the Time Warner Cable Local News Group might work more closely with our corporate cousin. At one point in the meeting, we were informed that Ted Turner wanted to come in and say a few words. He did and stated that he’d love to see us work more together. He wondered aloud why Gerry Levin hadn’t thought to label these local operations with the CNN name. Before any of us from the cable side could answer, he said he had to move on to his next meeting. He took a moment to shake each of our hands and thank us for all our work.

When he got to our place in the room, we quickly told him that we had worked for him some 25 years prior at his radio station in Charleston, and that we had once met briefly then. He smiled and said in that signature southern drawl of his, “You did? That’s great. To be honest with you, I don’t remember a lot from back then. I did my share of livin’ back then.”

With that, he stepped back and told us, as a group, that he thought what we were doing was great and important to the future of the company. He was out the double doors in a flash, and our team feasted on the compliment for weeks thereafter.

At the same time, Time Warner Cable was pioneering something that would be far more important to the company’s future. We saw it in the back room of a cable system office in Elmira, New York. It was one of the first working models of using the infrastructure of a cable television system to deliver high-speed internet service. This “broadband” service would become the company’s “Road Runner High Speed Internet” offering, which would quickly replace the slow dial-up telephone connections that most people used to connect to the budding phenomenon known as “the internet.”

One of the early leaders in the business of providing internet access via dial-up was the nearly ubiquitous “America Online.” AOL, as it would be called, would lead to Ted Turner later calling his decision to merge with TimeWarner as perhaps the one decision he considered “a mistake.”

In 2001, at the height of the original “internet bubble,” AOL would buy TimeWarner for $182 billion. It created the largest media company to date, with holdings from traditional publishing to the biggest name in the emerging digital space. Not long after the merger was completed, and corporate suits were replaced by blazer-and-khaki-wearing internet bros in company meetings, Ted Turner would be marginalized and eventually pushed off the company board two years later—by his former friend, Gerry Levin.

Ultimately, the union of AOL and Time Warner would be labeled “the worst merger in American corporate history.” AOL had bought Time Warner based on its inflated value during the “go-go” years of anything internet-related. Not long after the merger, AOL’s stock value plummeted, and things got bad. By 2009, Time Warner had spun off AOL as a separate company and later sold its cable holdings to Charter Communications. Time Warner sold its remaining media assets to AT&T in 2018 for $85 billion. After a lengthy fight with the US Department of Justice to close the deal, AT&T renamed Time Warner to WarnerMedia. AT&T quickly learned that running a content company wasn’t necessarily compatible with running a telecommunications company. In 2022, it spun off WarnerMedia as a new company and partnered with Discovery Networks to create Warner Bros. Discovery, under the leadership of CEO David Zaslav.

Which brings us up to last November, when Warner Bros. Discovery was set to be acquired by Netflix, only to be pushed aside early this year by a higher offer from Paramount-Skydance, led by David Ellison. That acquisition is now winding its way through its own lengthy process with the Justice Department. If it’s ultimately consummated, CNN and CBS will have the same owner, which is ironic because Ted Turner tried back in 1985 to make an audacious “hostile bid” for CBS, which would have put CNN and CBS under the same ownership. Turner’s bid, largely to be financed with “junk bonds,” was ultimately rejected by CBS. But the billion dollars CBS had to spend to spurn Turner led to a tortured path of corporate ownership over the decades, culminating in the hands of Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry.

Ted Turner’s personal wealth remained in the billions until the time of his death. After being pushed out at Time Warner, he focused on his other interests in real estate and conservation. He was, at one point, the largest private landowner in the US, owning large parcels in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. He was instrumental in the reintroduction of bison to the American West and had the largest herd in the nation, with over 51,000 head on his ranches. He would partner in the founding of the restaurant chain “Ted’s Montana Grill” in 2002.

Turner and Fonda divorced in 2001, but reportedly remained friendly. Fonda told Deadline.com today, “I loved Ted with all my heart.” Turner was never reported to be in another serious relationship. He spent much of his later years alone on his large ranch near Bozeman, Montana. According to his lengthy obituary in The New York Times, he is survived by his three sons and two daughters from his first two marriages, along with fourteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

At the end of “Citizen Kane,” there is a lengthy bit of dialogue that centers around the question of Kane’s last words. This had been a challenge from the newsreel editor to the reporter who interviews the key people who had known Kane throughout his life, which makes up a good part of the film. The reporter, named Jerry Thompson, delivers this summation in the script:

“He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and a reactionary; he was tolerant - “Live and Let Live” - that was his motto. But he had no use for anybody who disagreed with him on any point, no matter how small it was…”

We certainly don’t suggest that this was also a description of Ted Turner, but rather the difficulty of summarizing the life of so large a man in a few sentences or even a single word. He was called at times “Captain Outrageous,” “Terrible Ted,” and “The Mouth of the South.” What we believe is that his major accomplishments deserve to be acknowledged equally, as does the complicated story of his personal life. It was a privilege to meet him on two occasions and to follow his career from college dropout to creator of the nation’s most recognized global news organization and finally to a philanthropist who donated a billion dollars to the United Nations, amongst his other charitable efforts.

We’ll end this as all good obituaries should, Ted Turner was 87 years old.

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In fact, almost no one knew. Because she wanted it that way.

Liz never wanted to be the story, which tells you a lot about the kind of reporter she was. Joining the station, known as “Local 12", in 2002, Liz reported week in and week out about how people were beating the odds and living their best lives via everything from the latest medical breakthroughs to just finding ways to exercise more. She was passionate about telling these stories, but always through the people who were fighting the challenges that life presented, both big and small.

Liz was a caring, hard-working reporter who loved her job.

Aside from earning a Bachelor’s in Dietetics and Nutrition from RIT’s College of Applied Science and then a Masters in Public Communications and Journalism from Syracuse University, Liz was also a registered dietician, a personal trainer, and a certified diabetes educator. She was also, in the years we worked together, unfailingly positive and energetic.

(She may have noted, on more than one occasion, that we needed to exercise more.)

We now know that she was initially diagnosed with colon cancer in 2023, and would undergo five different surgeries during the interim, according to the station’s story on her passing. All the while, she continued to report on new treatments and promising therapies, even as her own options dwindled. Her work would air on WKRC-TV, as well as on many other Sinclair stations across the country, until shortly before this last week. Just hours after her colleagues were informed that she would not be returning to work, she passed away peacefully with her husband, Fred Craig, and other members of her family at her bedside.

In one of those odd twists, we had just seen Liz a couple of months ago, while in Cincinnati for the funeral service of James Harrison, her long-time cameraman from the station. James had passed away suddenly just a short time prior. Liz spoke lovingly of the man she called her “work husband,” having regularly worked next to him for many years. She would make the crowd both laugh and cry as she detailed their experiences working together. After the service, as a swarm of well-wishers circled her, we only exchanged a few quick words and a short embrace before others clamored for her attention. Of course, she gave each person who approached her the kind of personal moment that someone who had long been in the public eye knows how to do instinctively.

We could not have known that it would be our last encounter.

But knowing her determination in pretty much every interaction we had during the time we worked together, we know that if she had revealed the terrible disease she was quietly battling, she would have likely said that she had found some great doctors and that she was going to beat this thing.

And then she would have said she had to head out and get another story done.

Since hearing the news, we keep mentally replaying one very poignant scene from the TV series “M*A*S*H.” In the episode titled “Sometimes You Hear The Bullet” during the show’s first season, Lt. Colonel Henry Blake (played by the late McLean Stevenson) tries to console a grieving Captain Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) after he loses a patient on the operating table.

Blake says, “Look, all I know is what they taught us in command school. There are certain rules about a war. Rule number one is that young men die. And rule number two is…doctors can’t change rule number one.”

To that, Liz Bonis would have told you that doctors are changing the rules all the time.

We so wish they could have done so for her.

Rest In Peace, Elizabeth. You did it your way.

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Like everything else on the show floor, artificial intelligence is taking this technology even further. One of the most talked about demonstrations we saw was that of Vizrt, which showed off a new AI-powered keying system that eliminates the need for a “green screen” (those big walls painted in a fluorescent color to be electronically removed in a television control room in a process called “chromakey”)

Most people are familiar with chromakey's use in presenting weather segments during local TV newscasts. The process is how the meteorologist appears to be standing in front of the computer-generated weather graphics.

One of the recent prominent examples of deploying AR/VR facilities in local television stations has been the CBS Owned Stations, which have been moving to deploy a large-scale AR studio across its stations since KPIX debuted the technology in 2023. Its ninth station to debut the technology, WWJ, known as CBS Detroit, launched it earlier this month.

So yesterday, when severe weather rolled into the Dallas-Fort Worth market, we thought it would be interesting to watch how one of those new AR studios would be integrated into the weather presentation of CBS’s KTVT (aka CBS Texas) during a real-time, breaking weather situation.

This is what we saw when we first started watching the station, via the CBS News app on our Apple TV:

This shot triggered an immediate flashback to a difficult conversation with a meteorologist some years ago, when we were trying to stress the importance of “staying tight” on the local weather situation, because viewers put a bigger priority on seeing the situation “where they live — rather than halfway across the country!”

(As we recall now, by this point in the conversation, things had gotten a little heated, and voices may have been raised. It wasn’t the only time that happened.

Back on KTVT, the camera changed relatively quickly to show this angle:

Frankly, this didn’t improve things that much. While there was so much on the screen at one time, not that much of it was the actual “Metroplex,” which is the core of KTVT’s coverage area. It all certainly looked “big” on the screen, but we weren’t sure that it was superior to the more standard-looking severe weather presentations that were airing at the same time on other stations.

But we continued to sample the coverage as the situation progressed and more severe weather developed in the area. Before long, we saw this look on the air:

Well, we were happy to see a somewhat tighter view of the radar, but now we were struggling to read the names of locations, even on our 85-inch flat screen. We do admit to having eyes that have grown a little weaker with age, but this would definitely be in the category of those small lines on the chart that we struggle with during an eye exam. And we can’t even imagine what use this would be, if our screen were a tablet—or worse yet, a smartphone.

Plus, we have to ask why they are wasting so much area on both sides of the screen? To get the full “faux wood” experience? As we continued to watch, this shot would shrink even more as the decision was made to add the live feed from one of the station’s live stormtrackers.

You’d be forgiven if, like us, you couldn’t find the location of “Cuba” on the screen. (That would be a city in Texas, not the island nation in the Caribbean.)

Look, we get it: this is the cool new toy management put in, and if you are on the KTVT “First Alert Weather Team,” you likely don’t really have any choice in the matter. The meteorologists were doing a credible job of covering the situation and letting their viewers know what was happening. This kind of continuing coverage, what we often call “wall-to-wall” coverage, is unscripted and requires some tolerance from the viewer of the improvisational nature of the production.

But we just have to wonder if, in this threatening situation, the television screen “real estate” can be put to better use? For contrast, take a look at this frame from the live streaming severe weather coverage of popular YouTube meteorologist Ryan Hall in the same time frame:

Now we admit right away, this might be too “information dense” for some viewers. But if we lived in Nashville (the one in Arkansas, rather than the more famous one in Tennessee), we would definitely be grateful for having this presentation available—on any screen.

By the way, Hall had roughly 90,000 watching his coverage online when we snapped this screenshot. We wouldn’t be surprised if that was comparable to KTVT’s audience size at the same time, and we’d bet his technology set-up costs less.

Our point is this: a station can have the “latest and greatest” technology, but if it doesn’t substantially improve the experience for the viewer, especially in a moment where getting the relevant information quickly and easily really matters, how much is it worth?

We’re certainly willing to acknowledge that this AR-based technology is still early in its deployment for this specific weather purpose. More design work is likely to refine and hopefully improve the look. That said, CBS is spending no small amount of money to roll it out across all its television stations—and even on its network news — all in hopes of attracting more people to watch its local news and weather coverage.

They might want to remember the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. whose song said it well, way back in 1964.

“Money can’t buy me love.”

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For now, we’re going to continue here with our reporting on our trip to Las Vegas, the weekend before last, on what we saw at the NAB Show.

Because if there was one main theme that was in everything, it was those two letters that seemingly appear in almost every conversation about the future of every business these days. Those being, of course, the letter “A” and the letter “I”.

(If you read that in the voice of a Sesame Street Muppet, then thank the Children’s Television Workshop for teaching so many of us the alphabet.)

AI, or in its full name, Artificial Intelligence, was being promoted in so many different products shown on the multiple floors of the NAB Show, that we stopped trying to count them all. Our primary reason for attending the NAB Show was to examine how AI is being offered and used as a tool in television newsrooms. And for the whole story on that, we have to rewind the clock a little bit. In fact, we have to go back twelve full months to April of 2025.

We made the same pilgrimage to Las Vegas and the NAB Show last year, with pretty much the same editorial objective. We talked to a lot of people, saw a lot of demonstrations, and after we got back home, started to write this article no less than half a dozen times. That was all before we reached a bit of an epiphany:

It was too early in the development and deployment cycle to know exactly what true trends were emerging. So we never wrote this story.

Don’t get us wrong, there was quite a bit going on with AI in newsrooms a year ago. But it seemed, to us at least, much like the early days of television outlets first having websites. Some wanted to be first and plant their proverbial stake in the ground, and then everyone else who was, as our car-selling father used to say, doing a lot of tire kicking—without taking out their checkbooks.

Fast forward to this April, and everything was decidedly much further along.

When it comes to talking about the current “state of the art” in newsroom systems, artificial intelligence is now far more embedded in the tools and in a much more elegant fashion. And as far as we could see, to calm any fears, the option to use those AI tools was present, but not predetermined. Every vendor seems to realize that every newsroom needs some local controls on how and when it brings AI into the editorial process.

Of course, the two lead vendors in the newsroom computer system (NRCS) space have been the AP’s ENPS and AVID’s iNEWS. For decades now, almost every local TV newsroom in the US has been powered by one of these two systems. And that’s still true to some degree today. But new and nimble competitors are gaining, both in terms of their offerings, their customer base, and in the size of their booths on the show floor.

We start in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center with AVID, if only because they had one of the largest amounts of booth space on the show floor. Much of that space is devoted to the wide number of products the company offers, focused around their pair of major tools in the post-production world: the video editor Media Composer and the audio mixing and editing platform, ProTools. In a corner of the AVID booth was a demo station for not one, but three different software products that are the successors to the venerable iNEWS platform.

The first is AVID’s MediaCentral, which is the rundown-centric platform that is where stories are created and ultimately moved to airing. Like every NRCS we saw at the NAB Show, MediaCentral allows journalists to use AI to perform the typical tasks of transcribing sound, identifying different speakers, summarizing larger amounts of data, and helping assemble all of the data that pours into the newsgathering process. A second software product, called Wolftech News, which AVID first demonstrated last April, operates in concert with MediaCentral to provide “story-centric” tools for planning, resource management, and “AI-powered fact-checking and content verification.” We know that WolfTech News was championed by the Sinclair group’s newsrooms, who were almost all on the iNews platform. Finally, AVID’s Content Core is the cloud-based media asset platform that newsrooms can use to handle their video and audio needs from ingesting to editing to playback. Here again, AI is an offered feature set to facilitate media searching and archiving,

In terms of product catalog, AVID has not just these three main offerings for the newsroom, but countless others, which explains why we could never seem to get close enough to their demo stations to get more than a distant look at how all of these services work together to improve the crucial workflow of a newsroom. But what we did see was an impressive suite of offerings.

In the realm of the large video systems vendor space, Ross Video competes with AVID in offering a large number of product lines, from switchers to graphics and just about everything else you might find in a broadcast studio. It also has its own NRCS product suite, now known under the one name of Indigo. Indigo-Editorial is apparently what used to be known as Inception, but is now part of the larger Indigo “media workflow” platform. This may explain why we could never find anyone demonstrating Inception in the busy Ross Video booth, and why we moved on.

Over in the West Hall (which requires a quick hop on “The Loop” the system of Tesla vehicles zipping through underground tunnels that Elon Musk’s “Boring Company” has drilled between the Convention Center and a growing number of other nearby destinations) we made our way to the booth of the Associated Press and its “Workflow Solutions” unit, which handles the other heavyweight in the NRCS space, ENPS. The Electronic News Production System, which “keeps 65,000 broadcast professionals on air every day,” according to the AP’s website. (AP actually says “professions” on its website. We think they mean professionals, as 65K of different broadcast professions seems like a few too many to us.)

ENPS is still the rundown-centric platform that powers the editorial workflow of writing, editing, and organizing in show rundowns for the news broadcast. ENPS was where the first protocol to connect the various production hardware and systems was deployed, the ubiquitous “MOS” protocol, which earned the AP the first of its two EMMY awards for ENPS. In recent years, ENPS migrated from being a dedicated application on the computer desktop to being browser-based, which all modern NRCS platforms are now. It has also been integrated with over 130 different vendors’ products to control nearly all of the workflow systems found in news production facilities (at least by the AP’s count), but the AP also has multiple software offerings for newsrooms, showing its AP Storytelling platform as a perfect companion to ENPS.

Much like AVID’s Wolftech News offering, AP Storytelling is their story-centric tool to manage story ideas, resource planning, and publishing to various platforms. Again, here, the Artificial Intelligence tools are available to assist journalists in multiple aspects of doing their job each day. The AP likes to stress that this is the toolset that they needed inside their own global newsgathering operation, and so it has been developed, tested, and proven to “keep a story on track from first idea to final output.”

If AVID and the AP have solid, well-established platforms and they are trying harder to hold on to their market share, it is because they are being pushed by the newer players in this space, who have been making inroads by offering newer, and arguably more integrated solutions to be the “single platform” that newsrooms can utilize to handle more of their daily functional needs. The two vendors in this space required a trip back to the North Hall of the LVCC, and some time in the Octopus and CUEZ booths.

First to Octopus, which has been pushing into North American newsrooms with a product that anyone who has spent some time in the last couple of decades working on either iNEWS or ENPS can use. While featuring a style that is more reminiscent of Windows 10, as compared to the Windows 11 look that iNEWS and ENPS seemingly have arrived at. That is by design, as the company touts its ability to easily transition newsrooms from whatever existing platform they may be using over to Octopus. The platform, which is in its 12th iteration, promotes the fact that it can support either a “rundown-centric” or a “story-centric” approach to newsroom workflow. It also offers AI tools integrated into the workflow, but allows the system managers to select which AI models can be accessed by the journalists working in Octopus.

A unique aspect of the Octopus offerings is the integration with the company’s iReporter platform. iReporter is a user-generated content (UGC) platform to manage the gathering, verification, and use of UGC via a dedicated mobile app and web portal. Given the role that UGC has come to play in newsgathering, especially in breaking news situations, the iReporter platform, combined with Octopus, is a strong and unique offering as a newsroom tool. Octopus has landed deals to be used by the Griffin stations in Oklahoma, as well as some of the Standard Media stations. One reason for its appeal in smaller newsrooms may be the fact that Octopus is offered on either a subscription or one-off licensing plan, which would allow budgeting flexibility for what is typically a major expense.

And on the topic of expenses, we come to the other player in the newsroom workflow systems space, the Belgian-based company called CUEZ. We first saw CUEZ last year, with a small booth tucked away in the corner of the show floor. Their name had just come to our attention as the software that was powering a project by TEGNA at some of their stations, which would allow Producers to “run their own newscasts on the air.” In essence, eliminating the need for a director or “technical content producer” as the sole remaining control room position has been titled by some groups. That project was so new and apparently sensitive enough that the person who showed us CUEZ in 2025 would not even name TEGNA as the US broadcaster who was deploying it.

Fast forward to 2026, where a member of the CUEZ team, who was happily demonstrating the expanded features of the platform, acknowledged TEGNA’s rollout at some of its stations in the US. (That and the fact that we observed a small crowd of folks with TEGNA’s name on their convention badges, huddled in the CUEZ booth.) But what was apparent is that the year and the work with TEGNA (and other broadcast newsrooms) has significantly advanced the platform. CUEZ is a fully cloud-based suite of tools, including a rundown manager, an automator tool to control production systems in the control room, and a story desk to manage story creation, resource management, and publishing to online and social media platforms. (By now, this should be apparent as the framework that all of these platforms are attempting to fill.)

What became apparent to us in our days of pounding the show floor is that CUEZ may be the upstart that many are taking the hardest look at. The software feels more tightly integrated than its competitors and seems to have spent more time adapting to the real-world workflow of live television production. That may be due to its roots as an automation program not just for news but also for other live television programs and events such as sports, entertainment, and even worship services. (Don’t sleep on the burgeoning business of live television production within houses of worship. We have seen churches with better television facilities than some stations.)

And as much as we aren’t big fans of the idea, CUEZ has evolved to the point that it promotes the idea that its platform can power a small market television newsroom to the point that those on camera at the anchor desk can run the entire production of the newscast. And that’s not just a theory, but they have a real-world example running at Gray Media’s KNOP in North Platte, Nebraska. (Full disclosure: we have watched some of KNOP’s news product, and it is executed quite well, certainly on par with and superior to other small market newscasts we have reviewed.) Of everyone we looked at on the NAB Show floor, we came away thinking that CUEZ will be the player that we will be following the most until next April, when 58,000 or so broadcasters, production types, and creators stream back into the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Let’s say your station isn’t ready to give up its existing news production infrastructure? We know of at least one alternative to the news platforms we have showcased here so far, and that would be the offering from Magid, called Collaborator-Publisher. Yes, that Magid, the same folks who are known for Research and Consulting to many television newsrooms over the past seven decades. Magid wasn’t on the show floor, but what they have developed is (in their words) “a high-performing, brand-aligned workflow” platform that is powered by agentic AI. Both a story creation and editing tool, Collaborator is a combination of an AI-powered researcher, editor, and publisher. Magid says that Collaborator has been developed by working with over 60 media organizations, along with the writing program at the University of Iowa.

Unlike the previous platforms we have looked at, Collaborator is a stand-alone platform that lives outside of the typical NRCS, but works alongside them to provide “a solution for the specific friction points that journalists face every day,” according to Magid. While that can seem a little clunkier than the built-in AI tools, we know of several broadcast newsrooms that are currently using Collaborator and have been pleased with what the product has brought to their operations in terms of editorial consistency, publishing for alternate platforms, and the security of knowing they are in a “closed system,” so their data isn’t used to train publicly available large language models (LLMs). One key point about Collaborator is that it is not a market-exclusive offering, unlike their research and consulting services, which are typically in just one station in each market.

A disclaimer for you to consider before we wrap this up: We haven’t used any of these tools extensively and certainly don’t profess that one is better than another. We have given you our impressions from the demos we saw, some conversations with company reps, and reviewing their online websites (which we have conveniently linked to throughout this article).

Our biggest concern with any of these tools is how well they can function in the frantic crush of covering live breaking news. It is one thing to “automate” functions in a scheduled, planned-out newscast. What happens when there is no schedule, no plan, except for the one that you create as you go along? That is where we want to see these tools in action.

We still have concerns about being too reliant on “the cloud,” but we have had local systems fail, even with redundant servers, backup power sources, etc. As always, “your mileage may vary,” as the car commercials used to say (when mileage estimates first became a thing).

Perhaps worth even more consideration is this: The speed of innovation, which is now being “supercharged” by AI. One of the best quotes we heard at the NAB Show was that “programmers using AI now accomplish in two weeks what used to take a year.” The ability to create specific solutions for customers has never been easier. What we saw in April of 2026 will be improved by an unknown multiple in the next year, versus what we saw a year ago. Heck, what we have written here, ten days after the NAB Show opened, could already be out of date.

One parting shot: About that idea that AI in the newsroom will lead to fewer humans being employed in the newsroom? Let’s get on the record that we are absolutely not fans of that idea. We think AI, along with all of the other current tools available, should help newsrooms do more and better journalism, with the same headcount.

The objective has to be not just to survive, but actually thrive.

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From the moment you step off the plane at McCarran…sorry, Harry Reid International Airport now, it just smacks you right in the face. The electronic sounds of slot machines fill the air. One first chance to get your cash on the way in and one last chance to take it from you on the way out.

Then it is the crowd. No matter when we arrive, it always seems busy here. The throng at the airport’s rideshare pickup location left no doubt that this time would be the same.

Once upon a time, back when we were on an expense account, we would stay at the Wynn or its twin property, Encore, which seems to be the unofficial hotel of the television elite. But since we are now on our own dime, we booked a room at the Westgate. The Westgate’s main appeal is that it is immediately adjacent to the mammoth Las Vegas Convention Center, where the NAB Show is held.

The Westgate is, to put it in the best possible light, a little careworn. It is a remnant from when Vegas was a smaller oasis in the desert. Not the 50s or 60s Vegas of the Rat Pack era, but later, when Elvis arrived here. His shows started here in 1969, when the hotel was known as “The International.” The King would rule here for two extended runs each year until 1976. Much of the place feels like he never left, even if Barry Manilow is the name in lights on the marquee out front.

We arrived to find a long line to check in at 9 pm on a Friday. When we finally got to the desk about twenty minutes later, the very nice woman at the front desk asked us if we were in town for the NAB or for Wrestlemania. There was a pause as we considered which answer might be better. She recognized our hesitation and said, don’t worry—there is also a national dance team competition at the hotel this weekend.

The confluence of WWE fans, pre-teen dance team members, and NAB Show attendees was interesting enough. Then we heard that the band Phish was on night three of a four-night stand at The Sphere.

As someone once said: “Only in Vegas, man.”

The NAB Show didn’t start until Sunday, when the event officially gets underway, and the show floor opens. So we took Saturday to connect with some friends for brunch and dinner. That, and to adjust to the travel, the time change, and the lack of any ability to produce tears in our eyes for at least 24 hours.

Sunday morning, it was time to rise and shine, and “take care of business” as Elvis would say.

The good folks at TVNewsCheck.com put on a one-day conference called “Programming Everywhere,” which covers a wide range of television-specific topics. Their event kicked off with a 9 AM session featuring new research findings from Magid titled “The Omni-Media Landscape: Mapping Reach, Affinity and the Future of Media Monetization.”

For those readers who may not know, Magid has been doing media research and consulting since well before we entered the business, and they have expanded out to working in “empowering businesses” across many different disciplines. But research, both quantitative and qualitative, is at the core of what they do.

This opening session featured Magid COO Jamie Spencer presenting the company’s insights from its ongoing “EmotionalDNA” work applied to the U.S. information Media sector. Or, as the company press release states it: “tracking over 150 news brands for over 40 emotional-connection attributes predictive of brand love, against 14 proprietary points of engagement, in speaking with over 2,000 consumers in the initial wave.”

As an experienced attendee of Magid research presentations over our decades, we downed two cans of Red Bull before finding the meeting room and taking a seat.

Magid’s Spencer took to the podium right on time, and we were off. If there is research, then there is always a PowerPoint “deck.” And right on the first slide after the title, there it was:

“We are competing in an attention economy. The playing field is massive.”

Probably should have washed down a couple of Advil with those Red Bulls. Our brain momentarily flickered back to years ago and working with sportscasting legend Warner Wolf. Warner was famous for throwing to every highlight clip, saying, “Let’s go to the videotape.” When his highlights told the story of the game, either good or bad, he would often say, “Turn your sets off right there.”

(And mind you, this was three days before Perry Sook would publicly predict that only two or three companies would ultimately own all local TV stations. Talk about turning your sets off “right there.”)

But Jamie Spencer isn’t the COO of Magid without having some serious ability to be “droppin’ some knowledge.” And there were some definite “points of interest” to come.

Like how the average American’s media diet is to consume 13+ hours of media content each day. And we aren’t likely to grow that figure, so the battle is for the attention of the consumer. (What social media marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk dubbed “the attention economy” a few years ago.)

“Attention is greater than consumption.” This should be obvious to anyone who has witnessed the consumption of media in a busy family’s household anytime recently. Thus, media brands want to understand why consumers invest their attention. And according to Magid, well, it’s all about PIE.

Sorry, not the apple or cherry kind. We just abbreviated the three areas that Magid’s data highlights: Passion, Intention, and Efficiency, to being simple to remember as just PIE.

And studying the elements in PIE, it is Magid’s position that we can say farewell to the Breaking News era. And that we have now fully arrived in the Context era. And the biggest loser in the era of Context? Trust.

That’s because, in Magid’s determination, “attention-winning brands today capture passion through comfort,
confirmation, and context.” Being “trustworthy” doesn’t show up in the top 25 “emotional attributes” of news brands. (Better pull those promos with the news anchor talking sincerely about trust. We’re looking squarely at you, Tony Dokoupil.)

Actually, Tony’s boss at CBS, Bari Weiss, might find a lot to absorb in this Magid presentation. We aren’t going to try to capture all of it here for you, but if you are interested in taking a deeper dive, you can read through their entire presentation by clicking on this link

The closing slide of their presentation offered some hopeful thinking. It stated, “The Omnimedia Landscape
delivers significant opportunity.”

So we went in search of both that landscape and whatever opportunity the NAB Show floor presented as it opened at 10 am. We’ll have more for you on what we saw there, coming up in our next dispatch from Las Vegas.

And now we’ve realized just why we have had a craving for some coconut cream pie (our favorite) ever since Sunday.

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