Opening up the TVND mailbag

Like most people we know, there is a collection of music stuck in our heads here in the TVND.com newsroom. One of our favorite little tunes is from Nickelodeon’s show “Blue’s Clues,” which was a favorite of our kids when it debuted back in the late 1990s. We loved the little song that the lead character, Steve, would sing, proclaiming, “We just got a letter, we just got a letter…we just got a letter, wonder who it’s from?”

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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