One fine day of "StrikeWatch 2026" was all we got

Frankly, we are a little peeved at the employee unions of the Long Island Railroad today. Their resolve to get a new contract with New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority was apparently pretty weak. Or the MTA just caved pretty quickly after witnessing just one day of a strike against the LIRR. After just one weekday of walking the picket lines across the 700 miles of the nation’s largest commuter railroad, the unions and the MTA announced last night at 9 pm that they had reached a tentative settlement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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