The past week brought two such examples of this not-at-all encouraging trend.

The first came last Wednesday morning, when MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian jumped on the air during Peter Alexander’s show to break the scoop that FBI Director and frequent free government flyer, Kash Patel, had landed in Russia for meetings. His report cited two anonymous sources, noted that he had reached out to the FBI for comment, and added: “They have not gotten back to me.”

Friends, if you’ll permit us a small rant here, using some variant of the journalistic crutch “We have reached out for comment on this story (that we are presenting to you right now), but they have not gotten back to us” tacitly admits you have likely decided to go with what is likely a one-sided story. So you are trying to cover your proverbial buttocks by saying you have definitely tried to do your job, but the people who haven’t taken the time to get back to you on whatever your schedule is have almost certainly not done theirs.

At least not in time for whatever your deadline may happen to be.

But Ken Dilanian’s “breaking news” story got it wrong. Director Patel was nowhere near any part of the Russian state. Instead, he was at Liberty University in Lynchburg, in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That was, when we last checked, squarely in the United States. By early afternoon, Dilanian was back on the air explaining that his sources had told him Patel had landed in Russia for a trip previously reported, but that Patel “did not, in fact, land in Russia today.”

According to the excellent reporting of Natalie Korach for Status.news, MS NOW was not the only outlet to receive the bogus tip on Patel’s whereabouts, but it was the only one to report it—and later had to correct it. Korach’s story for Status says the situation led the network to launch an internal review of its reporting and approval process. This all comes as the network has been building its own newsgathering operation after separating a year ago from the NBC News resources it had accessed since it launched as MSNBC in 1996.

As you might imagine, given his history of outrage at all slights, real and imagined, Patel wasted little time turning the mistake into fodder for questioning why the network should be entitled to the public’s trust. The botched report by Dilanian, who often covers the FBI Director, is now the example of everything wrong with the outlet that has often been critical of Mr. Patel.

That outrage had barely begun to diminish by the weekend, when we saw a second example of a member of the press behaving…well, at least strangely.

Late Saturday night, veteran CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent Jan Crawford took to X/Twitter to respond to a viral video from a town hall held by Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the US Senate, Abdul El-Sayed.

Some background: Dr. El-Sayed has been dogged by questions about whether he sympathizes with the Muslim Brotherhood since he ran for governor in 2018. His current Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, has claimed that El-Sayed “pledged his support” to the group, several branches of which the Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations in January.

To be clear, there is no credible reporting from any major news outlet showing El-Sayed himself has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. (Recently surfaced posts by his half-sister claim their mother was involved with the group in Egypt in the 1970s, more than half a century ago.) He wrote about Egyptian politics in 2011, and those writings have been used to portray El-Sayed negatively, specifically in campaign commercials from his Republican opponent and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

At his Saturday town hall in Caro, Michigan, an attendee in the crowd yelled to Dr. El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” The candidate asked for the person’s name and fired back, “Why are you asking the question?” The audience member responded only with the first name “Tommy” and repeatedly insisted on his inquiry. El-Sayed responded quickly, saying, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” then delivered a five-minute dissection of why the question was obviously being asked because of his last name and appearance. “Tommy” tried gamely to press on and deliver a “gotcha” moment, then left the event. (Notably, independent journalist Marisa Kabas, writing in her publication The Handbasket, has since identified “Tommy” as a longtime Republican political operative named Thomas Teepell.)

CBS’s Jan Crawford enters the story by reposting the video of this town hall exchange, seemingly supporting “Tommy” in her comments and thanking him for “triggering” a “self-own” by the candidate. Crawford also suggested that she had to rewatch the video twice to catch the candidate’s “nanosecond” response that he indeed disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood.

Crawford later deleted the original post and posted this for her comments, stating: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”

At this point, we can only borrow the words of Marcia Brady (our favorite in “The Brady Bunch Movie”), who stated it best: “Sure, Jan.”

Don’t ask us to explain these examples of the press behaving badly, or any of the other recent ones that preceded these two. It’s baffling that, at this moment in the nation’s history, and with journalists needing to do their jobs, these glaring examples of self-inflicted wounds continue.

The easiest explanation is that the current demand on journalists—to produce quality, well-sourced reporting while also delivering instant breaking-news headlines and simultaneous analysis, in real time on all platforms—is unrealistic. Trying to do it all creates too many opportunities to “drop the ball.”

And unfortunately, this is no game.

Trust doesn’t disappear all at once. But each time it is chipped away at, it isn’t easily restored. Those who didn’t trust in the first place only have their skepticism confirmed. Those who might have trusted at one point now wonder why they did in the first place.

You want proof? The latest Gallup polling from September 2026 says that only 33% of those adults surveyed said they had either “a great deal” (6%) or “a fair amount” (27%) of trust in the news media. Meanwhile, others said they trusted the media “not very much” (33%) or “none at all” (another 33%).

Talk about a not-at-all encouraging trend.

The only bright spot is that people still say they trust their local media. Pew’s polling from a year ago found that 70% of respondents trusted their local news organizations—down from 82% on the same question in 2016. In last year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report, local TV news topped every category as the most trusted news source, but only 59% of people said so.

But before we see another local TV station promo beating the drum about “Trust is earned,” let us remember the better version of that saying: “Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.”

Especially when you keep behaving badly enough to give your critics this much ammunition.

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And from the few folks we have talked to, it has already been pretty bloody.

You see, October isn’t just the month with the spookiest day of the year; it is also when many local stations go through the annual exercise of budgeting for the year to come. Depending on the company, October is typically the pivotal month when stations present their “strategic plans” for what they project their business outlook will be over the next twelve months—in this case, 2027.

And for many, the outlook isn’t that good.

The irony of this timing is that while many stations, especially those in the “battleground states” of the 2026 midterm elections, are currently overrun with political advertising of all stripes, they face next year knowing there will be little or no political money washing in with the only colored wave that really matters, the green one.

Say what you will about SCOTUS’s 2010 Citizens United decision, but you could just as easily call it “The Preservation of Local Broadcasting Act.” By striking down limits on independent corporate election spending, the court opened the door to super PACs and their outside-group cousins. This cycle, their spending on spots carrying the fine print “not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee” is outspending the ones where the candidate “approves this message” by roughly two to one. And unlike candidates, those groups don’t get the lowest unit rate. They pay top dollar.

The day after the election, the ride on all that political money ends.

Add that financial roller coaster to the continuing declines in audience levels, the continuing migration of ad dollars to digital, and the continuing debt service ownership groups must pay, and making the budget numbers work at most local TV stations for the next fiscal year isn’t just scary. It’s terrifying.

In that equation, cutting more costs is the only lever most operations can pull to deliver a positive outcome. And to quote the classic horror movie setup: “the call is coming from inside the house.”

Or, more precisely, the call for more cuts is coming from inside the company.

We’ve heard from several friends in leadership positions at stations across the country, and their stories sound pretty much the same. The first (or subsequent) pass in the budgeting process has ended with one message from corporate leadership: “Go back and make more cuts.”

And these cuts are deep ones. Not just freezing or eliminating positions. Everything from anchors learning to direct their own shows to videographers becoming full-time reporters. Hacking off weekend newscasts like a random arm or leg.

Talk about watching a bad “slasher” movie.

Stations in the top 50 markets are being told to find seven-figure amounts in budget savings. Smaller stations might be asked to cut fewer dollars, but that’s still a significant percentage of their annual operating costs. And this isn’t a new horror show; this script has been the same for years now.

Like in every bad horror movie, the quick fix is always the same: more blood. But we’re not talking about seeing more dyed corn syrup here.

With this plot in mind, we’d suggest that if you’re working in a local station, you take some pity on your News Director or General Manager, who is probably trying to hold on to their sanity through this brutal process. That assumes your station still has a General Manager in the building, rather than one who parachutes in about as often as Hollywood greenlights another Halloween sequel. (It seems that some groups decided that losing a GM salary might be a cut worth making.)

The next villain in the franchise? Perhaps the growing use of AI tools in the newsroom to fill all the holes this kind of endless cutting leaves behind. (Sorry, but we aren’t adopting the White House’s ordered rebranding to “Super Intelligence” here.) If you don’t think that could lead to some scary scenarios while trying to cover the news, think again.

We’d be less than honest if we didn’t ask whether 2027 is the year perennial fourth-place local TV stations will be killing off some—or all—of their newscasts for cheaper alternatives. (Not that there are that many to choose from.)

Halloween comes and goes in one night. This horror show could run all next year, and yes—the call for more cuts will still come from inside the house.

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And it will probably get worse before it gets better.

We say this coming to you from a relatively “blue” state, and even here it is just insane. We can’t even imagine what our readers in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina are being bombarded with.

If aliens were watching from somewhere in space, they would likely think the current President is on the ballot, even though his name will not appear in any of the fifty states. They would also have to believe socialists are on the ballot in every state, which, of course, they are not.

And they would have to wonder, as we do, just who makes up the political action committees with the titles of “(state residents) For Sanity”? Because little qualifies as sane about the messages the PACs are paying to run in nearly every campaign for any statewide office.

But believe it or not, we here at “The Topline” aren’t in the political predictions business, so this column isn’t really about the political landscape in 2026 or how it might change after Tuesday, November 3rd.

Instead, we’re here to share an observation that has struck us a few times while watching the countless political spots playing on our television set, and likely yours as well.

And that observation is that political messaging is about as crazy as it has ever been. Maybe even more than ever before. Given the state of the nation, the media, and public discourse in general, is anyone really surprised anymore?

We’ll admit we were surprised by one recent ad from Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate running against incumbent Republican Jon Husted. We’ll warn you this online version is NSFW, while they used a different, cleaner version on broadcast stations around the state.

And that brings us to our bigger point: Local television broadcasters should take a serious lesson about messaging from this political season—aside from the money they will take from the candidates and PACs buying up every scrap of airtime they can find. (In fact, it is getting so crazy out there that we have seen statewide races buying ads in national college football games, because it is apparently cheaper to go that route than trying to buy time in every local market in a state like Texas.)

We’ve said it here before, and we’ll say it again for the record. The vast majority of on-air marketing for the vast majority of local television stations is just crap—to put it more nicely than that guy in Sherrod Brown’s commercial did. It is tired and formulaic at best, or insulting and boring at worst.

Political ads with the candidate looking straight into the camera and promising to do this or that if they get elected, and anchors looking into the camera and telling viewers they are dedicated and proud to be part of this community and this news team, are equally ineffective. (That’s assuming your station even still has anchors in the first place. Some groups are turning anchors into endangered species.)

Your station should fight for viewers just as hard as candidates are fighting now for votes. The survival of some stations may truly be hanging in the balance.

Even as every station in a battleground state is reaping the windfall of unprecedented spending this election cycle, the real test is just ahead in 2027. It will be an off year for elections, and thus political spending will not be on the budget spreadsheet to keep the bottom line from looking like polling for any candidate endorsing a tax increase. The “feast and famine” cycle of ad dollars next year will lead not only to more budget tightening, but also to a good bit of sphincter tightening.

With viewership declining outside live sporting events, we just wonder when some clever local station leaders will air promotional messages that have more impact than the same tired slogans insurance companies have now adopted. (Progressive has pretty much ruined “Coverage you can count on” for any station now.)

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if a station committed to an actual campaign promise—and then documented how it delivered on that promise? If your station has the stones to still claim it is “Working for You,” then how about proving it? Let’s hear from actual viewers about how you worked for them.

We don’t expect any station to go so far as to call out its competition by name—but wouldn’t it be impactful if it did?

Some twenty years ago, one station in Terre Haute, Indiana (market #159) did just that.

WTWO, the local NBC affiliate in Terre Haute, called out cross-town rival and long-time market leader WTHI—the CBS affiliate there—in what can only be described as a 60-second attack ad posing as a station promo. WTWO’s promo took WTHI’s weather coverage to task, and specifically its weather radar. The WTWO commercial pointed out that because WTHI’s radar was physically located at the station in downtown Terre Haute, it was subject to a “dead zone” (the area directly around and above where the radar beam originates). This “dead zone” purportedly covered much of downtown Terre Haute. By contrast, because WTWO’s radar was located outside the city (near a cornfield), it better covered the area where most folks lived. WTWO even put up a website at dopplerdeadzone.com to explain the claim in detail. (Alas, the website is no longer available.)

Not content with that single attack, the WTWO promo went on to claim its weather team had years more experience than WTHI’s and questioned whether WTHI might have had a power failure during a recent major storm.

You can still watch this bold bit of broadcasting history right here—because everything lives forever on YouTube.

The commercial ended up being featured at the time (and not in a complimentary way) on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” (this was back when Jon was still working four days a week instead of just one). WTWO’s General Manager at the time, Duane Lammers, didn’t take too kindly to “The Daily Show” having fun with the commercial and called out the program, saying they must be “hard up for material” in a local newspaper interview.

Of course, that led to a second night of jokes at both Lammers’ and WTWO’s expense.

In an interesting bit of history, Nexstar owned WTWO at the time, and Lammers was also the company’s COO. A decade later, Nexstar would buy Media General, which then owned WTHI. Nexstar decided to keep WTWO and sell WTHI, even though the latter still had the better ratings.

So the brash commercial—and the subsequent controversy—didn’t suddenly propel WTWO’s ratings past WTHI, but it earned the station attention and, of course, got people talking. Maybe not all in a positive way, but as the old saying goes: “All publicity is good publicity.” (Also said as “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”)

And at the end of the day, that is exactly what a marketing message is supposed to do.

What we can tell you is that there is no shortage of local television stations that need some marketing breakthroughs to “get on the radar” of those still viewing in their respective markets.

Like all the candidates trying to win your vote this coming election day, these stations’ campaigns are running out of time. We hate to say it, but in the uncertain future of the local television business, more stations may not have a race to run in the next two to four years.

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So on this first Tuesday in October, under the newly christened name of “Skydance,” it is time to get down to the business of making this new company actually work.

Yesterday, the answers to questions about just who will run what in the new Skydance corporate food chain were announced. The biggest position was filled by newly named Co-CEO, Ynon Kreiz. Until last Friday, he was the CEO of toymaker Mattel, Inc., where he pushed for the “Barbie” movie to get made. Now he is sharing top leadership responsibilities with David Ellison himself.

The name we were following most closely was Mark Thompson, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of CNN, who was reportedly unsure whether the new owner wanted him to stay on. Thompson told his staff on Monday morning he had agreed to stay in his current role. (Though Oliver Darcy of Status reported last night that Thompson and other top CNN execs do not yet have a new contract in hand, and their current deals are set to run out next year.)

Those of us who have been following all the palace intrigue over who would end up leading CNN were also waiting to see what role the leader of Skydance’s other news organization, CBS News, would end up with in the rolled-up mega company. And it turns out that the network’s version of “Gozer the Destructor” in the form of its Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss, will apparently continue to do just what she has been doing, with her mission to turn “The House That Murrow Built” into something more palatable to the folks who felt it was just another liberal newsroom. So far, her moves haven’t been a roaring success.

Both Weiss and Thompson report to the Co-CEOs, and it is Kreiz who gets to handle day-to-day management and integration. The CNN and CBS News leadership will soon be holding countless meetings to plan the newly combined world they will all be working in. While we’ve seen that some media pundits have suggested that Skydance will be in no hurry to combine the two news operations, we think that is a lot of wishful thinking that may make their former colleagues feel a little less paranoid in the near term. Nothing in the consent decree reached with the state attorneys general restricts a combination of the two, and Thompson’s own memo to his staff conceded that the specifics of how CNN will operate inside the new company have yet to be finalized.

You see, the promises made in putting together the Warner Bros. and Paramount media empires were that a lot of money would be saved through that favorite term of corporate speak: Achieving Synergies. In plain English, that means combining similar efforts and expenses to save money and put those savings to the bottom line as quickly as possible. Skydance’s target is to find some $6 billion in “run rate synergies” within three years.

The newsgathering infrastructure between CBS and CNN overlaps significantly, from real estate to real people. A plan has to be devised to put the two organizations under the same roof as much as possible. One key example is considering the two networks’ newsroom footprints in New York City. Between CBS’s plant at the Broadcast Center on West 57th Street and CNN’s expansive operation at the Hudson Yards complex, there is room for a significant consolidation. (The people part comes with one wrinkle: the separate settlement with the Writers Guild, according to the guild, prohibits writer layoffs on the CBS News broadcast side for five years.)

We would imagine that the fight over which newsroom absorbs which will, much like when the Ghostbusters confront Gozer in the movie, be epic, even if it takes place mostly behind the scenes. Though with the amount of leaks there are in both organizations, the ugliness will probably end up detailed in various reports along the way.

Thompson may have the larger base, with the existing footprints in NYC and the major Techwood complex in Atlanta. Whether that is enough to override Weiss’s relationship (and political capital) with the Co-CEOs (or at least one of them) is the part worth getting out the popcorn for.

As if that weren’t all enough to keep everyone occupied for some time, there is also the very important challenge of charting the future for both news organizations in the world of digital media.

Neither CNN nor CBS has had massive success turning their legacy news brands into huge digital hits. With audiences for legacy television programming continually declining, becoming leaner and meaner while finding more eyeballs and ad dollars on their digital platforms will quickly come under the microscope. This is an area where CNN, under Thompson, has built something in the aftermath of David Zaslav’s shuttering of the network’s original “big bet” to create a digital winner with CNN+.

Though as a number of reports have noted, Mark Thompson is 69 years old. How much longer he wants to be doing this kind of work—especially if it involves skirmishes over what editorial independence each newsroom will have—may be the most watched element of this seemingly unavoidable turf war. The consent decree does give those skirmishes a referee: a five-journalist Editorial Independence Board that Skydance has 180 days to set up. Its members will be appointed by Skydance’s own board of directors, which David Ellison chairs.

We will spare you the recounting of Bari Weiss’s tumultuous first year at CBS News, which coincidentally is reaching its first anniversary today. The very same day that Skydance began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under its new symbol of SKYD.

Which should remind everyone that when all is said and done, the only thing that will ultimately matter in the upcoming forced marriage of CBS News and CNN is how much money they are contributing towards their parent company’s bottom line. The real Destructor here won’t be Bari Weiss or Mark Thompson. It will be a $6 billion synergy target. That’s the giant marshmallow man that will be stomping its way through everything.

Everything else is just a distraction.

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Aside from those responsibilities, the position required keeping a written log of everything that was played on the air, as well as taking readings from a pair of large transmitters that broadcast the station’s AM signal and its sister station on the FM dial. That second station delivered bland, orchestra-centric music that was not so charitably described as “The soundtrack of dentist offices all across the Lowcountry.” Also required during the work shift was routinely changing the large reels of magnetic tape on the primitive, analog automation system that delivered that music that could only be listened to by people over the age of 40.

Among all of this work was the need for the occasional “call of nature,” as one might politely put it. Given that the “Top 40” music being played on the AM station featured songs that ran an average of about three minutes each, and that each vinyl record had to be started manually, the timing of such trips down the hall to the restroom required no small amount of precision—and the occasional longer record to be played. (The expansive seven minutes and eleven seconds of The Beatles playing “Hey Jude” was a lifesaver in these situations.)

It was a busy six hours, with a lot to keep up with, along with the primary performance of being energetic and upbeat in front of the microphone. The shift flew by each night, and to this day, it is still the one job your editor enjoyed most in a long career in broadcasting.

This memory came flooding back to us when we saw a recent YouTube video from KRIV Houston anchor Caroline Collins. In it, she asks the provocative question: “Is this the future of Local News?” (Click the title to view the video.)

The video features Ms. Collins taking us “behind the scenes,” as it were, of her new role, where she is not only anchoring the station’s live stream but also (in her words) “playing director.” She then shows us the vast array of buttons, keyboards, and screens that are laid out before her. She explains that she uses all of these tools to show us various cameras, news stories, and commercials, of course—because something has to pay for all of this technology, and one might suppose her salary as well.

So let’s attempt to answer her question.

Is this role of having the people you see on camera presenting the local news now also responsible for operating all the technology that puts the images and sounds on the screen, the future of the news business? Are we now in the era of what we will label here, borrowing from our radio history, “the news jockey”?

Well, Caroline, to put it succinctly, yes. And the fact is that we have been for some time now.

As television news evolved through its early years and into “middle age” during, say, the 1980s, and as 24-hour news operations emerged, the technology used to put the news on television developed rapidly. By the next decade, digital video that could be acquired, edited, and played back from computers—rather than videotape machines—accelerated that development and reduced the number of people needed to create each newscast.

By the time we were all getting past our fears of Y2K calamities that never came to pass, early automation systems arrived that let fewer people operate a television control room and create a newscast. Technology has continued to accelerate, and in recent years someone (likely in management) asked the obvious question: “Why can’t those people who are on camera—just reading the news—also be punching the buttons to put themselves on the air?”

To be clear, KRIV’s Caroline Collins is not the first person to take on this role. We’ve been watching with interest as local stations across the country created newsroom workstations where one person can be a “news jockey” and put on their own show.

In watching this trend develop, we believe we first saw it at Nexstar’s WFLA-TV in Tampa, years ago. The station’s J.B. Biunno was a true pioneer in the space, creating live streaming content that he both anchored and directed in real time. He went on to create a “stream center” of his own design, where the station now produces daily interactive shows and extended live event coverage of all kinds. Its “Tracking the Tropics” coverage during hurricane season is “must-see TV” when a major storm is threatening landfall on the Gulf Coast.

Not long after Nexstar began rolling out the idea of installing “Stream Centers” across its local stations, fellow group broadcaster Gray Television began implementing its own version of in-newsroom setups that let a single person produce, direct, and anchor live news coverage or different programs on a range of topics. This same setup became the center of Gray’s “Local News Live” streaming channel, which originally featured live coverage and stories from across the 117 local markets where the group has television stations.

Lest one think this evolution occurred organically in the industry, the economics of these changes proved irresistible to companies looking to improve the bottom line and pay off the money borrowed to build these ever-growing groups of local television stations. Needing fewer people to run a newsroom lowers what’s typically one of the largest single expense lines in a local TV station’s operating budget.

So the more accurate answer to Ms. Collins’s question about whether this is the future of local news may be that it isn’t the future—it is already the present state of the art, and it is continuing to grow. Her station now uses its live streaming desk to originate two hours of its over-the-air programming each midday.

Much like our own early experience in radio, the work requires some key things from those who take it on. Preparation and organization are essential. You don’t just sit down at the controls and try to “drive” this kind of setup any more than you would sit down at the control panel of a nuclear power plant and ask, “I wonder what this button does,” as you push it.

In watching her video, we note that the setup at the Fox-owned station appears to be a relatively elaborate and expensive one from equipment maker Vizrt. We’ve seen simpler ones that seemed easier to operate for someone also appearing on camera at the same time. We can only guess this is being deployed across local Fox stations as they try to roll out a suite of technology that can accommodate as complex a production as they may need.

Also notable in the video is the lack of a tool many TV news anchors would expect to have whenever they appear on camera: a teleprompter. The lack of one in such a setup suggests the expectation is that the anchor will have to “ad-lib” their on-camera parts while orchestrating all the other elements that will go into the program.

This may be the proverbial silver lining of these “streaming desks.”

Without a word-for-word script, this new class of “news jockeys” will have to know the news of the day well enough to talk about it coherently, all the while “playing director,” as Ms. Collins put it. Those who attempt this position, which requires juggling so many tasks at once, will do so knowing the camera will immediately expose any lack of understanding of the story being covered in the moment.

We’ve seen examples across the spectrum of successfully operating as a news jockey in this “hot seat” of controlling so many things at the same time. We expect a whole new generation of talented people to take this seat in the future and succeed.

After all, if a 16-year-old kid could keep two radio stations on the air for six hours a night as the only person in the building, being a modern news jockey should be completely doable.

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A small epilogue, if you’ll allow: That 16-year-old kid only got the chance to do that job because one very generous man recognized his early passion. After hearing about the opportunity, he pushed him to apply and vouched for the kid with the radio station when he did. The career that followed likely wouldn’t have happened without that support, which he gave as the executive director of the local Junior Achievement program. Many thanks, Al Veeck, for doing all that you did for so many young people.

Unfortunately, a three-minute Picturephone call cost from 16 to 27 bucks at the time. That top rate would be near $300 in 2026 dollars. The technology didn’t catch on and faded into the same failed promises of the future—like those flying cars we are still waiting for.

We were reminded of the promise of the Picturephone because, like many folks, we have been consuming more podcasts as part of our regular media diet. Recent estimates from Edison Research put weekly podcast “consumption” at about 130 million Americans, a number that has grown year over year. Part of that growth is coming from people watching video versions of what were once audio-only productions, which is why Edison now measures “consumption” rather than “listening.”

Video podcasts seem to fall into a few different production styles. Many are still solo productions, featuring a single person, typically speaking directly to camera. Then there are the interview podcasts, which usually take one of two forms: an in-person exchange between two (or more) people, with the now-standard look of large microphones on those flexible arms visible in the camera shots. The other style features participants in different locations, connected by video conferencing technology. In these situations, the visible microphones are usually paired with visible headphones, giving the production a very “inside-the-studio” feel.

We point out this difference because interview quality can vary significantly depending on how it is conducted. When participants are in the same room, eye to eye, it feels much more like a conversation. But when participants are in separate locations, the interaction often feels very different, more like 1964’s Picturephone.

It all just lacks that crucial intimacy of speaking to another person face to face.

We think local TV newsrooms can take an important lesson from this.

During the COVID pandemic, television news had to quickly embrace video conferencing for doing interviews. Every newsroom leaned on the same Zoom and Teams calls that corporate America still uses for its countless daily meetings.

Alas, the pandemic ended, but the video call as a staple for news interviews didn’t.

We still see them throughout many local newscasts, and we think they’re worse for it.

Whether it’s a newscast or a podcast, the art of the interview demands that both parties be in the same place. Can you imagine the legendary Mike Wallace confronting someone via a Zoom call? Sure, a great reporter can conduct a tough interview via just about any means—but a silent stare after a waffling answer has a much different impact when done in person across a desk, rather than across the internet.

Of course, both government officials and public relations professionals have realized that only agreeing to a video call lets them manage the situation more easily and even end the interview on their own terms. They control everything from how they look to being able to dodge a question with the excuse, “Sorry, your audio cut out for a moment there.” And for the news reporters and MMJs with demands to produce an ever-increasing amount of content, opting for interviews that don’t require them to leave the newsroom—or even their home—can be an attractive alternative.

From our perspective, we would urge TV newsrooms to make such interviews the rare exception rather than the default method they have seemingly become. If there is absolutely no other way to do the interview in person, a video call is preferable to not getting an on-camera interview at all.

But for heaven’s sake, let’s please put some effort into making the quality of the thing as good as possible—at least on the newsroom end. We’ve seen too many reporters and anchors on their side of video calls look like they’re using a webcam made before Y2K. And the overhead fluorescent lighting in many newsrooms does no one’s face any favors.

Viewers are now somewhat forced to watch all video with a more discerning eye, if only to determine whether what they are watching is real—or something hallucinated by all of the AI tools that seem to get better by the day. So let’s not force them to question what it is they are seeing on the news.

Not too long ago, the radio giant iHeart started opening their podcasts with an announcer stating: “This is an iHeart Podcast…guaranteed human.” The first time we heard that disclaimer, we dismissed it as just some unnecessary branding puffery.

Now it sounds like a promise a listener—or a viewer—might come to depend on.

Like they used to on their local news.

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OK, let’s stop right there and make it clear that the preceding paragraph is a complete work of fiction. Well, Mike Tomlin is currently working with the announcing crew for NBC’s Sunday Night Football, so that one part is true. But as far as we are aware, there is no plan to have him—or anyone else—coach two NFL teams at the same time.

That would just be ludicrous.

So consider this update from our friend and “industry insider” Rick Gevers, who reported earlier this week that Jesse Williams is taking over as News Director for Scripps’ KMGH-TV in Denver. She will also oversee the newsrooms of sister Colorado stations KOAA/KKTV in Colorado Springs and KKCO in Grand Junction.

Is this move any less ludicrous?

We don’t know Ms. Williams personally, but by all accounts, she is a solid newsroom leader. She is moving to the position in Colorado after a successful run as the Senior Director of News at Scripps’ KTNV in Las Vegas. (What is it with the seemingly endless ways to title the position of the person leading a local station’s news department?)

But no matter how talented she is, dividing her attention between news operations in markets #17, 87, and 187 is a tough ask. (Hopefully no coin flips will be involved in determining her schedule.) Depending on where in the Denver metro she lives, the drive to Colorado Springs is only an hour or so, depending on traffic. But the hop over to Grand Junction is more like four hours by car—assuming that’s her mode of transportation. (Alas, KMGH ditched its news helicopter some years ago, so that’s not available for a quick flight over to KKCO.)

Maybe she can travel with her boss? Scripps recently installed a new “regional leadership structure” across its local television markets and named Kathleen Choal as a “regional general manager” based in Denver at KMGH, but also overseeing the stations in both Colorado Springs and Grand Junction.

One key difference in these new “leadership structures” at Scripps is that there will no longer be a local general manager position in either Colorado Springs or Grand Junction. But according to the report from Rick Gevers mentioned earlier, both markets will still have news directors.

We assume that this will make Ms. Williams’ new title something snazzy like “Senior Director of News Directors.”

And we’re not the only ones confused by all of this change inside of Scripps. One industry veteran recently asked us the pointed question about the Cincinnati-based owner of some 60 local stations: “Does anyone know what the hell they are thinking over there?”

We certainly don’t claim to understand whatever is passing for strategy in the halls of the Scripps tower overlooking the Ohio River these days.

The obvious assessment is that these moves are ultimately driven by the pressure to meet tighter financial goals. But it can’t be that simple, can it? Sure, one general manager is less expensive than three different ones (assuming, of course, you aren’t paying the one as much as the three combined were making)

And Scripps CEO Adam Symson has a direct financial incentive to cut costs wherever he can. According to its SEC filing, when the company extended Symson’s employment agreement earlier this year, it included a performance-based cash award of up to $10 million if certain metrics are achieved. That figure is on top of his annual salary of $1.4 million and an additional annual bonus of up to 175% of that amount.

(We also note that the company also agreed to reimburse Symson up to $50,000 for “attorney’s fees incurred while negotiating his employment agreement.” We might suggest that any on-air folks working for Scripps ask for that same benefit in their next negotiation, but we don’t want to see them get laughed out of the room.)

All in, that is a solid compensation package for the leader of a corporation that has seen its stock tumble from around $15 a share when he took over in 2017 to under $3 a share when trading closed as we wrote this column. Our trusty TI-84 calculator, left over from taking the SATs many years ago, puts that at an 80% drop in value.

Of course, the entire broadcast industry has been slammed by an unprecedented change in its business model. Ad revenues and audience sizes have fallen faster than anyone could have predicted nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Symson was elevated to President and CEO, despite never having once been a general manager at a local television station.

Speaking of General Managers, Scripps is still looking for one of those “Regional General Managers” to lead its stations in, of all places, Cincinnati (WCPO) and Cleveland (WEWS). But because leading two teams at the same time isn’t challenging enough, whoever takes that position will also have to be regularly traveling a bit further north up Interstate 90, because they will also be managing Buffalo’s WKBW.

So you’d have to cheer for the Browns, the Bengals, and the Bills all at the same time? Even a coach as great as Mike Tomlin wouldn’t take that big of a challenge on.

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Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, are probably still very happy to finally land the prize they have been pursuing for over a year. They first had to fight off Netflix, which appeared to be the initial winner in the bidding, before ratcheting up their offer and winning that fight this past February.

The federal government signed off on the deal relatively quickly, no surprise given the personal and political relationships between the Ellisons and the Trump White House. (Yeah, that’s the same “People’s House” that CNN, the network Paramount is about to acquire, has been banned from. More on that in a moment.) Along the way, the Ellisons picked up a 49.5% foreign investment backing their offer, primarily from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. The Brendan Carr-led FCC had no problem signing off on that aspect of the deal.

But California’s Attorney General, Rob Bonta—who was apparently seeking his own political future—sued to block the Paramount-WBD deal. He was ultimately joined by a group of other state AGs, all of whom claimed to be seeking “structural remedies” before they would allow the deal to proceed.

Many people assumed that would result in some divestitures from the combined media giants. Based on the few “concessions” Paramount agreed to in the settlement, many people will be disappointed. (And somehow it got done just before that nasty $7 Million-a-day “ticking” fee was set to start ringing up.)

In the end, the California AG appears to have caved as political pressure on him increased, and as Bloomberg News reported, he found himself isolated. For its part, Paramount had recently made louder noises that it might move its Southern California headquarters to that other movie-making capital of the nation—Nashville, Tennessee?

While the realistic chances of that happening seemed low, the threat alone got Bonta’s phone ringing with calls from the Mayor’s office in LA to the Governor’s office in Sacramento, and then a growing chorus of tech titans from Silicon Valley. The movie-making industry, and in turn the people who work in it, have been hurting badly in and around Hollywood. The mere threat of moving vans pulling up to the famous Paramount Studios gate was ultimately enough to get AG Bonta willing to settle for some promises not to move, make at least 30 movies a year, separate some distribution deals for cable networks and, perhaps most insignificantly of all, appoint something called an “independent editorial board” to resolve issues at CNN and CBS News.

Yeah, that definitely qualifies as a “Structural remedy.” One likely to be as effective as the stuff they use to patch potholes in the middle of winter. Did you know that CBS News already has an “editorial ombudsman”?

We didn’t either.

But we’re going to suggest that the biggest loser from this settlement getting done isn't located in California, New York, or any other state whose Attorney General wanted to block this deal.

No, the individual we’re thinking of lives in Texas. And his name is Perry Sook.

Nexstar’s Chairman and CEO is also involved in a lawsuit with the California AG. Rob Bonta brought the legal action to unwind Nexstar’s rapidly approved and closed merger with rival broadcast group TEGNA.

And the hand that Sook and Nexstar now hold at the high-stakes table to get a deal done to fully absorb TEGNA and its TV stations—is seemingly far weaker than the one the Ellisons had.

For one thing, Nexstar owns local television stations in nearly every market in California, including Los Angeles (#2) and San Francisco (#9), as well as San Diego, Sacramento, Fresno, and Bakersfield. TEGNA also has stations in San Diego and Sacramento, which would give the merged company multiple stations in those two markets. Nexstar’s corporate headquarters are in a Dallas suburb, while TEGNA’s are in a Washington, DC suburb.

Thus, Mr. Sook and company don’t really have a “give us what we want, or we’ll move” threat to play here. That’s aside from making some insignificant relocation threat—like maybe moving some CW network work out of California. We also don’t think a promise to produce more local news will appease Mr. Bonta.

Worse for Nexstar’s prospects is the growing backlash now facing the California Attorney General for agreeing to—what many already see as what one industry insider in the Golden State labeled it: “A very weak-ass deal”— to settle with Paramount and the Ellisons, before heading to trial.

We wouldn’t be surprised to see AG Bonta suddenly become very unwilling to find any way to settle with Nexstar before the parties are scheduled to arrive in a US District Court courtroom in Sacramento next summer.

At least not without some actual “structural remedies” being found.

Meanwhile, there’s another Federal lawsuit we need to explore: the aforementioned CNN, along with MS Now and Politico, sued the Trump administration over the weekend. Their action is over the President’s “ban” on those three media outlets from being in the White House, let alone even being on the grounds.

The reason for their “ban,” as given by the President: Their continued reporting of what he deems to be “fake news.” An activity that has been absolutely protected by something in the First Amendment to the Constitution for nearly 235 years.

The action raised questions that dominated industry conversations over the weekend about what would happen as the ban took effect. CNN is a key part of the “TV Pool” that covers the President wherever he goes. What’s ironic about the network being prevented from fulfilling its role in the Pool is that the then-nascent Cable News Network actually had to bring a lawsuit back in 1981 to be permitted to be part of the TV Pool. At the time, it was the exclusive group of the three major broadcast TV networks’ news divisions. CNN won that lawsuit and became a permanent part of the pool in 1982.

But the real drama centered on just what all the other TV networks would do in light of the ban covering their fellow news organizations and members of the White House Correspondents Association. That is the same WHCA that held its delayed annual dinner that the President attended for a second time back in July, after the initial event was disrupted by a lone man who attempted to breach a security checkpoint manned by the Secret Service.

In a rare show of solidarity, nearly all major news organizations chose not to cover the President’s appearances on Monday with video, both in Washington and later in New York City. Even print outlets withheld still photos of those events until late in the day.

Whether this “mini-blackout” of the President’s public sightings will matter to the man who first built his public, then political persona, in the center of the intense coverage of the media that he now demeans and often sues at the slightest whim, remains to be seen.

It seems to us, as was noted in a few places this Monday, like rather odd behavior from the very man who has taken an oath (on two different occasions) that states “I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

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Ultimately, we didn’t make the trip.

So, color us quite happy to learn that Status recorded video of the interviews conducted last Wednesday during the summit. We have been finding time over the past weekend and into the new week to watch the videos posted on their YouTube channel.

Let’s make our overall verdict clear right now: there are some really interesting moments in these sessions, and anyone interested in the current state—and the future of—the business of news should really take the time to watch them.

If you can only watch one, let us recommend the session with tech journalist and apparent queen of podcasting, Kara Swisher, who brought her incisive observations and scorching wit to the event. Swisher talked about everything, including her very public stance that she will leave CNN should Paramount-Skydance ever become its owner. That’s not an empty threat; the Cable News Network is where she has been doing the series “Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever.” We’d argue it is one of the most interesting things on the network (and its digital platforms) since Anthony Bourdain created original content for them.

We also enjoyed watching former network news anchorman, Brian Williams, and his longtime producing colleague Jonathan Wald appear together on the Status Summit stage. “BriWi,” as he was dubbed along the way, was pretty candid about the state of the television news business, saying that he was “glad to be clear of the blast radius.” He meant the proverbial “bomb” that has fallen on the business he worked in for some 40-plus years, the last 23 of them at NBC and then MSNBC (now MS NOW). The interplay between the Anchor and his Producer was fun to watch in real time. Williams admitted he still watches the 11 pm local news each night because of “muscle memory.” (He did not mention that part of his motivation for watching the local CBS-owned station in New York City might be to see his son, Doug Williams, who is an anchor and reporter there.)

Speaking of CBS-owned stations that we have known and worked at (we spent two tours at WCBS-TV earlier in our career, one of those overlapped with the aforementioned Mr. Williams, senior), we come to another guest who appeared on the Status summit stage, the former CEO and President of CBS News and Stations, and apparently now an industry gadfly, Wendy McMahon.

It was McMahon, during her tenure from 2021 to 2025, who decided to roll up the storied network news unit with the company’s 28 local television stations across 17 major markets in the United States. Part of that combination was the decision to largely drop any local identity those stations had built over their history and abdicate their branding, becoming outposts of the network’s news division under the banner of “CBS News New York,” for example. (Substituting the specific location in place of NY.)

Fortunately, as we first reported last week, we have some hope that this “brilliant” decision is finally perhaps being unwound.

Ms. McMahon’s turn on the stage inside “The Times Center,” where the Status summit was held, began with an indeterminately long bit of her going on about the event’s host, Oliver Darcy, who was sitting next to her and just wanted to get to interviewing her. He graciously accepted the overwrought compliments and acknowledged the story that McMahon opened with, detailing that she had been “on standby” the entire day, just in case an announced guest was late or didn’t show up at all.

We would come to wish that Ms. McMahon had suffered the same fate that befalls Matt Damon at the end of each edition of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” where the host claims that “we’ve run out of time” and ironically apologizes to Damon—who was never booked in the first place.

If only the audience at The Times Center had been so fortunate.

What Ms. McMahon had to say was interesting and occasionally actually important. She was in the center of the CBS “eye” during the end of the Shari Redstone ownership years, before David Ellison’s Skydance Media (backed by his father’s millions) acquired Paramount, which owned CBS amongst its assets.

But her efforts to position herself as a champion of the free press, and most specifically the “protector” of the legacy of the news operation and, more specifically, its storied “60 Minutes” franchise, were more than a little hard to swallow.

At least with a good cocktail.

McMahon demurred when asked about the woman who succeeded her as the leader of CBS News, saying only that she “doesn’t know Bari Weiss.” But she added that she really isn’t a fan of what seems to be happening since she left the CBS Broadcast Center for the last time in May of 2025. Her departure was widely reported to be necessary for Shari Redstone to get approval, both from the Trump administration and the President himself, for her sale of Paramount, and, in turn, CBS, to Skydance. As you may recall, the 47th President was suing “60 Minutes” on the dubious claim that the newsmagazine had “unfairly” edited an interview in October of 2024 with his then-Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Executive Producer of the program at the time, the well-respected Bill Owens, had already resigned in protest over the “corporate pressure” for the newsmagazine to acknowledge it had made an error and agree to settle the President’s lawsuit.

Now, Wendy McMahon wants you to know that she was always fighting for the editorial independence of both CBS News and “60 Minutes” during her time leading the news division, the owned stations division, and the TV program syndication division. She took the opportunity to point out to the live audience that her final year in her job could be described in terms that one might attribute to a figure like the late Katherine Graham, the storied publisher of The Washington Post.

“Look, my last year at CBS News stations and media ventures was largely spent defending, protecting, standing up for, and oftentimes fighting for the editorial independence of 60 Minutes. Um, I am proud to say that no stories were killed, no shows were preempted, and I think it was one of the most consequential seasons in 60 Minutes history. And not just because of what happened, but because of the storytelling and the journalism and the reporting that was produced.”

Within seconds, responding to a direct question from Oliver Darcy about how often she was over at “60 Minutes” offices to be “involved with the editorial,” McMahon said plainly, “I didn’t.” It seemed to us that she believed this distinguished her from the actions of current CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who has reportedly been quite involved with the widely reported revamping and recasting of the program over the past few months.

And speaking of that revamp, word as we go to press is that the not-very-dramatically-changed “60 Minutes” debuted this past Sunday for its 59th season with a 21% smaller viewing audience, as only 7.94 million people tuned in—even with a solid NFL Sunday football lead-in. That figure will likely draw significant scrutiny, especially if it takes the program out of its usual position as the most-watched (non-sports) TV program of the week.

Wendy McMahon’s appearance at The Status Summit had a lot more to unpack, and we’d recommend watching the full video if you’re interested and have the time. We’ll link to it here on YouTube. But the one other thing that stretched our credulity was her statement that she is surprised that other broadcasting companies haven’t come to the defense of the ABC Owned and Operated Stations (which McMahon herself used to lead before 2021, when she left to take the job at CBS). The 8 ABC O&Os are now under what is called an “early license review” at the Federal Communications Commission. The review is allegedly to determine whether those stations are still “acting in the public interest” and should be allowed to keep their licenses.

The obvious reason is that Disney owns the stations and the ABC network. The latter has kept Jimmy Kimmel and his late-night talk show on the air, despite the President of the United States, along with his attack-dog FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, not being fans of the program’s host or his monologues.

McMahon rattled off a roll call of NBC and CBS, along with local station owners Gray, Nexstar, Scripps, Sinclair, and “the list that goes on and on” of other companies that have yet to speak up in the defense of the ABC-owned stations. The fact that she would include Sinclair among the companies that would support ABC in this fight suggests her understanding of the current reality of the television business is nonexistent. (A reminder that Sinclair, along with Nexstar, pulled Kimmel’s show off its stations over his single critical joke in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September of 2025. They returned his 11:35 pm program to their stations, but only after he was suspended and expressed his regrets when he returned to the network.)

Our skepticism here can be summarized with this single assertion: If Wendy McMahon were still running the CBS News and Stations unit, instead of advising the newsletter-publishing platform Beehiiv, she would not have a damn thing to say about the patently unfair—and clearly political—retribution they are currently fighting. Like those other media companies she called out from the stage last Wednesday, she would be more worried about her TV stations staying in business than about becoming the next targets of a bullying FCC.

Because, to quote a former famous face of CBS News, “that’s the way it is.”

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September 11th, 2001.

Some other occasions rise to that level of memory. November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas and then April 4th, 1968, in Memphis. There’s July 20th, 1969, at Tranquility Base and January 28th, 1986, over the Atlantic. The shock of April 20th, 1999, at a high school in Columbine, and the horror of December 14th, 2012, at an elementary school in Sandy Hook.

December 7th, 1941 should be among these dates as well, though that happened before most of us were born—much the way 9/11 happened before most now in their first job were.

What connects 9/11/01 and 11/22/63 specifically, in our memory, is that on both occasions we remember exactly where we were—and what happened next.

We found the nearest television screen and watched as two of the darkest moments in our nation’s 250 years unfolded, in real time. The first filmed pictures from Dealey Plaza took hours to reach the country. The pictures from lower Manhattan arrived instantly.

But the instinct was the same both times: we learn that something incomprehensible has happened, and then we see it for ourselves. On television.

We watch. In horror. In disbelief. In anger. In shock. That instinct is the actual subject of this column, not just nostalgia for its own sake. (We would direct you to Tom Jones of The Poynter Institute for an excellent look at the stories looking back at that fateful day a quarter-century ago.)

And so, “submitted for your approval” (with apologies to the scripts of Rod Serling) is our inquiry here today: Is television’s time, as the place the nation turns to in “the fateful hours” after the unthinkable happens, now in the past? Or is that role just slipping away, one bad quarter at a time?

Those who work in television newsrooms, on both the local and national level, know the editorial agenda changes day to day, sometimes hour to hour. Some days the lead story is obvious. Other days it takes real struggle to find and deliver it.

And then there are the days that unfold as “a date which will live in infamy,” as Roosevelt called it—the days journalists exist for, when delivering the first draft of history—in real time—is the whole job.

For a significant and growing share of the audience, the television screen isn’t their first screen anymore. It often isn’t even the second. And that matters more on a day like this one than it does on an ordinary Tuesday, because the value of a news operation was never really about the other 364-odd days of the year. It was about being ready—fully staffed and resourced—for the one day nobody sees coming.

Which is what makes the industry’s current trajectory so uncomfortable to sit with today of all days. Being in the news business has never been cheap, and running a network or a local station hasn’t been the lucrative operation it used to be—for quite a while now. Every week brings word of another media company trying to cut its way to success—slashing staff and budget, and ultimately having fewer resources for exactly the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that is only demanded once or twice a decade, and that nobody notices the absence of — until the moment they need it and it isn’t there.

Twenty-five years ago, a fully staffed newsroom with deep institutional memory and the resources to go wall-to-wall with coverage for days on end was assumed. Twenty-five years ago, digital media was still in its infancy. Writing for Vanity Fair, David Friend suggests that the events of September 11th helped spawn “The Digital Media Era.”

Twenty-five years from now, on whatever next date earns its own place in history, will it still be? That’s the uncomfortable part—not that anything has been fully lost yet, but that the infrastructure we’ll need is being quietly dismantled.

So we’ll ask it plainly, on the anniversary itself rather than around it: when the next “date which will live in infamy” arrives in this country, will there still be television newsrooms capable of covering it?

Or will we be left to turn to the cacophony of voices on social media, spewing rumors and opinions and posing them as facts?

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Speaking of memories, we were reminded of a strong one over the weekend in the viewing of a particular network-owned station who appears to be quietly bringing back some branding from its once-glorious past.

Perhaps, a small but notable revolution could be getting underway.

The station in question is New England’s oldest, CBS-owned and operated WBZ-TV. When we dialed up their live stream late last week we saw the station utilizing its recently unveiled “virtual reality” set for its weather presentation in a newscast. Frankly, the whole “VR” thing is a bit of a yawner now, and the quality of the deployments across the CBS-owned stations that have built them is frankly, uneven and unexciting—at best.

But we noticed a couple of small changes while watching the ‘BZ live stream on our 85-inch television set, and we snapped a quick picture to make sure we weren’t hallucinating that it was forty years ago and the year was somehow 1986.

Behind the meteorologist is something that hasn’t made an appearance on the station in quite some time. It is that distinctive looking numeral “4” and the typeface for the letters “WBZ” that appear below it. That “look” hasn’t been on the air in decades, since not long after WBZ’s original owner, Westinghouse, took over all of CBS in 1995. That’s when WBZ, which had signed on the air as Boston’s NBC affiliate, became a CBS affiliate. (It had originally followed WBZ Radio’s longtime relationship with NBC as its radio affiliate there since the early 1930’s).

Westinghouse was a broadcasting industry leader from its launch of the nation’s first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh back in 1920, straight through to the company’s acquisition of CBS some 75 years later. In 1963, the industrial conglomerate moved to separate its broadcast holdings from the larger electrical manufacturing business, and so it rebranded “Westinghouse Broadcasting” into the catchier “Group W” as shorthand. Around the same time, it adopted a unique looking typeface, with sharp angles and deep grooves, that would be used across the broadcasting company and all of its radio and television properties, including WBZ in Boston.

After some research, we believe the name of the original “Group W” type designer has been lost to history. (If someone has better information, please do let us know.) The modern day typeface that is called “Anklepants” is a relatively faithful recreation of the original design, but it isn’t exactly the same in all aspects.

Why our obsession about something as specific as a typeface?

To be honest, we are somewhat nerdy about graphic design in general, and when we started our career in broadcasting, the Group W stations were known as some of the best in the business. WBZ-TV had been Boston’s dominant local station for news for decades at that point, and the station’s logo had been in place for well over a decade. (This was unusual because many stations changed their “look” multiple times in the decades they had been on the air at that point.) WBZ-TV stuck with the Group W typeface “4” for nearly 30 years, before ultimately ditching it for the first in a series of CBS mandated rebranding efforts since the mid-1990s.

The latest of those efforts arrived just three years ago. In 2023, the CBS News and Stations unit—under then President & CEO Wendy McMahon—decided to make all of the network’s owned stations extensions of the “CBS News” division, turning the long standing local brands into the more generic “CBS News (location)”. This turned WBZ 4 into “CBS News Boston” and relegated the historic three letter call sign into a small black and white box in the lower left corner of the television screen. The number “4” was erased from the station altogether. (In other markets with CBS-owned and operated stations, they were given the option of retaining either just their call letters or their channel number with the CBS “eye” logo attached.)

But this recent return, however subtle, of the historic “Group W” look to WBZ-TV may mean something more significant than just a nostalgic nod to the station’s history. In the photo above, there is another small clue of perhaps a more significant break with the network. One that seems to elevate local identity over the corporate one that has become so prevalent in the industry these days.

In the lower left of the photo, at the beginning of what is known as “the lower third” graphic along the bottom of the screen, you’ll note that it no longer says “CBS News Boston” as it did when we last saw the station a few months ago. Now, it shows “WBZ News Boston” along with a strategic CBS “eye” next to the WBZ call letters.

To us, that represents a potential major change in marketing strategy.

It signals that in the Boston television market, the importance of the WBZ brand is far more positive than that of “CBS News.” And these days, there should be little wonder as to why that might be true. Given the havoc that the 2025 arrival of owner Skydance, with its hungry-to-build-a-media-empire CEO David Ellison and his hand-picked leader for CBS News, Bari Weiss, have brought to “The House that Murrow Built,” there hasn’t been a lot that’s resonated with the audience. Both the network’s morning and evening news are distant thirds (or worse) in the network ratings battle. And everyone is holding their collective breaths to see what Ms. Weiss and her errand boy Nick Bilton with bring forth with their remake of “60 Minutes” when it debuts its 59th season this coming Sunday evening.

In the face of all that, it would be understandable that someone in the WBZ-TV studios on Soldiers Field Road in the Allston-Brighton section of Boston might want to recapture some of the greatness of channel 4 from decades past, while maybe tamping down the station being the local face of the crumbling CBS News legacy. But what makes the move a little more complicated is that WBZ-TV is overseen by “President and Regional General Manager” Johnny Green, who is actually based in CBS’s New York City headquarters, where he also oversees WCBS-TV, the CBS Owned station there.

Mr. Green would know the legacy at WBZ-TV first hand, he was the station’s news director from 2016 to 2020, before rising to a corporate position with CBS. During his time in Boston, CBS would sell off all of its radio stations in 2017, including WBZ radio at 1030 on the AM dial, to Entercom—which is now known as Audacy. But to get the deal approved by the FCC, Entercom had to sell off some stations. (This is back when the FCC actually cared about one company owning too many broadcast stations, something that isn’t much of an issue for the commission today.) Thus WBZ was among a handful of stations that were spun off to iHeart Radio, the largest owner of radio stations in the country.

Back to the present, we suspect that these changes that may be taking place at WBZ-TV are being done with the knowledge of its mostly-out-of-town leader. Though we also suspect that the experienced Johnny Green has limited how far the station can dig into the archives and bring back its past, until it either sees some significant positive results to justify those changes or someone at the network level realizes that there may be a small revolution brewing up in Boston.

And not one involving any kind of beer.

Of course, if there was any place you would want to start a real revolution, Boston would seem to be the best place to do so.

After all, the place has some notable experience with them.

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Three things come immediately to mind, and while at first read they may not seem related, we think there may be, at the very least, a thread that runs through all of them.

And that thread deserves some recognition and appreciation.

The first item arrived this past Thursday afternoon, when reports began to emerge that Maria Bartiromo of Fox News (and its sister channel, Fox Business News) was out of her job at the Murdoch-family-owned networks. Bartiromo, who started in TV news as a producer at CNN, came to the public eye over a 20-year career at the business and finance-oriented network CNBC, which she joined in 1993. She became famous for both her anchoring and her appearance, but Bartiromo was no empty designer suit. She was the first reporter to ever go live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and she was known as a tough interviewer of business leaders of all stripes.

She left CNBC to join Fox News in 2014, and like many of the faces on the network, Bartiromo expressed more political views in her on-air appearances. She notably became a supporter of President Trump during his first term in office, and she was criticized for being a friendly and unchallenging interviewer of the 45th and now 47th President. Her statements after the 2020 presidential election made her a central figure in both the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits against Fox News; the Dominion case was settled for about $787 million, and the network was forced to air on-air acknowledgments that it broadcast false statements about Dominion’s voting systems. The latter lawsuit by Smartmatic is still pending in the courts.

The always reliable Status newsletter first reported last night that the events leading up to Bartiromo’s surprising defenstration from Fox News were centered around charges that she disobeyed directions from network management to “steer clear of giving credence to” claims made in a July primetime address by Mr. Trump, during which he made multiple unproven claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election and potential involvement from China. Bartiromo is also accused of going so far as to directly share with the White House the specific details of the network’s directive to her and other senior on-air figures to avoid any coverage of the debunked claims the President had presented.

This disclosure of confidential company information would have likely violated her employment agreement. It was apparently the final straw which led to her termination, likely with the direct approval of News Corporation founder Rupert Murdoch. Status speculates on what we immediately thought: whether Ms. Bartiromo might now be considered for the currently open position of White House Press Secretary.

Journalistic ethics were the focus of a second story on Thursday, when a report from The New York Times-owned sports website The Athletic was published. Andrew Marchand, the veteran sports media columnist, reported on the publication’s review of the work by its former NFL “Insider” Dianna Russini. Russini, as you may remember, resigned from The Athletic back in April, following a suspension that was triggered by the publication of a series of pictures by The New York Post’s “Page Six” that captured Russini and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel together at an Arizona resort. The pictures called into question the relationship between the coach and the reporter, who had covered him and his teams for years.

The Athletic’s findings were that Russini was “noncompliant” with the editorial standards of the news organization, primarily because she never disclosed the relationship with Vrabel to her superiors at The Athletic. But the publication was specific in pointing out that it “neither completed an investigation nor reached any conclusion about the nature of the full relationship between Vrabel and Russini.”

Ultimately, The Athletic reviewed all of Dianna Russini’s work and decided to attach “editor’s notes” to a small number of Russini’s reporting, both in text and in videos, that specifically reference Vrabel in some fashion. For her part, the currently unemployed Russini issued only this statement for Marchand’s report: “I stand by any and all reporting I’ve ever done in my career.” (She was employed as an NFL reporter by ESPN from 2015 to 2023, before joining The Athletic in September of 2023.)

For his part, Mike Vrabel initially denied any inappropriate or personal relationship with Dianna Russini when the first photos were published. He later announced that he was entering counseling after a 2020 photo emerged showing the two kissing in a bar. The Athletic acknowledged that its review found that “Russini’s work was seldom reliant on Vrabel as a source or a subject.” It added: “But, of course, the appearances surrounding her relationship with Vrabel undermine our audience’s confidence in her impartiality.”

As of the time we are publishing this, Mike Vrabel continues as the head coach of the Patriots and says he is focused only on the start of the team’s regular season.

Our final item in this trio of stories about women in journalism concerns the passing of a figure who some would strongly suggest paved the way for the previous two to have their careers.

We learned on Thursday that journalist and activist Gloria Steinem passed away on September 2nd. To capture the full scope of her life and her leadership of the modern feminist movement would take many more paragraphs than we have available here. We would point you to the excellent summary of her life and achievements on Wikipedia and her obituary in The New York Times. (That’s a free link to their article.)

What we will offer—as men who came of age at the same time that Steinem rose as a leading voice in the fight for women’s rights and equality in society—is that she undoubtedly deserves her place in the small, but crucial group of journalists whose work, both on the printed page and in the industry itself, changed the course of the nation.

Her co-founding of Ms. magazine in 1971 sought to, as the Times put it so precisely, “capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.” In the clear light of reviewing the history of the five-and-a-half decades that followed, it is clear that she succeeded in many respects.

Though we would be quick to add that far too many aspects of our culture in this area still need to be acknowledged and addressed.

Amongst the best personal tributes to Gloria Steinem we’ve seen came from MS NOW anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who said on the network: “If it was not for Gloria Steinem, I would not be in this chair.”

We suspect that many women, not only in journalism, but in all walks of life, might echo those sentiments.

Hopefully, Maria Bartiromo and Dianna Russini are among them.

Gloria Steinem was 92 years old.

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And while we hate to generalize, most of what local TV news people put out on social media looks like what a high school audio-visual squad might create. No, wait—that’s insulting to the high school kids, as we have seen many schools with better set-ups— and certainly better-looking video—than some local TV stations.

In the industry’s rush to cut costs at every turn, many experienced and talented folks who carried and stood behind the cameras have been pushed out of jobs by the now-annual cycles of budget slashing and staff reductions. In turn, everyone else has been forced to become their own photographers.

And let’s be kind here and say that the results have been…mixed, at best.

Holding your smartphone and filling the screen with your face while walking through the station parking lot only makes for a decent hostage video. It does not make for a very watchable experience. Especially when you are supposed to be part of an organization that does “broadcast quality” video on a daily basis.

Even the leading YouTube, TikTok, and Insta creators have figured out that spending some time making their reels look professional has a real impact on the number of views they get for each video. The folks with the most followers take no small amount of time and care (and increasingly no small amount of money) to make their productions look their very best.

Even if it is just one person speaking into a smartphone camera in their basement.

But don’t worry, we come with more than just our disdain for what a veteran photographer we used to work with always called “some piss poor video.” We actually have someone who can help you up your game when it comes to making those moving pictures look so much better.

His name is Chris Goor. He was a video cameraman for the BBC, among other outlets, for over 25 years. Based on his accent, we think that checks out. But based on his knowledge and what he has to share, we believe that everyone who ever pushes the big red button on the video app on their smartphone (or any other video camera) needs to listen to him.

You see, Mr. Goor has a lot to teach you about being a much better creator of video, from the standpoint of being both behind and in front of the camera lens. His lessons are compact, easy enough to follow, and in our humble opinion, essential.

And did we mention that they are free?

His YouTube channel is titled “Brand Video Pro,” and you should look it up and start watching it at your earliest opportunity. Like right now.

We’d point you first to his latest video, which is titled “This One Change Makes It Look Like A Crew Filmed You.” If you shoot any video for any kind of purpose, take the nine minutes and five seconds to become a much better creator. It’s that important.

Want to be better on camera? Chris has a video for you on that very subject with the provocative title of “I Filmed 1,000s of Presenters. The Confident Ones All Did This.” His observations and advice are, as folks in the UK like to say, “bang on” and they will definitely help you become a much better photographer and/or presenter. (A quick reminder that “Presenter” is just the formal British term for most anyone who appears on camera.)

We don’t know Mr. Goor personally, and we sure don’t get anything from recommending him to you. However, if we still were leading a local TV newsroom, we would mandate that everyone watch a selection of his videos as soon as humanly possible.

Then practice what he preaches.

When he’s not producing content on YouTube, Chris Goor runs a coaching business at Brandvideo.pro. There’s no shortage of people online promising to teach content creation these days, but his stuff is straightforward enough that we’d gladly hand him money. One problem: “The Studio” isn’t taking new members. Waitlist only. So the free YouTube content is what you’ve actually got access to — good news is, there’s plenty of it.

Oh, did we mention he does all this with just a smartphone as the primary video camera in his standard “kit”? He helpfully details all the gear he uses in this video: “A TV Camerman’s Kit List for Great Video Content.”

We can hear your skepticism already.

Fine, don’t take our advice. Just hope that someone working at your competition hasn’t already read this article and is already watching these videos. Because while your social media will continue to be just so-so, they will be producing videos that get all the views you were looking for in the first place.

Don’t say we didn’t try to help you out with that.

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(And it’s not their decision to give the ever-frenetic, high-volume mouthpiece Pat McAfee even more airtime on the sports network.)

No, we are talking about the network’s decision to drop its ubiquitous “BottomLine” score “ticker” from all college football games in the upcoming season.

Ryan Glasspiegel reports the exclusive for the industry website, Front Office Sports. In his story, an ESPN spokesperson confirms the decision to drop what television viewers recognize as that lower line of rotating text information (and often commercial messages, too) that persists while watching almost any live sports or news programming.

To which we would say, “It’s about time.” And perhaps add a sincere “Thanks.”

Plus, we say that as one of the people who actually helped create ESPN’s “BottomLine” way back when it was originally known as “the 28/58 Update.” It came about shortly after we started working at “The WorldWide Leader in Sports” in the mid-1980s, long before the network was the leader in anything other than spreading the unique television experience of watching “Australian Rules Football.”

Remember that way back in 1986, there were no cell phones smaller than a lunchbox-sized device. And they certainly weren’t smartphones by any means. Heck, Steve Jobs had debuted the first Macintosh computer only a couple of years earlier. So nobody was carrying around a device that could instantaneously give them the score of every other sporting event being played anywhere in the world, plus the real-time stats for every player in those events, as well as the betting odds for who might win those competitions, let alone who might commit the largest number of fouls.

Back in the veritable Stone Age of on-screen television graphics, things like scores and statistics were popped on and off the screen throughout each contest, forcing fans to actually watch the game to keep up with the score, let alone know the down and yardage for each play. Given its feisty desire to make a name for itself in the ever-growing lineup of channels on cable television, the decision at ESPN was made to try displaying the scores of any other sports events that were “in progress” across the very bottom of the TV screen for a few minutes—beginning at the :28 and :58 minute marks of each hour.

CNN had been doing the “ticker” with news headlines at the bottom of the screen since its debut as one of the earliest made-for-cable channels in 1980.

At ESPN, we distinctly remember that this “innovation” was not met with universal acceptance, either internally or externally.

For one thing, gathering, entering, and displaying these updates was a strictly manual process at the beginning. Computers were just arriving in the newsroom at SportsCenter, and there was no direct interface to move the score information from those computers into the Chyron character generator units that displayed the actual letters and numbers on the screen. Thus, the technology to accomplish this mostly came from the ten fingers of the hard-working folks who made this magic happen inside the network’s headquarters in bucolic Bristol, Connecticut.

Over the years, the 28/58 updates became the more elaborate and information-dense display now known as the “BottomLine.” It’s so signature to the network that a giant digital version of the display adorns the lobby of the network’s huge digital television production center in the center of its now-sprawling Bristol campus.

But this fall, the network says you won’t see it constantly displaying the scores of other games (along with endless promotion of other upcoming ESPN events) at the bottom of the countless regular-season college football games it produces and airs across ABC, ACC Network, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews, and SEC Network.

Why the change? As the network’s statement to Front Office Sports frames the decision: “By removing the BottomLine during live action, we’re creating a cleaner presentation that keeps the focus where it belongs—on the field.”

What the statement didn’t say, but certainly could have if it was being honest: “We also recognize that you watch these games with other screens in your hand or on the table in front of you that all allow you to check the score of the massive contest between the football powerhouses like Lehigh and Colgate, without having to wait through dozens of other scores that you could care less about.”

Not to mention how much money you have at risk on a sports betting or prediction market website.

Whatever the reality, we applaud the decision to help “declutter” the screen displaying the actual game, which frankly has gotten busy enough in some productions to resemble the data density of every stock trader’s digital oracle: the twin-screened Bloomberg Terminal.

Local TV newscasts didn't miss the rush to slap more information across your television screen. As we wrap up our beach vacation on the Atlantic coast today, we’ve seen similar tickers plastered on the local newscasts airing across the local Savannah, Georgia TV stations run by Nexstar, Gray, and Hearst—just as they do on all of their stations’ local newscasts across the country.

Those tickers feature a mélange of national news headlines, weather data, local sports scores, and even daily lottery numbers. Not to mention their most important raison d’etre — an advertising message, mostly, it seems, for an accident injury law firm.

Again, back when we didn’t all have a small device on our person that displays all this information (and so much more) nonstop, the usefulness of having “the ticker” on a local TV newscast made much more sense.

Today it just seems like so much else of whatever makes up most of those newscasts: something to fill up the screen until it is time to show the next batch of commercials. That would be bad enough on its own. Still, given this particular time of year, those ad breaks are now filled with endless (and mostly negative) political commercials, which might be the only thing worse than the endless commercials for the ever-growing number of injury law firms that want to handle your case and get you “all the money you (and they) deserve.”

And to think that we in the business have the temerity to ask why fewer and fewer people are choosing to spend their time watching these newscasts.

It could be worse, of course. It could just all be more airtime for Pat McAfee.

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And we have some thoughts about this year’s edition.

Right off the bat, as if to underline the inevitable conclusion of the drawn-out drama of Nexstar’s battle to fully acquire rival group owner Tegna, TVNewsCheck has gone ahead and combined the two companies in its compilation of this year’s Top 25 Station Groups list. While it would be easy to critique this decision, rather than keeping the two separate, since that is how they are still considered by the U.S. District Court that is hearing the lawsuits against the merger—which, after all, was approved by both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory bodies that needed to sign off on the transaction.

In last year’s version of this list, Tegna ranked as the 4th-largest station group; now, combined with Nexstar, the pair dominate the list from the top spot with $7.6 billion in revenue. For reference, that’s more than twice the just under $3 billion in revenue earned by the number 2 company on the list, Atlanta-based Gray Television. (Any wonder why there are forces that want to force the uncoupling of Nexstar and Tegna, and, in turn, its control of local stations in 132 markets, reaching 80% of the nation’s television households?)

The only potential challenger to Nexstar-Tegna in size would be the proposed, but rejected, union of the #3 and #8 companies on the TVNewsCheck list, that being Sinclair and E.W. Scripps. With a presence in 82 and 73 local markets, respectively, our rough calculations put their combined reach at about 115 markets total, with about 65% of the nation’s TVHH reached.

It is important to remember that Sinclair still holds nearly a 10% stake in Scripps’ stock, which is currently worth north of $25 million, but the Scripps board rejected Sinclair’s offer last November to buy the rest of the company at $7 a share. (That’s more than double the $3.32 price that SSP shares closed at on August 24th, 2026.) The Scripps board also adopted so-called “poison pill” measures that would make Sinclair's offer to merge the companies far less financially attractive—let alone their privately stated distaste for the practices of the Smith-family-led Sinclair.

Whatever one may think of Sinclair, they are still amongst the top three entrants on the TVNewsCheck list, even without adding Scripps. Though doing so would firmly vault the combination into the number two spot behind Nexstar-Tegna in local markets and television households reached. But in terms of revenue, a combined Sinclair-Scripps would only generate a projected $4 billion annually, about 55% of what Nexstar-Tegna is looking at taking in.

Should Scripps find a more palatable potential partner in #2 group owner Gray, it would likely be only slightly better off on the balance sheet. A merger of Scripps and Gray would likely net a footprint across some 160 local markets, with coverage of 60 to 63% of the nation’s television households. The combined entity would have an annual revenue projected at just over $4 billion, because Gray generates just $238 million more than Sinclair did in the 2025 estimates.

The next four positions on TV NewsCheck’s list are occupied by the network-owned and operated groups, with FOX leading the way in the #4 position. The Rupert Murdoch and family-controlled group of stations lands in that position because it covers the largest percentage of the country (39.2%) among the O&O groups and it had the highest total revenue in 2025 (roughly $2.36 billion). It’s followed by NBC/Universal at #5, with 31 NBC and Telemundo O&Os bringing in total revenues of nearly $2.15 billion.

Paramount’s CBS-owned stations group puts the David Ellison-led company at #6 on the list with 18 stations reeling in just over $2 billion in revenue, while covering some 37.7% of the nation’s TV households. Bringing up the rear in the O&O groups is Disney’s 8 ABC stations, which reach only 22% of the nation’s TVHH, but throw off an outsized $1.64 billion in revenue. That’s not surprising given the long-standing audience strength of those 8 stations in each of their local markets.

Following previously mentioned Scripps at the #8 spot is Hispanic broadcaster TelevisaUnivision, which comes in with 25 local stations reaching 45% of the nation’s households with television sets, generating just over $1 billion in annual revenue for 2025.

Rounding out the top ten at the #10 position is privately held Hearst Television, part of the Hearst publishing empire. Hearst is in some 27 local markets, covering just under 20% of the TVHH in the country and generating an estimated $945 million in annual revenue. (We should acknowledge that TVNewsCheck’s list cites revenue figures provided by BIA Advisory Services, which is the gold standard source for financial data on television stations and local markets nationally. They do the work to know all the financial metrics in the local television business.)

The rest of the TVNewsCheck list of the Top 25 Station Groups ranges from groups as large as Chicago-based Weigel (#16), with 33 stations, but in total, it generated only $121 million in 2025 revenue. Compare that to #15 Sunbeam Television, with just 2 stations, which throw off $168 million in revenue from the Boston and Miami markets. (That number should rise now that, in Miami, Sunbeam has both the FOX and ABC affiliations on its WSVN there.)

Speaking of Miami, there is the odd group of “just one station” (with apologies to WSVN, which often uses that tagline in its newscasts). That “group” consists only of WPLG, the single station owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The former ABC affiliate, now a local news-focused outlet, generated just over $100 million in revenue during 2025. That was while it still had ABC on the air for about eight months. It will be interesting to see what the final revenue figure will be for a full year without a network in 2026.

All in, the top 25 TV station groups brought in approximately $27.2 billion in total revenue for 2025. Interestingly enough, that amount is almost equally split between advertising dollars ($14.1 billion) and retransmission fees (collected from cable, satellite, and streaming platforms at $13.1 billion)

We thought it was worth noting that back in 2019, the list of what was “The Top 30 TV Station Groups” from TVNewsCheck cited that the groups generated a total of $25.6 billion in annual revenue (less in total than 2025), but that was made up of more advertising dollars ($15.6 billion) and less retransmission fees ($10 billion).

Obviously, the groups have been challenged by ad dollars continuing to be siphoned off by digital outlets. In contrast, they continue to squeeze for more retransmission dollars from the various platforms that carry their signals. Witness the current move by DuJuan McCoy’s Circle City Broadcasting to push DirecTV to pay once again to carry its WISH-TV and WNDY in Indianapolis, in exchange for a deal to keep carrying WRTV, the ABC affiliate there. As we publish this, DirecTV has taken WRTV off its platform over the move.

As the industry consolidates, leverage against cable, satellite, and streaming platforms to pay higher retransmission fees grows. As will the number of disputes over renewing these agreements, which will continue to temporarily interrupt carriage of these local TV stations while these negotiations likely become more contentious.

One more final note from 2019: TVNewsCheck’s list that year of the largest TV Station Groups was topped by Nexstar, which had arrived at that position through its acquisition of the stations previously owned by Tribune Broadcasting. That acquisition gave Nexstar stations in the nation’s four largest markets (New York-WPIX, Los Angeles-KTLA, Chicago-WGN and Philadelphia-WPHL) for the first time. Nexstar has led the list ever since.

All of this leads us to wonder if in six more years, will TV NewsCheck’s annual list be down to just the Top 20 TV Station Groups?

Maybe even fewer?

Because it sure seems like—if nothing else changes—the biggest players will keep getting bigger.

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On transformation, Welch is often cited as saying, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

We came across the quote while thinking about transformation, specifically in the case of another broadcasting company, The E.W. Scripps Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Scripps, as it is typically referred to in shorthand, recently announced its quarterly earnings. In what can be best described as a “pay no attention to the disappointing results but look over here at what we are doing” move, Scripps CEO Adam Symson took the opportunity to dazzle investors with his plan for “refounding” the 148-year-old company.

This “refounding” is the latest version of whatever strategy the company has been trying to execute for the last few years. Along the way, it has been active in the buying, selling, and trading of local television stations, while at the same time ramping up and then all but shuttering its aspirations to have a national news network in Scripps News. It also forged a new path in the television sports arena with the creation of Scripps Sports, which was an early home for the WNBA and local NHL teams in several markets, built on the back of its portfolio of the former ION station group (itself the former network of Home Shopping Network stations from back in the day)

Along the way, Scripps shed hundreds of employees across its local stations in a series of staff reductions, even as it touted a “reinvention” of local TV news production that it called “the Scrippscast.” This plan, which began under then Senior VP of Local News, Sean McLaughlin, sought to replace the traditional model under which most local stations produced their daily newscasts with a more streamlined and efficient system that would do away with anchors in favor of a linear stream of local news, produced by a staff of camera-toting-reporters who would shoot and edit their own stories. The Scrippscast could play in a 24/7 “loop” via a streaming service and then fill traditional news hours on a broadcast signal, so viewers could catch up at an hour of their own choosing—on whatever platform they might prefer.

It’s now a few years later, and the Scrippscast plan (now apparently tweaked a bit and part of the new “refounding”) has been unfolding across the company’s smaller markets. It is now debuting on larger Scripps stations, such as its perennial underperformer in Baltimore, WMAR-TV, the ABC affiliate in “The Charm City.”

Our research team recently had a chance to watch an 11 pm newscast, or rather “a Scrippscast,” on WMAR 2 News after it debuted last Wednesday. They sent back their terse note on what they watched:

“Uninspired. Unimaginative. Unwatchable.”

We immediately recognized that they were making a sarcastic play on the old local news branding of “Dedicated, Determined, Dependable,” which first debuted on Atlanta’s WAGA-TV back in the late 1980s. Yes, some forty years ago, we somehow expected a whole lot more from the nightly news on our local TV outlets.

We then saw that Scott Jones of FTVLive.com got a look at a WMAR newscast, and he had this to say about what he saw:

“…Viewers were treated to an “anchorless” newscast. The show starts with a live weather hit and then immediately shifts into an automated roll of pre-recorded packages, topped off with centralized national filler fed in from Scripps hubs.”

While we acknowledge that Mr. Jones can often be a bit reactionary in his hot takes on the local TV business, he isn’t wrong about what is happening at WMAR and, in turn, across the Scripps stations. He continued with this truth bomb:

“This isn’t an “investment” in local news. It’s an exercise in doing local TV news as cheaply as humanly possible, with the absolute bare-minimum number of warm bodies inside the building.”

The “new” template for WMAR 2 News also got some coverage from The Baltimore Banner. (That’s the scrappy local newsroom that has risen to challenge the local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, which was sold to Sinclair’s Executive Chairman David Smith back in 2024.) The Banner’s Shayla Colon framed the debut of “the Scrippscast” on WMAR-TV this way:

“For WMAR, which has been broadcasting in Maryland since 1947, the switch not only changes how people in the Baltimore region will get their information, but signals a shift in how technology is changing the economics of the news industry.”

Of course, for those of us who have worked in the local TV news business for decades, that is putting it mildly. The tidal wave of change breaking over the industry is unprecedented.

And it doesn’t show any signs of relenting any time soon.

While it is far too easy to criticize a company like Scripps for doing whatever it can to keep its head above the floodwaters, especially given that the company still has its name on an annual awards competition for journalism. The simple fact is that Jack Welch’s previously mentioned quote might be way more accurate than we first thought.

If Adam Symson’s “refounding” of Scripps doesn’t produce the desired results—and to be honest, we frankly can’t imagine what those desired results might actually be, other than just losing a lot less money—then what happens next?

Scripps was the target of an unsolicited bid last November from David Smith’s Sinclair to combine into a single company. Sinclair spent just over $15 million for an 8% stake in Scripps, which it still appears to hold. For its part, the Scripps board of directors rejected Sinclair’s offer to acquire all outstanding shares of SSP for $7 a share and instead adopted a so-called “poison pill” measure to block Sinclair from moving forward.

In February of this year, that same board decided to extend CEO Symson’s five-year contract, originally set to expire at the end of 2027. His new deal now runs through the end of 2029, and includes a one-time $10 million bonus if he can hit “a target of boosting adjusted earnings by $125–150 million over the next three years,” according to Variety.com

His “refounding” plan got a pretty positive write-up earlier this week from Tom Sly in TVNewsCheck.com. We’ll note that Mr. Sly is acknowledged at the end of his piece as most recently being the “VP of Enterprise Strategy” for Scripps. So make of his take on their “strategy” what you will.

Our take is this—we wonder how long it might be for the probably Artificial Intelligence-powered business analysis tools being used inside the Scripps corporate HQ to come up with the same answer that the WOPR computer arrives at in the climactic scene of John Badham’s 1983 movie, “WarGames.”

“What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Back in a previous career stop, in what seems like a lifetime ago now, we made the offhand prediction that at some point in the future, we wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one, or maybe more, local TV stations get out of the local news business altogether. In markets with a relatively fixed “pie” of advertising dollars, the stations with the smallest share of both the news audience and those same ad dollars would likely realize that their futures were brighter without the expense—and the declining returns—of producing daily local newscasts.

We’re not sure how many “reinventions,” “refoundings,” or “reorganizations” happen before that now seemingly flippant prediction unfortunately becomes reality. Still, you’ll forgive us for thinking the clock is running out of time before it does.

For more stations than anyone might expect.

And to us, that will be nothing but a damn shame.

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(To our regular readers, we’re taking a short but overdue vacation over the next couple of weeks. Thus, we will be on a reduced publishing schedule until Labor Day. Signing up for a free subscription below will ensure that you don’t miss our return or any emergency updates between now and then.)

This particular episode was recorded in the hours just after last week’s major decision by the Federal Communications Commission that we detailed here in yesterday’s edition of “The Topline.”

The conversation was focused on the reality of where the business of local television, and specifically local TV news, is headed. It runs just under 45 minutes, and there are none of the usually annoying pitches for those various internet advertisers that you may love or loathe.

The “In The Vicinity” podcast is available on all the major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Below is a direct clickable link to the episode for your listening:

In The Vicinity: What Happens When The Ownership Cap Disappears?

It might be a nice break from your marathon of true crime podcasts. We’ll be back here with another text-based dispatch later this week.

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Not only did the FCC Chairman (and the nation’s would-be “censor in chief”) Brendan Carr and his fellow Republican, the aptly-named Olivia Trusty, pair their votes to overrule lone Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez’s objections in a 2-1 vote to “lift the cap” as it were, they tried to blunt any fears of a free-for-all in the ownership marketplace by adding that it wasn’t “abolishing” the rule, but rather “replacing” it with a new system where the FCC would replace “the cap” with “a granular case-by-case review of television ownership deals.”

Whooo bubba, as we used to exclaim occasionally back during our southern years.

This move, the FCC’s press release proclaims: “will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard.”

Here’s the thing—this is exactly what the Commission is supposed to do with any transaction regarding a broadcast license since its creation. What Thursday’s vote actually did was retroactively give the FCC the power to “modify” its own rule that it has blatantly ignored since it approved the acquisition of TEGNA by Nexstar Media just back on March 19th of this year. It also removed the “blissful ignorance” the agency has shown for years about the so-called “sidecar” deals that allowed large broadcasting companies to get around the now-abolished…er…sorry, the now-replaced limit on television station ownership.

Not surprisingly, those same companies were quick to applaud the FCC’s decision, as was their industry lobbying arm, the National Association of Broadcasters. All sang from the same hymnal that gave us this long-repeated reason for the decision. Again, citing the FCC’s carefully crafted PR wallpaper:

“The video marketplace has changed dramatically with the proliferation of digital platforms—all of which enjoy unrestricted national reach. Streaming services now reach over 80% of U.S. adults, and this scale provides them with a competitive edge in terms of attracting investment capital and increased advertising revenue. Eliminating the national cap will allow broadcasters to better compete with these unregulated digital giants. The market also reflects a growing imbalance of power in the network-affiliate relationship, which the national cap intended, but failed to curb, as evidenced by network control over online video carriage, preemption rights and revenue sharing requirements.”

In response, we’ll quote Colonel Sherman T. Potter from the classic television series M*A*S*H (as brilliantly portrayed by the late actor Harry Morgan): Horse Hockey!

There are two giant pieces of equine dung in that paragraph, the first being anything about the decision allowing broadcasters to better compete with “the unregulated digital giants.” In the case of the digital streamers called Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock, those giants would be named Disney, Paramount-Skydance, and NBCUniversal—and all three of them also happen to be broadcasters.

Sure, sure, there are purely digital tech giants like Google, Meta, Apple and others that dominate the streaming space. Still, we have yet to hear one person explain how Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, et al., will be better able to battle for eyeballs because they can own 200 or more local television stations, including two, three or even more over-the-air signals in any given local market.

Then there is the second thing we need to scrape off our boots now: this thinly veiled threat from Commissioner Carr to the national television networks. The FCC says it needs to address “a growing imbalance of power in the network-affiliate relationship.” The Commission wraps itself in the very real business of TV issues of “online video carriage” (the major networks negotiate the deals for services like YouTubeTV, Hulu Live TV, Fubo TV, etc. to carry local affiliates) “preemption rights” (how many times a local station can preempt or replace a network-scheduled program) and “revenue sharing requirements” (how much each local station has to kickback of the revenue it receives from Cable and Satellite carriers who pay a per subscriber fee each month to carry a local station) All to obfuscate from the very unreal problem of the current administration’s distaste for network newscasts and the currently still-employed hosts of late night shows.

At least those not named Byron Allen.

This argument reminded us of the move the FCC made back in the early 1970’s when it created something called the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR). The PTAR required local stations in the Top 50-sized markets to have access to one hour of evening programming on their schedule to present local programming, rather than having the network control four hours on each weeknight’s schedule. The PTAR made stations responsible for filling the 7 PM hour, and network primetime would be held to three hours, 8:00 to 11:00 PM each night in the Eastern and Pacific time zones (7:00 to 10:00 PM in the Central and Mountain time zones)

And what locally created and focused programming did stations put in that precious hour? Mostly syndicated fare like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy”. Some were a little more creative and tried efforts like “Evening/PM Magazine” or other truly local productions, but most of those have gone away now. What’s left is either the few program offerings still in syndication or another hour of local evening news that nobody ever asked for.

The Prime Time Access Rule was eventually repealed by the FCC in 1995. The programming it inspired local stations to air—instead of more network fare—is largely still in place, though now with different faces hosting each program.

Except for Wheel’s Vanna White, who will keep turning those letters seemingly forever.

Still attractive distractions aside, if we might return now to the FCC’s latest gem of a “rulemaking decision,” the reactions to their move have been pretty much “along party lines,” as they often say in Washington, DC. The wait now is to see what happens as a result of the ownership cap going away as a straight mathematical exercise and instead becoming reviewable as “transactions that would have exceeded the cap that do promote the public interest and could gain Commission approval.”

Put more simply, the regulatory role of the FCC just moved firmly into political gatekeeping of who can and can’t own as much as they want of the local media landscape.

Lest anyone think this is the final word on the subject, it of course certainly is anything but.

Lawsuits are already being threatened, and many billable hours of lawyers will likely follow. The previously approved Nexstar-Tegna deal is now stuck in the Federal courts after both a coalition of states’ attorneys general and DirecTV sued to block it. That case won’t head to trial until likely sometime next year.

We imagine the first true test of the “no-cap-unless-we-say-so” rule will be the full assimilation of the stations owned by third parties, but fully operated by the industry giants. For example, WPIX in New York City, which is technically owned by “Mission Broadcasting” but really operated as if it were owned by Nexstar (because it all but is, except on paper), will surely be assimilated back into “the mothership” at some point. Same for the stations owned by Cunningham and Howard Stirk Holdings being absorbed into Sinclair Broadcast Group (that had already started happening in anticipation of the FCC’s vote). It is what Gray Television is in the midst of doing with the American Spirit Media-owned stations that it would have previously not been allowed to own outright.

After those moves play out, we can only assume that the station brokers who midwife the buying and selling of local TV properties will assemble deals of all sizes and shapes to consolidate ownership of stations further. It will be as if they were fast-food franchises being gobbled up by a handful of well-funded corporate players.

On the other hand, those mid-sized and smaller ownership groups that are publicly traded and who have been trying hard to convince Wall Street that their profitability margins are coming back “very soon” may be forced into selling stations to mollify their stockholders. After the quarterly earnings report from Scripps last week, we wonder if they could be first in line to do some wheelin’ and dealin’ along with the workforce cuts and cost savings it has announced.

We keep thinking of the pivotal scene in the movie “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd, who corner the market on frozen orange juice futures on the floor of the commodities exchange. Don Ameche implores his beleagured traders to return to the growing scrum of frantic trading by shouting “Get back in there and Sell, Sell, SELL!”

Finally, should anyone think that we are cheering for or against more consolidation in the ownership of television stations, let us be clear once again in our position. Above all else, we want local broadcasting to not only survive but actually thrive—in a very challenging media business landscape.

If last Thursday’s vote somehow delivers that — if fewer, bigger station groups actually translate into more local journalists covering more city councils and school boards instead of fewer — we’ll happily tip more than our cap to that.

We might even tip a glass of whatever everyone else is drinking.

Alas, we just don’t see the math working that way. Scale has never been the thing standing between a station and a well-staffed newsroom; the checkbook has. And a 2-1 party-line vote in DC doesn’t change who’s writing those checks, or what they’ve historically chosen to spend them on.

That’s the real world where the lifting of “the cap” actually gets tested. Everything else is just wishful thinking.

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That tune buried itself in our subconscious, and it has been there ever since. It comes out almost every time there is mail in our mailbox. And we found ourselves humming it yesterday when our column (“What if losing the network was the best thing to happen to your station?”) drew a handful of reader comments.

So in the fine tradition of late-night legend David Letterman, we thought we would “open up the old TVND mailbag” to respond to those in our readership who took the time to write us.

Our former colleague Betsy M Ross got the ball rolling with her comment that our column seemed to fall short for her because, as she put it, “we never really got an answer” to the question that our headline asked.

Well, that’s true, Betsy, because we don’t think anyone knows the answer yet. Least of all, we who don’t have the financials for these stations that are going through this transition. The question was meant to be a rhetorical supposition because we wanted to explore the idea that there could be a scenario where a local station losing its affiliation with a major network was not necessarily a one-way ticket to going out of business.

Since Betsy did give us credit for “a lot of history on small markets,” we will point out that the track record on stations making this transition is still relatively small itself. One of the oldest and most successful would be Graham Media’s WJXT in Jacksonville, which lost its CBS affiliation back in 2002. In that case, the station ownership (Graham’s predecessor, Post-Newsweek Stations) decided to leave CBS when the network demanded that the station start paying a hefty amount for the right to carry the network’s programming. It was an early test of the arrival of “reverse compensation,” which changed the previous business relationship in which networks paid their affiliates to carry their programming.

WJXT decided in April of 2002 that it would leave CBS and pursue a course as an independent station with a heavy focus on local news. Starting in July of that same year and branding itself as “the local station”, WJXT has been, by all accounts, successful in charting its own course over the last 24 years. And that’s in the face of two strong duopolies in the market, with Tegna operating both the market’s NBC and ABC affiliates and Cox Media Group operating the FOX and CBS outlets.

On the other side of the coin, commenter Herb Carson pointed out that losing a network affiliation “hasn’t worked out too well for Charlotte’s WCCB.” That’s a fair point, Herb, but WCCB’s situation is a bit different in that the Bahakel Broadcasting station has gone through multiple affiliation switches over the years, rather than being with one network pretty much since signing on, as our examples in WJXT and WSPA-TV had been.

Charlotte’s WCCB originally signed on the air as WAYS-TV on channel 36 back in 1954. Since we have already been called out for perhaps delving into too much broadcast history here, we won’t go too much into the disadvantages that UHF stations (those above channel 14) had in the early years of television, versus VHF stations (on channels 2-13). The current incarnation of WCCB dates back to 1964, when broadcaster Cy Bahakel purchased the station. He moved it to channel 18 two years later. It was primarily an ABC network affiliate over its history, until ABC moved to Cox’s WSOC-TV in 1977. During that period, several longtime NBC affiliates dropped that network in favor of the surging ABC, riding hits like “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” in primetime, along with “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight.”

WCCB would be an independent station for nearly a decade before becoming a charter affiliate with the upstart FOX network in 1986. It would enjoy nearly 27 years as one of the network’s strongest affiliates. In 2013, Fox would buy another station in Charlotte, WJZY, and move the FOX affiliation over to it. That would leave WCCB to move to the smaller CW network that same year, which it would carry until the CW’s new owner, Nexstar, moved that network’s affiliation over to its own WMYT in 2025. WCCB returned again to being a truly independent station with a local news operation on the air for 30 hours each week, which it continues today.

The fact is that WCCB has been a bit of an underdog in Charlotte’s television viewing throughout its history, trailing market leaders WBTV (a longtime CBS affiliate now owned by Gray) and WSOC-TV (ABC and still owned by Cox) — as well as WJZY (still a FOX affiliate, but now owned by Nexstar and branded as “Queen City News”) and WCNC (the market’s NBC affiliate, owned by Tegna—which is still operating while its acquisition by Nexstar is the subject of pending lawsuits.)

(OK, so we are definitely guilty as charged on always getting into a lot of broadcast history here. But we think it is helpful to know the backstory on these markets and the stations that serve them.)

And speaking of markets, faithful reader Randall King commented yesterday that the market situation in Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson is “not like a typical top 50 market” because it doesn’t have one centralized metro. That’s true, and we thought we had acknowledged the unique, decentralized nature of market number 36 in our original column. But there are a fair number of bifurcated or trifurcated television markets, both large and small in size. (We have worked in a few of them over the years.) While they do present unique challenges in attempting to cover and represent each part of the market, the reality is that the great stations find ways to broaden their audience to all parts of any given DMA.

Randall went on to postulate that “the local, local, local miracle may not work here,” which we take to mean that he is skeptical of WSPA-TV’s ability to be successful without a CBS affiliation and being a local news-focused CW station, such as WISH-TV has done in Indianapolis. That could certainly be the case, though again this change in Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson happened with very little warning, and it will definitely take some time for the situation to settle down and define itself.

Finally, commenter Sue Wilson noted that it is Forum Communications that has taken on the CBS affiliations on the digital subchannels of its stations in Bismarck-Minot, North Dakota (as well as in Rapid City, South Dakota). She is correct on that point. Frankly, we just haven’t followed the situation developing in those markets as closely as the others across the country.

To wrap this up, we agree that there is no single answer to the question we originally raised about whether it might ultimately be a good thing for a local TV station to lose its affiliation with one of the big four networks in ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC and to go out on its own. One thing we do know is that so far, of the handful of stations that have done it since 2002, all of them are doing well enough to still be in business.

So there has to be a model that works to some degree.

And because we are still supporters of having as competitive a media landscape as possible in each local market across the country, we will be watching and hoping for all to be successful in their continuing operations because having a diverse marketplace for local news and information is still a good thing for consumers.

And democracy.

In the meantime, do keep those cards and letters coming—well, at least the modern-day electronic equivalents of them. We truly appreciate the feedback.

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Well, it is the new normal at least.

In Greenville-Spartanburg (SC), Birmingham (AL), Albuquerque (NM), Jackson (MS), Bismarck-Minot (ND), and Rapid City (SD), the former Nexstar Media stations that used to be affiliated with the CBS television network are adjusting to life without that network and what the future holds.

In all of those markets, save for Albuquerque, the future is one without the half of each day filled with network programming now being the responsibility of those local stations to fill with…something. In Albuquerque, Nexstar’s KRQE has shifted the FOX network from its previous digital subchannel home known as “FOX 505” to the main channel 13.1 signal to accompany KRQE’s local “News Reporting You Can Trust” programming. Curiously, the station has dropped the channel number 13 from its branding to be just “KRQE”, likely because the station was displaced on cable and satellite lineups from that spot “on the dial.”

In the other markets mentioned, life after CBS ranges from a quickly assembled schedule of maintaining the local news programming that existed before August 1st, alongside whatever syndicated programming the station had access to. There is something of a mini renaissance going on for those pseudo-courtroom shows, with Judge Judy and her fellow robe wearers getting more airtime on many of these stations.

These changes happened so quickly that each station is still cleaning up its websites to scrub the last vestiges of the CBS “eye” from them. When we checked, WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi, was still showing CBS programming listed on the TitanTV schedule for the station. (In fairness, TitanTV can be slow in updating its listings in any market. We know this from our own experiences with that service.)

Because of our own history of working in the market, we have spent the most time analyzing the aftermath of “the great affiliation moves of 2026” in the largest market where Nexstar lost the CBS affiliation, and that is market number 36, the sprawling four-way hyphenated Greenvile-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson DMA that covers the “Upstate” area, being the Northwestern portion of South Carolina, along with much of the Western third of North Carolina, and a few counties in Northeastern Georgia. It is a sprawling 28-county area that surrounds those four cities.

That is where WSPA-TV 7, which had carried the CBS television network since the station flickered to life for the first time back in 1956, found itself without that network on August 1st, 2026. Rival station WYFF 4, owned by Hearst Television, acquired the CBS affiliation to be broadcast on a digital subchannel of 4.3, alongside the station’s long-standing NBC affiliation airing on channel 4.1.

There is an interesting historical footnote about this rivalry: WSPA-TV’s original owner, Walter Brown and his Spartan Radiocasting Company, fought a nearly decade-long battle to get on the air beginning back in the late 1940s. The station wanted to place its transmitter atop Paris Mountain, a peak within Greenville County, where the City of Greenville was located, rather than in WSPA’s official “city of license” in Spartanburg. (The “SPA” in the station’s call letters.) Their opponent in this fight was one WFBC-TV, owned at the time by the local newspaper, The Greenville News.

WFBC-TV got on the air first in 1953, in the flood of new television stations that took to the air following the lifting of the World War II-era freeze on station start-ups. The owners fought the launch of the new WSPA-TV, forcing the station to ultimately locate its transmitter atop Hogback Mountain, a higher peak further away from the City of Greenville. It was finally able to sign on three years later.

WFBC-TV became WYFF in 1983 with an ownership change. The rivalry between the two stations, and the two cities they call home, has continued ever since.

Now, WSPA-TV is adjusting to life with the much more limited programming offered by the CW network, and a heavy local schedule of the station’s “7 News,” which now covers over half of each broadcast weekday. And while we are sympathetic to the extra workload for our former colleagues at the station, we believe this forced change may be a unique opportunity for owner Nexstar to run an important experiment not only for itself, but also for the future of local television station operators everywhere.

You see, affiliation shifts in local television aren’t new. They have happened here and there in past years. In locations like Indianapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Jacksonville, and more recently in both Atlanta and Miami. The Miami shift was notable because it set the stage for this most recent round at the beginning of August. In Miami, the ABC affiliation moved from its longtime home of WPLG 10 to the 7.2 digital subchannel of crosstown rival WSVN, which is the market’s FOX affiliate on 7.1. WSVN has also run a very news-heavy schedule as “South Florida’s News Station” since it lost the NBC affiliation while known as WCKT back in the late 1980s.

This move marked the first time in a major market that one of the big four networks had agreed to leave a primary station’s channel as its home and move to a subchannel of another station. That’s now exactly what has happened to Nexstar in the six markets listed earlier.

But of those stations now without CBS, only WSPA-TV has followed the model that WSVN pioneered of loading up the program schedule with more local newscasts. The station now carries a morning local news block that runs eight hours from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM, interrupted only for a single hour at 9:00 AM to air the local “infotainment” focused “Your Carolina” broadcast, which is done live each day. The station returns to local news at 4:00 PM each afternoon after a three-hour block of courtroom shows (The People’s Court/Judy Justice/Judge Judy) for four hours of news until 8:00 PM.

Then there are two hours of CW network in primetime, followed by late news from 10:00 PM to 11:35 PM. (We do wonder why the station isn’t taking its 11 PM newscast all the way to the full hour, when it would have the second half hour to itself as the only hour of local news at 11.) All totaled, it’s an impressive twelve and a half hours of local news being produced each weekday.

It is now even more hours of local news than WSVN produces in Miami, which was once known as the station that produced more local news than anyone in the Eastern Time Zone.

And what we first thought seemed like a forced move to fill WSPA-TV’s broadcast day now seems like a crucial experiment by the station’s owner, Nexstar, to see just how a station in a top 50 market can operate and possibly even be successful as a “local TV news machine,” if you will.

Exploring the challenges of how much it will cost in terms of resources, both human and other, to sustain this level of news production? What will the audience appetite be for a station with over half of its day delivering local news? Will advertisers buy time or other sponsorship opportunities from the station? These and many other questions will be answered in the months ahead, especially as WSPA-TV deals with the second half of an election year which now features not only a Governor’s race but also an unexpected U.S. Senate seat open, following the sudden passing of Senator Lindsey Graham.

We were disappointed to see that at present, the station only has job openings for one new multimedia journalist and one newscast producer. We’d hope that adding multiple hours of news might lead to adding more staff to WSPA’s news department, but we won’t be surprised if Nexstar keeps a tight hand on the purse strings and doesn't spend a lot more at the station until it knows what the future financial picture holds.

And finally, given what Paramount is doing at CBS, especially in the network’s news division under the leadership of Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who is remaking the network’s franchises like “60 Minutes”, “The CBS Evening News”, and “CBS Mornings” with a less-than-stellar record of success — who is to say that somewhere down the road that being without a CBS network affiliation and not paying for the privilege of carrying its programming, might not be the better business plan after all?

We suspect that is exactly what Perry Sook and company will be looking to find out from what happens at WSPA-TV. And perhaps from other stations, now affiliated with other networks, that might be facing the same situation in the not-too-distant future.

It might just turn out that what are considered the stations that lost something major on August 1st, 2026 could turn out to be winners come August 1st in a year to come.

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