We know the dust hasn’t settled from yesterday’s big announcement in Miami that the ABC network is going to leave its current and longtime home on WPLG-TV and move on August 4th to become “ABC Miami” on subchannel 7.2 of WSVN, the market’s FOX affiliate known as “South Florida’s News Station.” The intrigue over how this all came to be and what it means for the television landscape, both in South Florida and across the country, will take some time to unravel.

However, being the kind of project-oriented people we are here at TVND, we immediately began thinking about the size of the opportunity/challenge ahead for “Local 10” in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market. After all, the station has a little over four months to pivot from being a network-affiliated station, which it has been for its entire history, to truly living up to that “Local 10” brand promise as a pure independent television station in the nation’s 18th largest market. It’s a market with several unique challenges, seemingly as all 210 markets will have in one form or another in 2025.

It isn’t a completely unchartered path. A few stations have moved from affiliate to independent over the years. One of the ones that stands out to us is in Phoenix, where KTVK lost its ABC affiliation in the great network shuffle of 1994. That’s when the upstart FOX network began building out its owned and operated group by buying cross-town rival–and then CBS affiliate–KSAZ (once charmingly named KOOL-TV) as part of the acquisition of the New World Communications Group. Even though KTVK was at the time one of the strongest ABC affiliates in the country, the ensuing network shuffle would leave it without a network when ABC found a new home on Scripps-owned KNXV in the market.

The similarities between the situations at KTVK and WPLG are more than just being left by ABC. In both cases, they were single stations rather than being part of a larger television group. Groups have more power and influence with the networks, as witnessed by Scripps bringing pressure to bear on ABC to move to its Phoenix station. Doing a “one-off” affiliation move is far easier than dealing with multiple stations in various markets. Both KTVK and WPLG were/are strong local news operations at the time of losing their affiliations–though it would be essential to note that thirty years ago, KTVK’s strength was far more significant because of the strength of broadcast television stations in the media marketplace back then.

Another way these two stations are alike is that both decided to double down on their local programming, which largely focused on ramping up their news operation. In KTVK’s case, the station had already made a sizable investment in local news nearly a decade earlier. In 1984, the family interests that owned the station had poached a dozen employees, including the team of Bill Miller and Phil Alvidrez from rival KTSP-TV (later renamed KSAZ.) Miller and Alvidrez had led the news department at KTSP and would move to KTVK and build a news juggernaut at the station. With Miller as Station Manager and Alvidrez as news director, the duo rebranded KTVK as “NewsChannel 3” and built a news operation that, by the time of the ABC move in 1995, was the dominant local television news operation in Phoenix.

The station would continue its strength as an independent, as the owners would spend millions on syndicated programming, news expansion, and a new studio facility to keep the “NewsChannel 3” juggernaut going. It would do so until 1999 when the family owners of KTVK sold the successful independent to another family-run company, Dallas-based Belo Corporation. In 2014, the station changed hands again from Belo to Meredith Corporation, merging the operations of KTVK and CBS affiliate KPHO-TV. Then, in 2021, Meredith Corporation was acquired by Atlanta-based television group owner Gray Media, who now owns and operates the duopoly of KTVK and KPHO.

KTVK still operates as a news-heavy independent branded as “3TV” locally. The station airs over 13 hours of local news each weekday from a shared newsroom with KPHO under the banner of “Arizona’s Family.” KTVK also airs a schedule of Phoenix Suns basketball games, giving it a local sports audience in primetime leading into its late newscasts. When not airing basketball, KTVK airs local news from 8pm to 11pm in primetime.

Turning our focus back to Miami, what the leadership of WPLG is now busy figuring out is how much of the KTVK blueprint it might choose to follow. And unlike Phoenix in 1995, there is already a station in Miami producing a daily schedule packed with local newscasts, that being the market’s FOX affiliate (and soon also the home of the new “ABC Miami”) WSVN. It is no overstatement to say that WSVN’s history of losing its NBC affiliation and success in pivoting to being an independent, uber-aggressive local news operation forever changed the way newscasts would be presented on television.

Under the leadership of then VP of News Joel Cheatwood and later Alice Jacobs in that role, WSVN’s newscasts feature a heavy emphasis on breaking and celebrity news, wrapped in bold graphics and music to match, all presented by a staff working in an on-camera newsroom called “the newsplex” that features a dazzling display of video screens that looks like something a viewer might see in NYC’s Times Square. The format was ridiculed by critics and dubbed as “tabloid” when it debuted. Still, with aggressive marketing and a willingness to “smother a big story,” the station’s “7 News” grew a younger audience quickly enough. Before long, every news director in Miami and those in the business nationwide began paying attention and working to make their newscasts more like what was airing daily on “South Florida’s News Station.”

That included WPLG, which had always been a more contemporary local news station in the Miami market before WSVN’s transformation. In 1976, Channel 10 was the first station in the market to feature a co-anchor team, in which anchor Ann Bishop would be the first female to anchor weeknight newscasts in a major market. She would be later paired with Dwight Lauderdale, the market’s first Black anchor, in 1986. Bishop propelled WPLG’s “Eyewitness News” to be the most watched in the market for almost two decades. WPLG would also innovate with the market’s first helicopter and a heavy emphasis on weather coverage.

So, against that backdrop, WPLG now has about twenty weeks to implement its plan to compete as a station without a network to fill a good portion of its daily program schedule. The station has already stated that it will expand its news operation, but how it goes about doing so will be watched closely by many. As we have previously noted, the station doesn’t have a group of other stations to draw upon, as it is the lone station to be owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, the highly successful and followed investment company led by Warren Buffett. Expanding news hours on the program schedule will come at a cost. WPLG’s General Manager E.R. Bert Medina said yesterday, “Instead of sending our money to New York, we will keep it in our community and use that money to finance a massive expansion in local news and other local programming."

Just how “massive” that expansion will be and what the price tag might be isn’t known yet. For comparison, when KTVK went to being an independent station in the mid-1990s, it spent a reported 100 million dollars in the effort, adding dozens of new hires in the news department and buying syndicated programming such as the still popular “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” to air in primetime.

Another example of a station making the transition from network affiliate to independent can be found by going from Miami Beach up the Florida coast to Jacksonville Beach, where WPLG’s one-time sister station WJXT made the same move back in 2002 when CBS moved its affiliation to another station in the market. That came after WJXT balked at moving from the business model where the network paid local stations to carry their network’s programming to the station paying the network for that same programming. That idea, known as “reverse compensation,” came about when local stations began making significant revenue from the payments they received from cable and satellite companies for “retransmission consent.”

“The Local Station,” as WJXT is known, went all in on that idea, moving its airing of the then-popular “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to primetime and boosting its local news production to nearly 60 hours a week. However, that is still less than WSVN’s current total of 63.5 hours of news produced each week. By comparison, WPLG currently produces 54.5 hours of news weekly on its own station. It has also been producing an additional six hours of news each week, with a 10pm newscast on Miami’s CW affiliate, WSFL-TV, since 2021.

Another question is, how will WPLG transition over the next few months? When KTVK made the transition to independent in late 1994, it chose to shed the ABC programming in stages rather than all at once. First, it dumped ABC’s “Good Morning America” to expand its own “Good Morning Arizona” out to four hours, staying local when other stations were airing their network morning shows. However, rival WSVN already airs its local morning news, “Today in Florida” (a name dating back to its days as an NBC affiliate), for a whopping six hours each weekday, from 5 to 11am each weekday.

No doubt, there are a lot of factors to consider in making the move from affiliate to independent. And we’re sure that the team at WPLG is already deep in the project. As the old adage reminds us, “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.” Given the proximity of that large swamp known as the Everglades, it is a reminder that the challenges that “Local 10” may be facing are not insignificant.

Our initial report on the “Seismic” news out of Miami (that description first used by our friend, Rick Gevers) has more on how the news unfolded on Thursday. Click here to read it.