It’s been a week since the folks at Gray Media and Scripps announced their rather benign sounding plan to swap some stations in smaller markets and so far, there has been no white smoke emerging from the FCC offices in Washington, DC. There is little belief that the Brendan Carr-chaired commission won’t approve these license transfers, but given the inscrutable nature of proceedings before the FCC these days, who knows how long it will be before these transactions are given the official stamp of approval so they can be consummated?

While that waiting game continues, the entire television industry is waiting to see if this deal will be the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” signalling if it will be open season for the deregulation that the National Association of Broadcasters has been longing for, seemingly forever. Tom Sly writing in TV NewsCheck today details the playing field pretty well in this article.

All of this anticipation has led us to spend some time conjuring up what might be the possible pairings to come in the multi-million dollar corporate version of the childhood game known as “spin the bottle.”

So, without further ado, let us give you some of our handicapping what might be the big announcements to come in the months following the FCC throwing the chains off the television industry. (Our lawyers would insist that we mention here that what follows is pure speculation, based on the reading of tea leaves and listening to various sources of gossip. No actual financial advice is being given and none of your money should be invested accordingly.)

As the late Jim Lange used to say when the three bachelors were introduced in the old television game show “The Dating Game,” Here they are! (Cue the Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass music!)

COUPLE NUMBER ONE: Cox Media and…everybody?

The waiting game on the announcement that Apollo Global Management, the investment company that manages over $750 Billion of various assets, is selling its stake in the television stations of Cox Media that it acquired at the end of 2019, has gone on for quite some time. The list of would-be buyers has seemingly included every major group name and then a few new names that don’t currently own any media properties. Check all the names in that TV NewsCheck article linked earlier.

But the main focus of speculation always comes back to two of the largest group owners, Nexstar and Sinclair.

The Cox portfolio of some 12 full-power television stations in 9 markets is an attractive prize for either company, though not without some issues to overcome in either case. The Cox group represents a major footprint in the Southeastern portion of the country, still one of the fastest growing areas. The speculation is that flagship WSB-TV in Atlanta could be worth a billion dollars on its own. Add in Orlando and Jacksonville in Florida, along with Charlotte, North Carolina and you have a seven-station nucleus of strong stations that would be very attractive to either Perry Sook or David Smith, who are buyers with access to the financial capital needed to cover the big check for the Cox group. For both companies, there would be some challenges to swallowing the entire portfolio that Apollo wants to unload. For Nexstar, those challenges would be their current ownership or management of stations in Charlotte (Fox affiliate WJZY and My Network affiliate WMYT) and in Dayton, Ohio (NBC affiliate WDTN and CW affiliate WBDT.)

It stands to be seen whether an FCC embracing deregulation more than a couple making out in a daytime soap opera would go so far as to allow one owner to have four over-the-air signals in one market. That would be the case in Charlotte, where Cox owns ABC affiliate WSOC-TV and independent WAXN. In Dayton, Cox has WHIO-TV, which is so dominant in that market, it probably could count as two or even three stations on its own, at least based on its annual billing.

Sinclair would face similar concerns in Dayton, where it owns the ABC affiliate, WKEF and the Fox affiliate WRGT. Other markets with potentially too many stations to keep would be Seattle, where Sinclair owns KOMO-TV, the ABC affiliate and KUNS, the Univision outlet there, and Cox has KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate. Pittsburgh is on that list as well, because while Cox has NBC affiliate WPXI-TV, Sinclair already has WPGH (Fox) and WPNT (My Network.)

The other big question on the sale of the Cox television stations is whether they will all go in one neat package, or will they be sold in a different configuration, across multiple buyers. While we’d bet that Apollo would want a single transaction to keep it simple, the lure of a higher total sales price could lead to multiple transactions with different buyers. However, minor speed bumps like having too many stations in a market aren’t really concerning. Multiple buyers appear to be standing in the wings for any potential spin-offs that might need to happen quickly. The wait continues for the reality that the once-storied Cox television group is going to be “under new management,” any day now.

But we’ve been hearing this for weeks now, so your guess is as good as anyone’s on when somebody is getting the ring.

Wondering what to do if you might happen to be working in one of the stations that might be acquired or spun off to another company? Industry veteran Hank Price offered some advice on that very topic last week . Definitely worth your time to read, if you haven’t already.

Tomorrow, we’ll reveal our second couple that could be headed down the aisle to the merger altar. Not to be too big of a tease here, we can tell you that we were shocked to even consider that these two group owners might get together. But after all, it is only a quick Acela ride between their corporate headquarters.

So as Jim Lange said as each episode of “The Dating Game” ended: “We’ll be back with more girls, more guys, more fun and more games. Until then, remember Dating can be lots of fun!”

A quick epilogue: The name of the theme song from Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass that played in each episode of “The Dating Game”? That would be “Spanish Flea.” Go play that title on your Spotify or Apple Music account to be taken back to 1965. It was a simpler time, some sixty years ago, when a group owner could have a whopping total of seven television stations!

You made it to Friday. Congratulations on surviving another week!

To celebrate this monumental achievement, we present you with our now infamous sampling of things you might want to read, listen to, or perhaps even spend a few bucks on. (Though the latter is completely optional, if you are like us then your Amazon Prime Week spending may have gotten a little out of control. So maybe just focus on the free stuff if your wallet needs a rest!)

One of the big business stories of the last week that doesn’t include the word “tariffs” in the headline was the news that Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X/Twitter, is leaving the Elon Musk owned company after just two years in the position. Given the unpredictable nature of Mr. Musk, there was only a modicum of surprise to this move, even if the timing of her announcement came on the day after X’s artificial intelligence chatbot called Grok spewed out some pretty antisemitic remarks and praised Hitler. The New York Times reported that she had discussed her plans to leave the company before the Grok problem arose.

Yaccarino, who had been on the fast track at NBCUniversal before May of 2023, was recruited by Musk to manage the social media giant’s business operations. The key performance indicator, or KPI, as the tech companies prefer to call it, was for her to bring advertisers back to X after the wild start to its post-Twitter existence under Musk had sent most companies seeking safer harbor for their advertising.

What followed and what led to Ms. Yaccarino’s departure makes for a really interesting case study on how such a news story can play differently across multiple media outlets. So, we’d suggest reading a handful of stories about it to get an interesting perspective on the way the news “spectrum” is working these days.

First off, there is the full New York Time Story which you can read by clicking here.

Then a very interesting alternate account from The Guardian about “The CEO who never was”

The tech business publication Ars Technica dives deeper into the Grok aspect of the story right here.

Entertainment trade publication Variety does a great job approaching the advertising aspects of her time at X in this story.

And Tom Jones of Poynter.com weighs in with an interesting opinion piece further dissecting the media coverage of the departure Yaccarino’s departure and some other journalism headlines of the week on this webpage.

If this sampler hasn’t fully satisfied your curiosity on how large the spectrum of coverage really is, just do a quick Google search on “Linda Yaccarino leaves X” and you can choose from a lot more coverage from a lot more outlets.

From the “what to watch” department, we would direct you to check our author Daniel Pink’s YouTube channel, @danielpinktv. We’ve been big fans of author Pink since his 2006 classic titled “A Whole New Mind.” For anyone working in the media business, we’d suggest checking out his new title from earlier this year titled “Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.” (A reminder that those are Amazon affiliate links, so we will receive a few pennies if you choose to purchase the titles after clicking on them.)

But Daniel Pink’s YouTube channel @danielpinktv is free, and it features a ton of videos that we can’t get enough of. From summarizing “21 Life-Changing Books in 18 Minutes” to “5 Easy Ways to Make Better Choices Every Day” his messages on what motivates us and what persuades others are definitely our kind of “Must See TV.”

And finally, if you are looking for a refreshing beverage to enjoy at some point this weekend, we invite you to discover (or rediscover, as the case may be) this two-year-old clip of Tom Hanks on with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert as they try out Hank’s unlikely combination of Diet Coke and Champagne.

There are many follow-up videos of other folks trying the concoction, which is cheekily dubbed as “a Cocagne” (it’s a phonetic joke.) Thus, you can also have some fun going down the video “rabbit hole” on this–as you sample the idea (should you choose to do so.)

As for us, we just prefer our Coke with regular sugar and caffeine, thank you very much. And we wonder why you would ruin that amazing taste with anything else? Beverage choices, notwithstanding, here is wishing you cheers to your weekend ahead.

As a former network news anchor used to say, “We hope to see you right back here on Monday.”

Our assumption is this: our invitation to the annual gathering of media moguls happening in Sun Valley this week was lost in our overstuffed email inbox. Probably in there along with our still missing invite to the recent Sanchez-Bezos nuptials in Venice. Maybe that spam filter in Outlook is working a bit too hard sorting out the emails offering us countless “work-from-home” opportunities to become “rich and famous.”

Can we just say how much we miss Robin Leach in times like these?

Like the proverbial “Swallows to Capistrano,” the current crop of actual “rich and famous” types are making their annual pilgrimage to Idaho to attend the Allen & Company retreat where deals get done, or these days the deals not being held hostage by some part of the administration in Washington, DC.

Even if we can’t be there, the fine folks at Deadline.com have some solid reporting on those in attendance. Plus, CNBC is there and covering the event like it is their version of the NFL Draft. Some reporting that Shari Redstone is not in attendance, as she is dealing with both her thyroid cancer diagnosis and any signs that the $16 Million deposit to a certain presidential library fund is going to move her merger deal for Paramount Global with Skydance off Chairman Brendan Carr’s desk at the FCC more expeditiously than say, the Epstein client list moved off the Attorney General’s desk over at the Department of Justice.

Fortunately, CBS Mornings anchor Gayle King is on the guest list at Sun Valley. Maybe she can include Shari on her texts with Oprah so they all can keep up with who is saying what there on the mountain.

But Sun Valley’s reputation as the place where “deals get done” (according to WarnerBrosDiscovery chief David Zaslav) may take a bit of a hit this year. Even if Disney and Hearst conveniently dropped the notion this morning that they might be willing to unload their “shotgun marriage” assets in A&E Global Media. Notably, there was no indication that such a deal to dissolve that union might include that longstanding 20% of Disney’s ESPN that Hearst has been getting a nice check from since 1990. (It’s probably worth a little more than the $175 million that Hearst paid RJR Nabisco for it some 35 years ago.)

One deal that probably won’t get any discussion over the fine dining in the mess hall at Sun Valley is the just-announced small station “swapalooza” between Atlanta-based Gray Media and Cincinnati-based Scripps. While we speculated here weeks ago about the potential dam in station trading finally bursting, this deal feels more like a small leak to test whether or not the aforementioned FCC is ready to clear the decks to approve the avalanche of duopoly-creating deals that are just waiting to get done.

Wall Street seems to believe that linear cable networks are going to get shoved off the balance sheets at Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery faster than those water taxis probably left the docks on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, after last call was announced at the “modest” Sanchez-Bezos reception, back on June 27th.

If those “SpinCos” aren’t fully up and running by Lauren and Jeff’s one year anniversary, then some presents are definitely getting returned.

One fewer television station owner in the designated market areas of Lansing, Michigan (DMA 113); Colorado Springs, Colorado (DMA 86), and Twin Falls, Idaho (DMA 189), will probably not find much of an unfriendly audience inside the FCC’s offices on L Street in the nation’s capital. Any concerns from those nagging public interest groups about there being one fewer TV newsroom in each market will be swept away by the usual promises that there will be bigger news staffs in the single newsroom that will be serving multiple stations after the approval of these trades. Certainly it will be framed as needed to “protect the economic viability of all the stations involved.”

Or some other well written language from the lawyers and public relations teams involved.

Meanwhile, back in Sun Valley, we are hearing that a hot topic on the agenda is this thing that the Secretary of Education refers to as “A-1.” No, wait-that’s what we put on our well done steak at the Waffle House. The moguls are hearing all about “AI” and undoubtedly how they will be able to use that to control the world. Or at very least, help trim those pesky debt loads by having ChatGPT (or whatever other “chatbot” that comes along) replace some of those benefit-needing employees on the payroll.

Fortunately, all those private jet pilots that steered in the couple of hundred aircraft that landed at Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey, Idaho with the invited guests for the Sun Valley shindig onboard, probably have more job security for the immediate future, given that the just enacted “One Big Beautiful Bill” from Congress has restored the 100% bonus depreciation for private jets.

Well, that’s probably why we didn’t get invited! Our financial planner hasn’t been able to make the numbers quite work for that Cirrus Vision Jet that we have had our eye on.

Maybe next year.

If there was a Mount Rushmore of local television news directors, just whose faces would be on it?

A few names immediately come to our minds. From the nascent early years of local news on television, a notable figure might be Miami legend Ralph Renick, who served as both the news director and main anchor at the original WTVJ (then on Channel 4). From the 1960s, legendary news director Al Primo, who invented the “Eyewitness News” format, first introduced it in Philadelphia and then achieved long-term dominance at New York’s WABC-TV. The groundbreaking Jill Geisler, at Milwaukee’s WITI, is certainly deserving of being in this group. Perhaps also Joel Cheatwood, for his innovations and success at Miami’s WSVN in the 1990s and later at co-owned station WHDH in Boston.

Another name that might be on the list for “the giants” of the local TV news business was also occupant of the news director’s office at WABC-TV, arriving there in the mid-1980s. Bill Applegate passed away a week ago while we were out on vacation. Still, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge his career and contributions to local television in this space.

William Joseph Applegate, born in 1946 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, would cut a wide swath through the many local television stations where he worked. After serving in the Army in Korea in the early 1960s, he entered television news, first as a reporter in Detroit, and he first became a News Director in Eugene, Oregon, at KEZI, where he also anchored the news. That would be followed by news director roles in Buffalo, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and finally, in New York City. He would then move into the General Manager ranks, making his way back to Chicago, then to Los Angeles, and finally arriving at his final post as VP and GM of then Raycom Media’s Cleveland duopoly of WOIO and WUAB, where he worked for some 13 years before retiring from the business in 2014.

Bill, as he was known, was often referred to by only his last name during his career. Usually revered, sometimes feared, but always a force in any market he worked in. He would make every newsroom where he practiced his trade a competitive force, never being afraid to shake things up or push his troops to do even more in the quest to move each station he led up in the ratings and revenue.

He was usually successful in that quest, each time he undertook it over the years.

The admiration for the man was evident in the many professional remembrances posted online since his passing. One common theme we observed was that each person who spoke about Bill Applegate would do so in terms of how much they had learned during their time working with him.

But he was not always respected by everyone. Those who shake things up as much as he did will always have their share of detractors. Legendary Chicago anchorman Walter Jacobson would call Applegate “a purveyor of garbage.”

He would be criticized often for embracing a more “tabloid” style of news on his stations. Chicago television critic Robert Feder said that Applegate was “willing to try almost anything to draw a crowd.” Newscasts that Applegate oversaw were never dull and usually had an emphasis on stories “about crime, sex and celebrities.” In other words, stories that television viewers seemed to care about and watch. He would emphasize on-air style for his anchors and their newscasts, bringing the production values of fast-paced formats, accentuated with flashy graphics and high-energy music. Applegate would not apologize for embracing these values, once telling critic Feder: “We have to push on to find an information form that is interesting enough and compelling enough to attract news audiences. We have to take risks, and we have to accept the slings and arrows of our critics.”

Funny how that quote is still as accurate about local television news in 2025 as it was when Bill Applegate said it in the early 1990s.

What critics may have missed about the newscasts that he put on the air is that they covered the news. Yes, perhaps more aggressively than others. They would typically be first on the air with breaking news and usually the last to go off. They reflected an understanding of the unique qualities of the cities they covered and worked to be part of those communities. Bill Applegate, the reporter, understood that being a good reporter meant being embedded in the community —and, dare we say it, fearless.

Applegate, the news director, was fearless himself. Stories of him jumping up on a desk in the middle of his newsroom and using his booming voice to get everyone’s attention are legendary. Later, as a general manager, he would use the same voice to deliver on-camera editorials that were never afraid to take a strong position on issues of the day, big and small.

To quote Robert Feder again, “But Damn if it didn’t work.” Much like in Chicago, where he was able to take WBBM-TV from being an also-ran in the ratings to being tied for first place at 10 pm, albeit briefly. Applegate would move Cleveland’s WOIO into its era as “19 Action News” and make the once home of reruns (as an independent station identified as “Nineteen”) a true competitor in the market.

His son, William Applegate, Jr., wrote of his father last week: “In the end, he hired, fired, and mentored some of the giants in local and national TV. He was loved, feared, hated, and every past participle of a verb you can think of. But undeniably, unquestionably…admired.”

Married to his wife, Kathy, in 1971, the couple had four children: William Jr., Brian, Elizabeth, and Matthew, as well as nine grandchildren.

Bill Applegate was 79 years old. He definitely left his mark on this business.

The search for the missing victims from the July 4th flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas isn’t over, and the toll of fatalities has risen to over 100 as of 6pm on Monday, June 7th. 27 of that number, including children, were in attendance at an all-girls Christian summer camp, are among the dead. There are no words, including offering the requisite “thoughts and prayers” that can suffice in this moment of heartbreak for the families of those victims and the missing still being sought in the aftermath of the torrential rain that would raise the Guadelupe River by some 22 feet in a matter of hours early on the morning of July 4th.

Any lack of words has not extended to local and state officials, who were apparently quick to begin pointing fingers towards what they characterized as a lack of any warning about the flooding, or at least a lack of a forecast that specified just how much flooding there would be. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said last Friday that he “didn’t know this flood was coming.” Austin’s KXAN reported that Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice reiterated that apparent lack of awareness, telling the media Friday: “This rain event sat on top of that and dumped more rain than what was forecasted.”

KXAN’s Investigative team detailed the timeline of notifications from the local National Weather Service office in New Braunfels that covers the Austin-San Antonio area, which includes Kerr County. The first notification from that office of a potential for flash flooding was issued as an outlook on Thursday morning, July 3rd. There were updates throughout the day, including two messages in the 6pm hours that used language indicating the potential for flash flooding from “an excessive rainfall event.” The NWS issued a Flash Flood Warning, which triggered emergency notifications on NOAA Weather Radios, Mobile Phones and Broadcasters at 1:14am on Friday morning, July 4th. By 4am, the National Weather Service had issued a “Flash Flood Emergency,” its highest level of notification, across those same outlets for portions of Kerr County.

It’s believed that the Guadalupe River flooded over its banks by 5:00am on Friday morning, sweeping everything in its path downstream from cars to homes to the many still missing.

The National Weather Service has been working shorthanded since 800 or so employees were fired from the NWS’s governmental parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, earlier this year as part of the sweeping DOGE reductions in the governmental workforce. Most National Weather Service offices had been hiring to replace positions that were open in the past few years. Anyone hired by the NWS in the past two years was considered “probationary” in governmental parlance and were the bulk of those terminated by the current Washington administration.

In the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service, they presently have 6 vacant positions on their normal staff of 26 people. So a bit under a quarter of the staff isn’t available at present. KXAN’s Investigative Reporter Josh Hinkle detailed the fact that State and Local emergency officials did not go so far as to implicate any personnel or financial cuts in their criticism of the lack of forecast details which might have prompted them to be more prepared for the devastating flood waters. The station has requested records of communications between state and local officials as well as asking additional questions of both the National Weather Service and the meteorologist from the Texas Department of Emergency Management.

July 7th evening update: The NWS has acknowledged that while it has open positions in the Austin-San Antonio and San Angelo weather offices (both were involved in alerting the area of Central Texas that experienced the July 4th flooding) the service employed a “surge staffing” model to bring in more personnel than would be normally scheduled during the warned period last Thursday and Friday. It believes that its performance was not impacted by any staff shortages. The political impact grew on Monday. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, called for a congressional investigation into whether staffing cuts at the National Weather Service had “any correlation into the level of devastation.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt challenged that narrative on Monday, flatly stating that “Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning.”

Which brings us back to our original question: “What if there wasn’t a National Weather Service anymore?”

Before you scoff at that notion as political rhetoric, let’s return to the much discussed “Project 2025 playbook” that has seemingly been the blueprint for the actions in the first months of the second term of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Aside from the DOGE-implemented staffing cuts, the Project 2025 document details some four pages worth of actions targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”

One of the parts of NOAA that current budget proposals suggest could be cut is the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. The OU Daily reported last week that the NSSL and an associated center at the University of Oklahoma are set to be gutted and 220 more people would join the unemployed. Rock on, student journalism!

Of course that budget proposal does represent what might be considered “a two-fer” by whacking a government program that hasn’t done much except radically improve the warning times on severe weather events over the past fifty years it has been in existence AND a higher-education research program committed to the same goals. Government Efficiency in action!

Before we stray too far out of our lane of covering the local television news business, let’s focus on why we keep asking the same question about what happens if there is no National Weather Service? Local broadcasters, like every other institution that is involved in tracking and forecasting the weather, depend on the National Weather Service for the core data and information that is the foundation of their meteorology operations. No matter what vendor they may contract with, what the National Weather Service does each day is what everything else is built on.

So what happens when that foundation crumbles after being weakened by a proverbial “death by a thousand cuts?” On the one hand, you have rivals such as AccuWeather who wasted no time in putting out a press release touting that they provided “most advance notice and most accurate warnings” for the destructive flash flooding in Central Texas to their business customers. No word on whether the State of Texas is an AccuWeather Business customer, but AccuWeather did acknowledge in a statement to SkyNews that warnings from both the State College, PA based company and the National Weather Service “should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety”.

Not to be too crass in the midst of what is still an unfolding tragedy, but we want to strongly suggest that every local television station with a weather department needs to spend some time thinking about–and maybe even advocating more strongly for–the future of the National Weather Service. As the scope of the Texas flooding was being determined over the weekend, the National Hurricane Center-another part of NOAA that is on the budget chopping block-was putting our warnings about Tropical Storm Chantal that quickly spun up off the South Carolina coast. Growing up in that part of the world, we have seen the ability to track and warn about Tropical Storms and Hurricanes save countless lives, thanks to the work of the National Hurricane Center and local National Weather Service offices on the coastlines of this country.

The threat to the National Hurricane Center prompted veteran broadcast meteorologist John Morales of NBC O&O WTVJ in Miami to post a scorching opinion piece on his station’s website about the proposals to cut the NHC and multiple programs within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He posted his opinion piece last Thursday, July 3rd. The day before the flash flooding in Central Texas.

One more Monday update to this article: John Morales of WTVJ weighed in on Monday about the question of NWS staffing levels in Central Texas last weeksaying “I don’t think any of the cuts going on with NOAA and the National Weather Service had anything to do with the quality of the forecast [or] the advanced warning of the potential for flooding and damaging rains.” But Morales also added “I’m on the record as stating that I think this degradation in particular in regard to the coordination is going to be a slow degradation.”

As we said in the original version of this: That countdown clock in the control room isn’t the only one ticking down to zero.

It is a move that Carmine DePasto would have admired. $16 million to settle a lawsuit that many legal minds believe wouldn’t have had much of a chance of succeeding if it had gone to court. However, there was no time for that, as a multi-billion-dollar deal needed to be finalized, and the lawsuit was threatening to derail the agreement.

So, as Carmine would have put it succinctly, “You have to pay.”

That’s precisely what Carmine, in his position as Mayor, would tell Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College when the two were meeting over plans to hold the annual homecoming parade. “If you want to have a parade in my town, you have to pay.”

Dean Wormer would balk at this demand, stating, “Carmine, I don’t think it’s fair of you to extort money from the college.” It is at this point that Carmine, as both owner of the town’s Oldsmobile dealership and Mayor, sets Wormer straight. “Look, as Mayor, I’ve got big responsibilities. These parades are expensive. You’re using my police, my sanitation people, my free Oldsmobiles. So if you mention extortion again, I’ll have your legs broken.”

It’s reported that Dean Wormer then offered to arrange “a nice honorarium from the student fund.” Because that’s how you got things done back in 1962.

And it appears that it is also how you get things done in 2025, with today’s news that Paramount has settled a 10 Billion dollar lawsuit from the current President of these United States over the baseless claim that CBS News, and its “60 Minutes” program “deceptively” edited an interview with then candidate Kamala Harris in the runup to last November’s Presidential election. In his lawsuit, Donald Trump claimed that the editing was intentionally done to interfere with the election.

In case you have forgotten, CBS made the editorial decision to air two parts of the same answer that candidate Harris gave to a question about Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. As detailed in the transcript of the entire raw interview with Harris, the first excerpt, all of some 21 seconds, aired first on CBS’s Sunday morning staple, “Face The Nation.” In the following “60 Minutes” broadcast, a different 7-second clip from the same answer was included in the story, which presented the longer interview with Harris, who was then the sitting Vice President.

Mr. Trump alleged in his lawsuit that this presentation of two different parts of the interview amounted to “news distortion” and was done intentionally to tip the election in favor of Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, and his opponent.

Also, in case you have forgotten, Trump won the November election with 49.8% of the popular vote. His margin of victory was 1.5% over Harris’s 48.3% or just over 2 million votes out of the over 152 million cast. The electoral college total was 312 to 226 in favor of Donald Trump, who is now serving as the 47th President.

There will be much written today, and in the days to come, about the decision by Paramount to make its contribution to a future Trump Presidential Library to the tune of $16 million, which the NY Times reports also includes legal fees incurred by Mr. Trump in the pursuit of the claim. If that $16 million figure sounds familiar, it is because it is the same amount that ABC News, and its parent Disney, paid to settle a defamation claim made last year by Mr. Trump against the network and its anchor George Stephanopolus.

The reason given for the “contribution” to the still-unannounced library being the same amount, is that while Paramount’s board of directors was willing to pay to clear the way for its announced merger with Skydance, it had concerns that shareholders of the company might bring legal action over the terms of the settlement as being “bribery.” Be prepared to hear that term more in the future, as US Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont (both Democrats) have threatened to hold congressional hearings over the matter.

Inside CBS News, the whole matter has taken on Shakespearean proportions. The internal struggle over the question of settling, rather than defending what would have been a landmark First Amendment case, led to the resignation of Bill Owens, the longtime Executive Producer of “60 Minutes,” and then the firing of the President of CBS News and Stations, Wendy McMahon. There will be anticipation that more personnel changes may be forthcoming, including the possible departure of some correspondents from the top-rated news magazine.

The palace intrigue within the offices along West 57th Street is likely to continue into the fall, whenever the merger finally takes place and new corporate management assumes control. That isn’t a given as it turns out. Despite the lawsuit being settled, the Federal Communications Commission still has to weigh in on the merger, as it includes the transfer of the television broadcast station licenses owned by CBS. The Commission, under Chairman Brendan Carr, is conducting its own review of the “60 Minutes” interview, though he claims that its review is “not linked” to the lawsuit brought by the now-President.

Despite the money that will ultimately be paid, perhaps the most interesting detail of the settlement to be revealed so far is the agreement by Paramount/CBS that in the future it will be mandatory to release the full, unedited transcript of any interviews with presidential candidates. Fox News reports that “people involved in the settlement talks have referred to this as the Trump Rule.”

Speaking of the President, a spokesperson for his legal team hailed the announcement of the settlement with the predictable rhetoric of “holding the fake news media accountable.” The person went on to pronounce that “CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle.”

Well, of course, Paramount did have a choice. It could have gone to trial and fought for the journalistic independence that CBS has shown since the days of Edward R. Murrow and later Walter Cronkite. However, instead, the chairwoman of Paramount, Shari Redstone, decided that she had billions of reasons to follow the simple advice of Mayor Carmine DePasto to stage her own version of a “a nice homecoming parade.”

For those who may not recognize the name Carmine DePasto, he is the character played by actor Cesare Danova in the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Aside from his meeting with Dean Wormser (brilliantly portrayed by the late John Vernon, while a dead horse is being removed from his office), Carmine also appears later in the movie in the aftermath of the climactic Homecoming Parade scene when the wife of Dean Wormser delivers what may be the most appropriate line of dialogue to end this particularly odious chapter in the history of American Journalism:

“You can take your thumb out of my ass anytime now, Carmine.”

We’ll spare you our standard rant on why saying “Coming Up” should only be done in song, and should only be done with the words “everything” and “roses,” before and after.

But it’s Friday, and we’re going to aim for a perfect score of posting each day this week by bringing you something from our new tradition of sharing interesting things you might want to read and a few more things you might want to spend time checking out this weekend. (Of course, you can choose to look at these things any time you wish to, especially if you work on weekends and have more free time on other days!)

We have selected several selections related to a single theme this weekend, and that theme is AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence.

We consider ourselves to be reasonably intelligent and decent learners of new things. Candidly, we have not made significant progress on our path to achieving a basic mastery of AI. Now specifically, we are talking about using a “generative AI” chatbot tool, and not something that is “AI-powered” such as Grammarly, Notion, Jasper or the like. Instead, we are referring to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, CoPilot (now available on many Microsoft Windows computers in some form), and similar services.

And thus we have been on a quest to learn more about “prompt engineering.” This is simply the skill of interacting with the AI service (and by interacting, we actually mean typing out on a keyboard) and asking the precise question you want. The more precise and understandable your question, the more likely you are to get the AI to do exactly what you want.

Sounds simple enough, but it is anything but. There are a large number of rules, let alone tips and tricks, that are involved. We receive multiple offers daily from online services, coaches, and charlatans who promise to make us AI masters in no time at all. We haven’t spent our money on those, well, not many of them at least, and you shouldn’t either.

In fact, you don’t have to spend a dime, because the good folks at Google will teach you how to become a “prompt engineering ninja” for free. Yes, the search giant offers a free online course to help you learn “AI Prompting Basics” with “Google Prompting Essentials.” Click here to go to their website.

Full disclosure: this is a basic-level course, and there may be an effort to “upsell” you to take other online Google courses via the online class provider Coursera. But we haven’t spent anything yet, and are learning a lot from this free offering. Worth checking out.

Speaking of checking things out, we’ve found some real revelations in the new versions of one of the most widely used tools on our computers. That tool would be the web browser. Like many, we use Chrome on Windows PCs and Safari on our Macs. Microsoft tries to force its Edge browser on us from time to time and we tend to curse at it being so intrusive. Besides, aren’t we living in the world of AI now? Shouldn’t we be able to type in whatever we need to know and have it answered for us, rather than just mainly getting pages of links? Yes, we know that Google is incorporating more AI-style answers into its web search results, but that feels like it is in addition to the old-school style of searching the web.

A startup called “The Browser Company” has been tackling this issue, and they have two browsers you might want to download and try on your own computer. WARNING: On behalf of IT staff everywhere, we caution you not to install this on your work computer without getting approval from the tech team that it is safe to do so. Many organizations have policies on downloading and installing any software that isn’t “approved for company use.”

Don’t get on the bad side of the IT peeps. Trust us, it never ends well.

The Browser Company developed an alternative to the Chrome web browser that seemingly everyone uses. It’s called the Arc browser, and it’s worth trying out. Arc is the company’s initial browser software that transforms the way you use a browser into an experience centered on multitasking in a much easier way. Arc is available for both Windows and Macs, as well as the Arc Search app for your Apple or Google-powered smartphones. You don’t have to be a super geek to give Arc a whirl and see if it makes the online experience of using the web a bit easier. Did we mention that it’s free and does a great job of blocking ads and tracking of your browser history? Yes, it does all that too.

However, we know some of you out there are more “Geek Curious” than others, and aren’t afraid of trying things that are more on the “bleeding edge” of what’s new. For you, there is The Browser Company’s newer browser offering, which is still in beta release and requires an invitation to participate. (Don’t worry, we can help you get in — if you’re interested.) This new browser is called “Dia” and it can best be described as… well, it’s not easy to explain. The Browser Company team created this video to help explain it.

OK, so they may be software geniuses, rather than great makers of explainer videos. Our answer is that if you could hook up a web browser directly to an AI service like ChatGPT, and then that one bit of software would learn what you want to know and just how you want to know it–whenever you have a question that you go to the web looking to answer. It is hard to explain, but shockingly easy to use what they have created.

A few caveats, the Dia browser is currently in beta, as we mentioned, and is currently only available for Macs. If you have a Mac and you’re interested in being invited to the beta to give it a spin, shoot us a quick email to editor@tvnd.com with a subject line that just says “Dia Beta Invite,” and we’ll send you an invite that should get you past the waitlist to try it out. We believe that if you conduct extensive online research or simply want to explore how AI can enhance a journalist’s work, trying Dia will be worth your time.

One final caveat, we don’t love the name “Dia” especially as the letters DIA can also stand for the Denver International Airport or the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is probably not a website that you accidentally want to wind up on if your current level of paranoia runs as high as our may from time to time.

Another thing for you to read this weekend is more of a potential “rabbit hole” that you might end up going down. With the whole AI boom, there are new developments every day, if not every hour in the tech space that are worth keeping up with. Doing so is no simple task. Even for the people who lean more into their “Supergeekyness.” Not that we are talking about ourselves, but “other” people we know quite well.

We find that Techmeme.com is our secret weapon for staying up-to-date on tech news. In a format that can best be described as “information dense” in much the same way that “Drudge Report” is for general news. It’s free, but supported by clearly marked “Sponsor posts.” If you want an even more streamlined way to keep up with tech, the Techmeme folks offer an outstanding daily podcast that is worth listening to on your drive home. That’s probably why they cleverly call it “The Techmeme Ride Home.” Available wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcasts.

We would like to inform you that we will be taking some time away from our computers next week, and therefore, new articles will not be posted here daily. How will you know when you have something new for you to read? Well, you could subscribe to “The Topline” by clicking here and never miss anything from us going forward. That’s because each dispatch we publish would be automatically sent to your email inbox. The best part is that we do this for free, which seems a bit prudent given that, despite the notion that every journalist is heading to Substack to make millions on their own, a Pew Research report released this week states that only 1% of Americans paid for any news last year. Click to read their report.

And with that bonus item available for you to read, we’ll wrap this up by wishing you a great weekend doing whatever it is that you want to do. Cheers!

Right from the start of this, we should acknowledge that we probably missed the opportunity to make that title much more television-centric. We could have used memorable coffee spot names from TV, rather than lazily naming the global behemoth of high-falutin' and higher-priced coffee. It would have been so easy.

Perhaps “When your television station decides it wants to become “Central Perk” would have been better. Or substituting the name, “Luke’s Diner.” Or maybe “Cafe Nervoso.' (That one, like Starbucks, was at least based in Seattle, for the TV show where it frequently appeared.) Perhaps even a more esoteric reference, such as “The Peach Pit.” Or an obvious one for real television junkies: “Monk’s Cafe.”

If you recognize each of the five shows referenced above, congratulations. If you did so without even thinking about it, it may be time to turn off the set and take a break outside for a bit. Spoiler alert: We’ll name those shows at the end of this article.

In any event, we are here to discuss the announcement by Graham Media Group’s WDIV in Detroit, which has announced that it will be entering the coffee shop business this September. Listen, it would be easy to greet this news with “a haughty snort of derision” as we are known to do occasionally. (And by occasionally, we really mean a few times every day.)

Let’s process this news together, shall we?

A successful network-affiliated television station in the 14th largest television market in the country has decided, after at least some amount of thought and planning (we assume), to announce that it will be teaming up with a local coffee roaster to create “Fourgrounds”, a new spot for java and more in the trendy Motor City suburb of Plymouth, Michigan. The place is described as “a friendly, close-knit suburb known for its lively community events and small-town charm.” Color us disappointed to learn, in researching the place, that it is NOT named for the brand of car in which our fathers might have dropped “the f-bomb” for the very first time in front of us, many years ago. No, it turns out the town had the name many years before Chrysler slapped it on an automobile for the first time in 1928.

The wisecracks almost write themselves, without even needing to ask ChatGPT! Our future stand-up comedian self will absolutely say one day: “We didn’t know the local television business was in such bad shape!” (Anyone over the age of fifty should instinctively be speaking in their head right now: “How bad was it?")

Forgive us, but as we are typing this following line, we are reading it out loud in an almost perfect (to our ears) imitation of the great Johnny Carson saying:

“It was so bad that a guy running a Detroit TV station agreed to open their own Dunkin' Donuts!” “Clearly, he did so after spilling a large Dunkaccino in his lap, leaving the drive-thru!” And cue Ed McMahon shouting off camera, “HEY-YOOOO!”

A few historical notes are now needed: First of all, we know that Dunkin' dropped the “Donuts” from its name in a Sean Parker-esque name change a few years ago. Having lived in Boston for a few years, we say it was “wicked stupid” and refuse to use the shortened name. Second, we also know that Dunkin Donuts dropped the amazing Dunkaccino from their menu back in 2022, which only proves that they could be “even biggah chowdaheads”, as the faithful in Massachusetts might say.

We could write many more paragraphs trashing this “station coffeehouse” idea, and trust us–we already have in our heads. There is just one thing that keeps us from doing so: After chewing on it for a little bit, like a two-day-old cruller from…(well, you know where we’re going to say)–the truth is, we think it is a really fascinating idea.

Dare we say it? It might even be a little bit inspired.

Hear us out, because we have seen over many years just how interacting directly with your audience is a great way to connect with them. You know, the real people who (hopefully) watch your station? A prime example of this working we saw firsthand over the past few years, when we attended the Minnesota State Fair. That’s the second-largest state fair in the country (only behind Texas) in terms of attendance, with roughly two million people passing through the gates each August except for the six times since 1859, when it was cancelled due to minor problems such as wars and pandemics, including the most recent one way back in 2020.

The four major network affiliates have a significant presence at the state fair. Three have permanent buildings on the fairgrounds, and all produce a ton of live programming from the fair each day. We’re talking entire broadcasts, including anchoring regular newscasts at their locations. And fairgoers line up to sit in bleachers and be part of the live audience or to spin a prize wheel and win a branded trinket to take home.

Regular people who would be, as our favorite research director loves to say, “right in the freakin' demo, my friend!” God bless him, you can’t take the New York City out of a guy who analyzes ratings for a living.

Yes, the stereotypical answer would be to say that a local television station may not have any business opening up a community space that serves coffee to the locals. What are they trying to do, copy the whole “Capital One Cafe” idea? At least you can do your banking there, even if you can’t meet the “Capital One Guy” in person.

Maybe it’s enough to have a chance to see your local TV news anchors in person. Perhaps the idea of creating a real personal connection with your audience is more than worth the effort. We’re not suggesting that a station should embrace the premise that Nexstar’s Rockford, IL duopoly made into a morning news promo a few years ago.

Actually, TV stations have been riffing on showing their news anchors in diners for decades. This 1983 classic from Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV is the earliest we remember.

The planned “Fourgrounds” is predictably drawing enthusiasm from the Mayor of Plymouth. According to WDIV’s web article announcing the venture, Mayor Suzi Deal is quoted as saying, “This will be more than just a coffee shop — it’s a gathering place.” WDIV, branded as “Local 4”, quotes its VP and General Manager, Bob Ellis, as saying: “We will be more local than ever before, and we believe that means something special.”

No immediate word was available on whether there will be daily specials at “Fourgrounds.”

Snarky comments aside, if a station is going to claim it is truly local–or in the case of all the Nexstar stations who had their own catchy song about “Loving Living Local” then maybe having a storefront on Main Street is a great way to connect with viewers doing something other than watching television or even looking at their phones. Indeed, there will be free WiFi at their caffeine “hot spot”, right?

At least patrons of “Fourgrounds” will be able to enjoy witnessing live daily broadcasts of the station’s “Live in the D” program.

We have always been fans of “streetside studios” for local stations. We have even worked on building a few of them for stations over the years. The idea has worked well every day for NBC’s Today show since Dave Garroway launched the morning staple back in 1952. Why Disney decided that its “Good Morning America” needed to move from its prime location in Times Square to a basement studio in Hudson Square is a question we can’t answer. However, we strongly suspect that money played a role in the decision-making, as well as pulling WABC-TV’s “Eyewitness News” out of its streetside digs uptown in Lincoln Square.

But if stations in the Twin Cities can be live daily from the Minnesota State Fair, we see no reason why WDIV can’t serve up both a cup of joe as well as its promised “Coffee with the Newsroom” events, featuring our Local 4 anchors and reporters.”

We do wonder whether those will include any sort of drive-thru option? (Give us a rimshot there, Ed Shaugnessy!)

If you made it this far, you deserve the answers promised earlier–which are “Friends”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Frasier”, “Beverly Hills 90210”, and of course, “Seinfeld.” Jerry even turned the whole “getting coffee” idea into his hit streaming series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

Don’t ever say “shows about nothing” don’t do well.

We’ll say thank you for reading. Please consider hitting the subscribe link at the top of the webpage. Even more thanks if you already have and are reading this in your email.

We have published fifty original articles on “The Topline” so far, and none of them has generated the level of feedback that our Monday edition has about the lack of attendance at the annual RTDNA convention, held last week in New Orleans. Much of what we heard was in agreement with our genuine concern for the event’s future, if not for the organization itself.

We have also gained additional insights from individuals with direct knowledge of how things may have reached this point.

A reminder that our concern stemmed from the word that the attendance at the 2025 RTDNA event was reported to be considerably less than 200 people. Our initial figure came from Rick Gevers' weekly newsletter, which is typically published on Sunday nights. Gevers chose not to attend the annual RTDNA event for the first time in some 47 years. We found his decision noteworthy because he has supported the organization for such a long time, both as a former News Director and as a talent agent serving the industry.

Since our Monday item, we have heard from some who did attend the convention and found themselves surprised by more than just the low turnout. Especially since the RTDNA was reportedly offering free conference registrations to local TV newsrooms across Louisiana, in an effort to encourage more in-state attendees and boost the attendance total slightly. We have no idea how many people took up the RTDNA on this offer. (To be clear, we don’t begrudge those who may have accepted–it probably made the difference for those folks being able to attend.)

Speaking of being able to attend, we’ve heard from others concerned that the RTDNA has been selecting pricier hotel venues in recent years to host the annual convention. For example, the New Orleans convention hotel, the Hotel Monteleone, was charging nearly $250 a night for a room. Certainly, hotel rooms everywhere are more expensive these days. However, we’ve learned that the hotel was charging only $150 a night for a room booked through the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters to attend their annual conference, held just last month in the same location.

The cost of hotel accommodations has been a pain point for the past few years. We heard mentions that the expense of staying in the convention hotel was “a bit pricey” for previous events in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and prior locations. This cost may have also reduced some journalism students' participation at the convention, which typically has made up a decent percentage of the attendees.

Our original article hypothesized that the annual convention was a significant source of revenue for the organization. However, multiple sources indicate that the RTDNA’s primary source of revenue is now the administration and awarding of the Edward R. Murrow awards each year. The Murrows are reported to have generated over half of the organization’s revenue in recent years. It is unclear whether the RTDNA is losing money on its annual convention. Still, with no exhibit floor to speak of, only a few corporate sponsorships, and dwindling attendance, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that is the case.

Monday’s post also drew a comparison between the turnout for the RTDNA convention and that of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which was also held in New Orleans last week. Multiple readers pointed out that the IRE’s agenda is strongly focused on practical topics and hands-on sessions. As one news director put it to us, “People go to the RTDNA mostly to be seen. They go to the IRE to learn new things and bring that knowledge back to their newsrooms. So if I only have room for one in the budget, the IRE is a much better investment.”

Those looking to recruit for their news organizations also note that the IRE’s annual convention is way more beneficial for that purpose as well. That may explain why there were nearly ten times as many registered for the IRE event as for the RTDNA. While we were only half-serious in proposing that the RTDNA hold its annual convention concurrently with the IRE, more than a few people asked about revisiting the idea of holding the RTDNA event in conjunction with the big NAB show each April in Las Vegas.

As we wrote back in April, we think News Directors should absolutely attend the NAB show. Having the RTDNA adjacent to that event made a ton of sense when it was done for a few years in the past. We’re told that two factors led to the end of the arrangement: the first was that the NAB stopped offering financial incentives to do so, and that some members of the RTDNA board at the time weren’t happy sharing the spotlight with the larger industry event. This same sentiment may have also led to the end of partnering with the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and other groups of journalists during the annual conferences that were held under the “Excellence In Journalism” banner.

Whatever the reasons, and whatever egos may have been involved in the seemingly fateful decision at the time, it is apparent to many that the time has come to reconsider the merits of even holding an annual conference in the future. As long-time news executive Jacques Natz replied to us on LinkedIn, “There are too many other ways to get professional growth sessions and leadership connections. Change the name and mission: focus on the Murrows.”

While we haven’t reached the conclusion that would be the best course for the RTDNA, Natz does have a point. If the association isn’t providing the opportunity to grow the next generation of newsroom leaders through an annual professional development event–whomever it can be held in conjunction with–the RTDNA board of directors needs to carefully examine, in the words of Murrow himself, “the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.”

And for that, a great deal more than just “good luck” will be required.

Some three months and and seventeen days ago we asked the question in one of our first posts here on The Topline, “Can One Hire Save Tegna.” That hire was Adrienne Roark, who was decamping from the mess at CBS to take the helm as Chief Content Officer at television group owner Tegna—where a mess of a different sort awaited.

We’ve waited since then to see what course she would chart to start dealing with problems that have been years in the making. Yesterday, we learned of one of them. Well, three of them actually, with the announcement of three new Vice Presidents of Content at Tegna.

Carol Fowler from the company’s WXIA-TV in Atlatna, Julie Wolfe from KING-TV in Seattle, and Chris Peña, who has been with the consulting firm Blue Engine, will step into the new VP roles with regional responsibilities for stations in the Mid-South, West and Midwest regions, respectively. Given that the announcement of their new positions detailed them covering only 23 of the company’s 51 current markets, we’d expect there are more Vice Presidents yet to be named, assuming each market will be overseen by someone at a VP level.

Tegna recently made annother announcement that it is adding over 100 hours of local news programming across its portfolio of stations. That would seem like a major expansion, except that the bulk of those hours are said to be expanding morning local news programming into the 7 to 9am hours, via each station’s “plus” branded streaming outlet. So this appears more of an extension of existing local news programming to an online-only audience, while network programming is being carried and where local competitors are likely to be already in place—both with over the air and over the top coverage.

The larger challenge that still awaits the content C-Suite in the Tyson HQ is turning “the ship” around after the recent years that it has been a bit adrift. Ever since the Joel Cheatwood-led attempt to install a news template across the stations that was built on following social media trends. The audience didn’t follow, but then there was the extended period of uncertainty from Standard General’s 8-billion dollar bid to take over Tegna, which ultimately failed, but not before depositing $136 million into Tegna’s treasury. Hopefully that helped cover the exit packages for the corporate leadership under previous CEO Dave Lougee, who all began disembarking “down the gangway” as it were.

And we almost forgot about the recent decimation of all creative services & promotion types at the stations, in favor of a handful of regionalized CSD’s, which the company seemed to have to reverse course on in record time.

All of this has left many of the company’s strongest stations far less than their former selves, while weaker properties have been working hard just to tread water. We wouldn’t presume to sort which stations fall into each of these groups, though we are relatively certain that is just what Adrienne Roark has been working to figure out for the past three months…and say, sixteen days. Now it appears that she has recruited three trusted lieutenants to help the cause. And perhaps there are a few more yet to join the team.

Or perhaps there are a few markets that might be sold or traded when the FCC starts its promised deregulation effort and breaks the dam on station trading that we forecast last Wednesday. (Get your own cool metaphor, TV NewsCheck.)

One interesting aspect of Tegna’s Monday announcement for the three new VPs of Content is a description that along with overseeing news content for a regional group of stations, each will also oversee an area of “content priority” such as weather coverage, morning news strategy, sales and sponsorships, solutions-based journalism and so forth. Given the press release’s language that states “each will be well-positioned to help identify trends and when appropriate, foster cross-station collaboration that enables journalists to produce more in-depth stories from local perspectives.”

We sure hope that isn’t some lofty-sounding corporate speak that translates into more centralizing or “hubbing” of content into so-called “centers for innovation.” The business has seen enough of that hidden iceberg in the past decade, which others have run into at full speed—all while thinking they were on course to reach a destination of success.

Call us hopeless optimists, but we are pulling for the team at Tegna to succeed on their transformational voyage. The broadcasting industry needs more healthy local stations that are doing more real innovating than focusing on collecting a huge pile of industry awards that the audience doesn’t see as treasure of any kind.

Don’t even get us started on that rant.

Long-time industry observer and talent agent (his day job), Rick Gevers, pointed out a rather uncomfortable truth in the latest edition of his must-read weekly newsletter, which tracks the comings and goings of television news directors. He chose not to attend last week’s annual conference of the Radio Television Digital News Association, held in New Orleans. No criticism from us about that, we chose not to attend as well.

But in Gevers' case, it’s the first RTDNA conference he has missed since 1978. Even our journalist-impaired math skills can calculate that it was the end of a 47-year streak. Being a class act, Rick didn’t make a big deal about it. So leave it to us to point out why it really is.

It isn’t as if Rick doesn’t like to visit New Orleans in June (though the weather there can be less than hospitable at this time of year). In fact, he was in the Crescent City last week, attending the annual convention of IRE, the Investigative Reporters and Editors association.

Now, Rick didn’t spell out exactly why he broke his nearly 50-year streak of attending the annual RTDNA convention, but in his Sunday night dispatch, he pointed out the really uncomfortable stat–one that had nothing to do with his beloved Indiana Pacers losing a tough Game 7 and in turn, the NBA Championship to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The attendance at the IRE Convention topped 1,650 people. The attendance at the RTDNA Convention was a mere 180 people.

We’ll quantify that differently: Nearly ten times as many people attended the convention for a specialized group of journalists as attended the once premier annual event in broadcast journalism. The one where Edward R. Murrow once gave a little speech that George Clooney turned into part of his Broadway play, which made more money in a single week of its run than any Broadway production ever has in a single week.

And so we’ll ask the uncomfortable question: “Wither the RTDNA?”

Let’s make our position clear: we are in no way supporting the demise of the association. We believe that the RTDNA plays a crucial role in the industry. But you would be forgiven if you had stated, as one RTDNA convention attendee did to us, that their visit to New Orleans left them “wondering about the future of the business.”

We’ve been around long enough to remember when the association was still known by a similar abbreviation as the RTNDA, which stood for the Radio Television News Directors Association. It hosted a well-attended and vibrant annual conference back when we first started going. We may have even landed a job or two there over the years. (Yes, we have attended for a few decades, but not as many as Gevers.) The RTNDA event was held each year in a different city, and it had solid attendance, not to mention a substantial agenda and perhaps a few memorable parties in its evenings. (Thanks for all those memories, CNN Newsource.)

When attendance started to waver, the RTDNA tried some different ideas to boost attendance at its annual convention. It was held on a couple of occasions with other journalism-focused groups such as the NABJ, NAHJ, and others. If memory serves us correctly, it was also once held adjacent to the annual NAB show in Las Vegas, the broadcast industry’s premiere (and best-attended) yearly event.

A couple of years ago, when the RTDNA convention came to our hometown of Minneapolis, attendance was small enough to be truly surprising to an informal group of us who had gathered for an annual dinner at each RTDNA for years. Part of the dinner conversation that evening at the legendary Murray’s Steak House was about the difficult, but obvious question:

“What’s going to happen to the RTDNA if nobody shows up to their convention?”

The question extends beyond the future of the event to perhaps that of the association itself. The annual convention is one of the primary sources of income for the organization. At least that is what we’re told by people familiar with the inner workings of the group. That was one reason why it moved away from holding its event with other organizations, even if the strength in numbers might be evident to anyone counting attendance.

Another question to consider is who was attending the annual RTDNA event–and what they were getting out of it. A cursory comparison of the agendas of last week’s RTDNA event and the IRE convention tells part of the story. Over the years, the IRE event has established a solid reputation as a premier training and networking opportunity for journalists in investigative positions across the country. On LinkedIn, we saw a few posts from folks attending Gray Media’s company day at the IRE convention in New Orleans. They had 140 journalists in attendance. While Gray has been investing heavily in investigative reporting across its entire group of stations, and deserve to be commended for their efforts in the space, the fact that there were more people from the group owner attending the IRE than the total number of people at the RTDNA event days earlier is pretty stunning to us.

Do we have the answers for what the RTDNA board of directors should do to address this issue? Hardly.

However, a question of relevance must be addressed in a concrete and meaningful manner — and there is some urgency about doing so. Yes, we are aware of all the points regarding the current state of the broadcast news business, not to mention broadcasting itself being in a state of decline. Yes, we know that news budgets are being slashed, much like scenes in a Wes Craven movie. And apparently, many news directors and their companies have decided that attending the annual RTDNA event is no longer a priority, especially when larger groups hold their own internal meetings for news department leadership.

All that notwithstanding, if something doesn’t fundamentally change for the RTDNA and quickly, we have to wonder what’s next for the organization? At this point, it may be worthwhile to ask the leadership of the IRE to consider merging the two organizations' events in 2026 or beyond.

At least then, maybe Rick Gevers would be able to start a new attendance streak.

We’re back with another edition of things you might want to read and watch this weekend.

Off the bat, in case you missed Tim Hanlon of TVREV taking broadcasters to the woodshed over plans to turn “NexGen TV” (also known as ATSC 3.0) into anything and seemingly everything but the new and improved version of HDTV that was originally promised, you should definitely check out this article.

In fact, TVREV.com is now on our “must subscribe” list for television news professionals as a regular read to keep up with the larger issues facing the entire business of television. As their masthead promises, they deliver on “The Future of Television. Dissected Daily.”

While we are mentioning free subscriptions, our accountant would insist that we should remind you that if you don’t subscribe to TVND.com, it would be great if you would take a moment and do so. It’s free, and we will deliver our dispatches right to your inbox as soon as we publish them. Just click the subscribe button at the top of this webpage. (If you’re reading this in your email, thanks for already supporting the cause. Share us with your friends.)

One of America’s most interesting companies has to be Tesla. Whatever you may think of founder Elon Musk’s political and personal lives, the fact that the company that made electric vehicles legitimate was worth more than Ford, Toyota and GM combined is no small accomplishment. Now the company faces a “brain drain” that is not all that dissimilar to what has been happening in the television news business. Patrick Brown chronicles the current crisis for The Atlantic magazine and his latest article is a fascinating read.

Speaking of Tesla, we want to introduce you to one Andrej Karpathy. He is the former senior director of Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. Before that, he was one of the founders of Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT. So yes, he is, as anyone from Boston might say “wicked smart." Just last week, we experienced Tesla’s AI-powered FSD or “Full Self Driving” mode for the first time. This was while driving on a three-hour trip across California. Candidly, we would describe the experience as impressive to the point of almost seeming magical. When the guy who was behind that, now wants to teach us how “software is changing…again”, we are definitely interested in what he has to say.

Karpathy’s recent keynote at at event called the “AI Startup School” is now available to watch on YouTube. We will warn you that it is a deep dive into a subject that maybe only true geeks might love. But it is a fascinating look into what the future of computer software in the age of artificial intelligence will probably look like, so maybe give it a few minutes to see if it is for you.

But if that is just too heavy a watch for your weekend, let us give you a different recommendation for something “completely different.” We loved the first three seasons of HBO Max’s comedy “Hacks” starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. But the recently released fourth season is a brilliant behind-the-scenes look at the television business through the premise of launching a late-night TV talk show by a veteran stand-up comedian and her creative writing partner. It’s funny and even poignant at times, but also insightful on the forces at work in the process of producing television. Highly recommended.

Above all, we definitely recommend that you have a great and enjoyable weekend. See you back here next week.

Forgive us being away from the keyboard for a few days, we had the audacity to actually try to take a small vacation. As has seemingly been the case for the entirety of our working lives in broadcast news, there weren’t any big stories that happened in the world while we were away, right?

Well not unless you count the continuation of a nation sharply divided over ongoing immigration policies by the federal government, leading to clashes with protestors over raids in Southern California. Then, over the objections of State and Local leaders, national guard soldiers and active marines were ordered into the area increasing tensions. Over this past weekend, an alleged political assassin killed two and wounded two others in our home state of Minnesota, leading to a tense and massive manhunt before a suspect was captured without incident in a rural area in less than 48 hours. This past Saturday also saw the dichotomy of a sparsely attended military parade in the nation’s capital, on the same day millions of citizens turned out for peaceful protests across the country against the current administration. And while all that was going on here at home, a shooting war broke out in the Middle East between Israel and Iran–over the latter’s ongoing quest to produce a nuclear weapon.

Sure, just another week in the news business in 2025. Such as that business may be at the moment.

Yesterday brought the headline that for the first time, social media and video networks have now displaced television as the first choice for how Americans get their news. At least that is the one of the key findings in a new report from the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

With all that presently as backdrop, we are going to focus here on the future.

Specifically, the future for the business of buying and selling local television stations. Because from everything we are hearing, there is about to be a flood of activity in that space after a pretty long period of there just being an occasional trickle. (Yes, we know we are leaning into this whole water analogy pretty hard, but it is our first day back at the keyboard.)

The climate for such deal making seems to grow more favorable by the day. The Senate’s approval of the nomination of Olivia Trusty to the Federal Communications Commission will give the commission a republican majority. That would appear to clear the way for a wide slate of industry reforms that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been wanting to move forward with. That slate is expected to include a loosening of ownership regulations that could permit the industry’s big group owners to become even bigger. Thus some long anticipated transactions should be announced pretty soon. Like any day now.

Two of them are worth a closer look as indicators being watched for the overall health of the business as seen through the lens of who is selling and who is buying.

The first deal everyone is waiting to hear about is the anticipated sale of Apollo Global Management’s interest in the television properties of Cox Media Group. Since acquiring a controlling interest in Cox’s television stations in 2019 (along with newspaper and radio interests Cox had in Dayton, Ohio) it has seemed that Apollo was hoping for something more lucrative than what it got from that original transaction. In 2022, Apollo would package and spin a chunk of Cox’s smaller market television properties, including WHBQ-TV in Memphis and the duopoly of KOKI-TV and KMYT in Tulsa, to an outfit called Imagicomm. Early this year, Imagicomm would exit the local television business, selling the Memphis and Tulsa stations, along with smaller properties in Spokane and Yakima, Washington; Pendleton, Oregon and Yuma, Arizona, to the newly formed Rincon Broadcasting Group. Rincon is headed up by Todd Parkin, who was most recently with Sinclair’s regional sports business that was known as Bally Sports Network.

But the big deal that Apollo wants to make is for the core group of Cox’s remaining ten television stations in major markets from Boston to Seattle, along with their powerful trio of ABC affiliates in the Southeast, including WSB-TV in Atlanta, WFTV in Orlando and WSOC-TV in Charlotte. That group of stations could be worth about $4 Billion and would be of interest to any number of potential owners, including industry “mega groups” like Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray, who would most likely have access to the major money needed to finance such an acquisition. Nexstar, in particular, has been mentioned frequently to us as a likely purchaser for the Cox stations, even though it would have to figure out what it would do in Charlotte, where it already owns a duopoly of Fox affiliate, WJZY and My Network affiliate WMYT, as well as in Dayton where it also has a duopoly of NBC affiliate WDTN and CW affiliate WBDT. Given the long standing strength of Cox’s WSOC and WHIO in those markets, the question would be what Nexstar would keep and what would it spin off to get FCC approval of acquiring the Cox station group.

Gray, based in Atlanta, would of course be interested in getting its hands on WSB-TV, which some observers have noted could fetch a billion dollar price tag just on its own. Gray too has some complications in realizing a deal for the Cox television stations, given that it currently owns WANF and WPCH in Atlanta. WANF, locally known as “Atlanta News First” was just in the news as it will soon be without a network affiliation. That is a result of CBS moving its network there to its owned and operated WVEU there in August. Gray also owns WBTV in Charlotte, NC, so that is also two markets to figure out what would be kept and what might be sold.

Of course, we’re assuming that even a reform-minded FCC would still keep a Nexstar or Gray from owning two “big four” network-affiliated stations in a major market such as Atlanta or Charlotte. That thinking could be outdated by the ever increasing drumbeat of lobbying that local television owners need far less restrictions to be able to compete and survive against the far less regulated digital media behemoths in the marketplace for eyeballs and advertising dollars. One thing that everyone expects to see is the consolidation of the many “sidecar” deals that have allowed groups to operate multiple stations in markets where they would be prevented from outright owning more than one television property.

On the other end of the spectrum for selling local television stations is the curious case of Allen Media Group. Byron Allen’s foray into local television ownership hasn’t likely panned out the way the successful TV producer had hoped for six years ago, when he borrowed nearly a billion dollars to assemble a portfolio of some 25 local TV stations–in smaller markets. Multiple industry observers have opined that the value of these stations has dropped significantly and that prospective buyers are finding that the financial situations at these properties is “challenging” especially in formulating any sort of offer to purchase the stations that Allen would consider to be worth accepting.

That’s not to say that there aren’t buyers out there for any and all local TV stations that are presently on the market for sale–or might be very soon. There may not be that many suitors able–or willing–to swallow an entire group like Allen or Cox in a single gulp. But there will be buyers, both established names and brand new ones, who are going through the process of doing their “due diligence” that is playing out behind the scenes even as we type these words. They are all looking to be ready to make offers on any local stations that may come onto the market in the months ahead.

In other words, as soon as we hear that one deal is being announced, don’t be surprised if that leads to a proverbial wave of dealmaking for stations–the likes of which we haven’t seen in the television business for quite some time.

The big questions to be answered? Who will be left standing on higher ground? And will anybody be left still watching those stations?

We’re almost afraid to take any more time off this summer.

Today was one of those days that put local TV newsrooms to the test. Aside from the expected coverage of protests across the country, there was an unexpected and horrific story emerging in the Twin Cities, where in the very early hours of this Saturday, a gunman, apparently dressed like a law enforcement officer, shot and killed State Representative Melissa Hortman, Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House, along with her husband Mark, in their Brooklyn Park, MN home. The gunman also shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette multiple times in their nearby Champlin, MN home. The Hoffmans were both very seriously wounded, but are expected to survive.

All four local TV newsrooms were in continuing coverage for many hours today as neighborhoods were “sheltered in place,” a manhunt expanded to cover multiple states (it continues as I write this), and key details were agonizingly slow to emerge—as they often are in such situations.

As the first major local news event post my being in a newsroom for the past fifty years, as well as finding myself across the country on a trip visiting family, it was a bit odd to be on the proverbial “outside looking in.” But I quickly took comfort in seeing that many former colleagues and competitors were on the air, doing the vital work necessary to keep viewers informed of what was developing on the story in real time. From all the coverage I watched, I can tell you each station had its moments of strength, along with a few minor struggles along the way.

What I can also tell you is that as a critical viewer, I am grateful for the work done today by all the local journalists back home who worked on this particular Saturday in June. Yes, there will be more coverage to be done in the days and weeks to come. But I am confident they will continue to work all aspects of the story and keep the community informed.

-Kirk Varner

We had really wanted to see George Clooney’s performance as Edward R. Murrow in his production of “Good Night, and Good Luck” at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway this Spring. Life being what it is, one thing and another came up, and we didn’t get to make the trip to NYC to do so. So, this past Saturday night, we tuned in as CNN made a bit of history (as Anderson Cooper repeatedly told us) when it televised the play’s final performance to its worldwide television audience.

At least, whatever audience CNN still has these days, the drumbeat grows deafening that linear television has been relegated to near-extinct status.

We’ll admit here to being fans of Mr. Clooney as an actor, producer, and supporter of journalism for quite some time. He comes by that honestly, as the son of longtime local newsman Nick Clooney, whom we have competed against and met on several occasions. Son George grew up around his father, who worked in local television news in Cincinnati. As a result, his appreciation for the business, and in turn its legacy as established by Murrow’s work in the nascent years of the television medium, is strong.

The original movie version of “Good Night, and Good Luck” premiered some 20 years ago, in which Clooney played Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producing partner, and later, the President of CBS News. Friendly would quit that position in 1966 over the issue of corporate interference in his desire to have the network cover the US Senate hearings into the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. For the Broadway production, he would play Murrow himself. (We have to admit now that we preferred him as Friendly, along with actor David Strathairn’s masterful portrayal of Murrow in the film version.)

But it was a fine production, even stirring, some might say. Especially to hear Murrow’s words given voice in this precarious moment of American history, which draws parallel to the troubling days known as “The Red Scare” in the 1950s. Yes, the nation was gripped by a brash politician who deftly used the media spotlight of the moment to conduct a thinly-veiled campaign of nationalism packaged in a questionable effort to “expose” communist infiltration of the United States government, if not the entirety of the nation itself.

Murrow and Friendly’s courage in doing so, and in pushing back on CBS Chairman Bill Paley’s effort to tone down the coverage to protect his business empire from the wrath of McCarthyism that had its champion and supporters in Washington, DC. While it is easy to understand “The Junior Senator from Wisconsin” as the key figure in the dark chapter of our nation’s history, the depth of how subversive the movement that also promoted an “America First” campaign was so much deeper than one man, chairing the hearings of “The Subcommittee of Investigations for the Committee on Government Operations.”

If your knowledge of this particular period of US History is lacking, as admittedly ours was (given that we were born after the events portrayed in “Good Night, and Good Luck), let us recommend the excellent two seasons of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC podcast titled “ULTRA." It does a brilliant job of telling the story of the rise of the ultra-nationalist movement from before America entered into World War II through to after the war and the ultimate showdown over McCarthyism in the 1950s. The story is told through the effective use of period sound (including NBC Radio newscasts from the time) and interviews with historians who explain what would sound like an amazing novel about spies and counterintelligence—except that this all actually happened here.

Speaking of political novels, if you haven’t ever read 1935’s “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis (or read it lately), you might want to get a copy or download it to your Kindle. Before somebody decides to ban it because it seems a bit too prescient in its premise.

Returning to the big night on Broadway, we hope you had the opportunity to see the telecast of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” as it is not planned to be made available for streaming viewing. We’d assume that is because the rights would be too complicated to allow for that delivery, and there is also the rumor that Clooney and company may take the production to the London stage at a future date. (Given the record-breaking box office in its limited Broadway run, it is easy to understand the motivation to do so.)

Following the play, CNN aired a live studio special, led by the network’s Anderson Cooper. It featured a panel of journalists, before an audience of journalism students and educators, to discuss the play’s message and its connection to current-day events and the state of journalism. The panel featured Walter Isaacson, author, journalist, and former President of CNN; Kara Swisher, noted tech journalist and podcaster; CNN Anchor Abby Phillip; groundbreaking network news anchor Connie Chung; Jorge Ramos, former longtime national anchor at Univision; and Bret Stephens, Opinion columnist for The New York Times.

There was the predictable analysis and opinion on why the play and its message matter greatly in the year 2025, as well as what it says about the challenges of practicing journalism at this time. There was discussion about whether there is a Murrow-like figure in this moment, and whether he (or she) would be allowed to do the work that aired on “See It Now” some 76 years ago. That question got further probed by a recorded interview segment that Cooper did with fellow CBS “60 Minutes” anchor Scott Pelley. This was presented against the backdrop of the not-so-subtle behind-the-scenes machinations between the broadcast and its corporate owner, Paramount Global, as the company attempts to effect a merger that is being stalled by both the White House and the FCC.

For extra emphasis, the CNN special concluded with another recorded interview, this one with the longtime journalist and author Marvin Kalb. Kalb has the distinction of being the last journalist hired by Murrow himself. Having spent much time with Murrow in his later years, Kalb reemphasized the questions and his beliefs on what Murrow would think of the state of journalism today, as well as its current ability to “speak truth to power.”

But it was a moment in the panel discussion that left the biggest impression on us. It came when NYT opinion writer Bret Stephens tried to delineate the difference between “Facts” and “Truth.” It was an illuminating moment in Stephens' premise that while facts are undeniable and verifiable, truth is often “in the eye of the beholder.” This drew immediate pushback from CNN’s Abby Phillip, who attempted to equate the two terms by asking whether all facts were indeed the truth. The nuance that Stephens attempted to convey was that while facts can be accepted by all who are aware of them, the concept of truth is shaped by each person’s worldview.

We so wished that Anderson Cooper had seized on this for further discussion because it is our view that this distinction is fundamentally at the heart of everything in question with the “business of journalism” today. Because the idea that “news” has been expanded into including “opinion” as a normal and acceptable part of whatever journalism is being practiced under the banner of news. For example, see the programming that is offered on any national “news” network, newspaper, or any other outlet—be it legacy or new media. “Talking heads” or news analysis is offered as being equivalent to the presentation of facts.

“Truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe.” That quote from Jack Holmes, a political editor at Esquire magazine, is sometimes wrongly attributed (in a shorter form) to Fox News Channel founder and CEO, the late Roger Ailes. It is also used in a similar form by the author Joseph Heller in the 1984 book “God Knows.”

But the idea actually dates back to the Greek playwright Sophocles, who wrote, “What people believe prevails over the truth.” And that is at the heart of journalism’s existential crisis that Murrow warned of, which the play “Good Night, and Good Luck” celebrates. While much of the “book” of the play focuses on the “See It Now” reporting on McCarthy and “The Red Scare,” the cautionary messages come at the play’s beginning and end. They are taken from Murrow’s 1958 speech before the Radio-Television News Directors Association convention.

Yes, it is the speech where Murrow uses his now-infamous line, calling television “this instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire.” He goes on to note that it can do so “only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

In the midst of CNN’s “post-play” roundtable, anchor Anderson Cooper had to interrupt the program to introduce a live reporter in Los Angeles, where protests had broken out in multiple locations over immigration raids and detentions by the federal government. It was a moment of real-time news interrupting a group of “talking heads” analyzing a Broadway production about the news business to talk about the current state of that same business. The irony was not lost on us.

In his original RTNDA address, Murrow notes more than once that “Our history will be what we make it.” But on later reference, he adds what might be his more profound and prophetic words: “If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.”

Notably, he did not end that address with his famous sign-off (and future title of both a great Hollywood and Broadway production) of saying “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Instead, he simply said, “Thank you for your patience.”

(Thank you for yours here, this went on a little longer than we planned for it to. Appreciate your reading all of it.)

From one of our favorite podcasts, “The Techmeme Ride Home,” we are borrowing the idea that on each Friday we’ll give our readers something they can enjoy reading over the upcoming weekend. Techmeme dubs them “weekend long reads” and that title seems good enough for us to adopt for our offering here.

For our inaugural “WLR” (yes—we have decided to abbreviate it because all cool things seem to have an abbreviated name, IYKYK) our first recommended read will be tech-centric. That is because this particular topic is too important for everyone’s lives.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those things that many people (including us) think they understand enough about. But truthfully they probably don’t. You may have used ChatGPT, or one of its cousins such as Co-Pilot from Microsoft, Claude from Anthropic, Grok from X, Gemini from Google, etc. We would certainly place ourselves in this category.

We know precious little, and that makes us both confident and dangerous at the same time.

AI is nothing short of a global arms race, posing a tech phenomenon. But fortunately there is someone who can help make us all smarter about it. Her name is Mary Meeker, and if you aren’t familiar with her work, she is a venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst. For years, Meeker chronicled the meteoric rise of the internet with an annual “Internet Trends Report.” It was a must read for anyone for anyone trying to understand how the internet was changing everything about everything.

Last week, Meeker and the team at her VC firm Bond Capital, put out her first report since 2019, when she stopped publishing her previous “Internet Trends Report.” This new report, all 340 pages of it, focuses on the most disruptive technology since…well, the internet.

And that technology would be Artificial Intelligence.

But their “Trends In Artificial Intelligence” report can be a tough read for mere mortals, so we found an excellent summary analysis on Substack that does a really great job of making Meeker’s in-depth report understandable to those of us who haven’t taken all the AP classes along the way.

Our first WLR recommendation goes to “Nate’s Substack” and this particular article which we found interesting, surprising and essential to understand what the future with AI has in store for us. Click here to read it for yourself.

Fair warning, while far more approachable than the original report, this can still be a “heavy” read at times. If you might be in the mood for something a little more entertaining to digest over your weekend, allow us to also provide the inaugural “WLR-Alternative” recommendation.

And that would be our favorite acerbic columnist Drew Magary’s evisceration of CNN’s Jake Tapper in his article: “Jake Tapper is the reason American is doomed.”

Have a good weekend everybody, we’ll see you back here next week.

A reminder that if you haven’t subscribed to TVND.Com, you can do so by clicking the subscribe button at the top of this page. It’s free to do so and really helps our efforts. Our promise is not to ever spam you or use your email address for anything but “the never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.” Just like Superman. Thanks for considering doing so and if you already did subscribe and are reading this from your email, please know that we really appreciate your readership and your support.

We spent some time in this week going through the local coverage from Denver’s local TV newsrooms of last Sunday’s breaking news around the horrific attack on a crowd of protestors in Boulder, Colorado. As we went through the recordings of each station’s on-air broadcast signal from that afternoon, we were struck by the lack of on-screen breaking news “crawls” (aka “tickers” in some corners) over each network’s sports programming.

That got us to wondering: Do on-air crawls for breaking news alerts still matter in 2025?

When we mentioned it in some conversations this past Monday, one colleague asked an even more provocative question that sent us further down the proverbial “rabbit hole.” In the “multi-platform” world we are in now, is it time to rethink the whole emphasis local TV newsrooms put on having “Breaking News” coverage on their broadcast signals?

Given the multitude of ways consumers can get news information delivered to them, do they really want or even need any interruptions into their coverage of the Women’s US Open Golf tournament? Or the PGA Tour’s stop at The Memorial tournament? Perhaps the NCAA Women’s World Series? How about the drag racing finals from New England? Or even the made-for-TV spectacle that is the United Football League as it aired across two different networks?

Do we just assume that they get everything they need from devices other than the television set? Has streaming breaking news coverage sufficiently replaced the broadcast channel as a way to deliver breaking news?

We ask all this, because in reviewing of the recordings of these stations on the afternoon of Sunday, June 1st, in market number 17, we didn’t see a lot of information presented to the viewers of those TV programs about what was happening in Boulder. At least not before those station’s regular newscasts started at 5pm, Mountain Time.

The first on-screen news crawl we saw about the Boulder story was on KCNC, known locally as “CBS News Colorado.” Their news crawl went up at approximately 3:14pm (all times mentioned are local) and stayed up for about 17 minutes. It had first word of police investigating an attack in Boulder with several blocks evacuated. The crawl also pushed viewers who wanted to watch coverage on their “Live 24 hour stream” though no details on how to access said stream were included on the crawl. An updated crawl appeared at 3:39pm which added some more detail, including a briefing from Boulder Police coming up at 4pm. This crawl promised live coverage on streaming and added information about where to find the CBS News Colorado live stream. It would air well past the start of the police briefing, staying on with the “scheduled to start at 4pm language" until 4:17pm. The @CBSColorado account on X.com shows a first post of “Colorado police responding to attack at Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall” at 3:35pm.

There would be no further on-air updates offered by KCNC until 4:30pm when CBS began its “CBS Weekend News with Jericka Duncan." That newscast led with the Boulder Attack story as a voiceover followed by a short sound bite from the Boulder Police Chief’s press conference. CBS News Colorado at 5pm followed with extensive coverage from Boulder, including three live reporters on the scene. They deserve a special mention for thinking of having one of those reporters, Michael Abyeta, at a nearby Synagogue where he detailed that people were gathering under heightened security from law enforcement. It was detail that no other station had in their coverage. The hour-long newscast was dominated by the Boulder story, going the entire first block for nearly 11 minutes and then being updated three more times in the second half-hour at 5:30pm.

KDVR, Fox31 in Denver, put up a crawl at 3:36pm over the UFL football game that Fox was carrying. The crawl read: “Boulder Police: Several blocks of Boulder’s Pearl Street under evacuation order. Several people injured.” That was all of the detail offered, followed by noting that “Fox31 News-Streaming Anytime on Fox31+” That crawl ran about 15 minutes with no update, until the station did its first breaking news special report at 3:50pm. That made Fox31 the first station to interrupt regular programming with an anchor in-studio and a live reporter in Boulder.

Following a very solid five minutes of breaking news from the Fox31 anchor (whose name was never mentioned or supered) and reporter Shaul Turner in Boulder, viewers were promised more live coverage when the Boulder Police Chief would hold a press conference in the next hour. Viewers were returned to the UFL game in progress with the exact same previous crawl. That ran until 4:04pm when the station did return with another special report as the Boulder Police Chief began to speak. On X.Com, the station’s @KDVR account posted the headline “Boulder police respond to Pearl Street for reported attack” at 3:18pm.

KUSA, Denver’s “9News” ran its first crawl at approximately 3:37pm with a bit more detail on the situation, including evacuations in part of downtown Boulder. Then at 4pm it ran a brief crawl alerting viewers to the upcoming Police briefing which would be covered live on sister station KTVD-20 and streaming on 9News+. The station then produced a solid half-hour special report covering the Boulder Police Chief’s remarks and featured live coverage around the scene of the attack from three of its reporters on the ground in Boulder. Oddly, the station didn’t run any further crawls over the Women’s US Open golf that was still airing on KUSA’s over the air signal, so if a viewer missed the initial crawl, they wouldn’t know of the news coverage going on over on the second station and the livestream. Looking back at their timeline on X, the first post from @9News there was at 3:17pm.

Then there was KMGH, “Denver7” which was airing ABC’s coverage of the Women’s College World Series on this Sunday afternoon. If you were watching the event, you received zero notification of the news happening in Boulder. No cut-ins, no crawls—at least not about the news. The X.Com account shows a first post from Denver7’s @DenverChannel account at 3:24pm, stating “BREAKING: The Boulder Police department said that officers were responding to the Pearl Street Mall after a report of an attack with several victims. KMGH was the most active station posting updates on X, along with reposting posts from its reporters and anchors into the evening.

Back over on its broadcast television signal, the station began running a severe weather crawl for thunderstorms moving through the metro at approximately 4:41pm, shortly before the game ended. (Tennessee defeated UCLA, 5-4 in case you missed it.) Then in a strange moment in the end commercial break following the game, KMGH’s meteorologist Stacey Donaldson went on the air with a severe weather cut-in that ran a couple of minutes, which then dumped back into ABC, which was now amid the lead story in the weekend edition of World News. The network’s lead story was the Breaking News on the attack in Boulder. The severe weather crawl would stay up until the station started it’s local 5pm newscast at the top of the hour, which began with a single live reporter in Boulder and would move on to severe weather coverage in less than four minutes. The half-hour newscast would end a little later than its scheduled running time at 5:40pm to join a program called “Real Talk with Denver 7 and CPR News.” Unfortunately, the program, which appeared to be pre-recorded, would feature Colorado’s Governor and other interviews all talking about the upcoming move of The Sundance Film Festival to…Boulder, Colorado.

Let us run a disclaimer here that while we carefully watched the off-air recordings of the four main Denver stations carefully during the hours of 2pm to 6pm local time, we certainly could have missed something during the period. We went back and reviewed each station’s timeline on X.Com as of Wednesday, June 4th, so it is possible that some posts there may no longer be visible. And finally, we don’t have details on any push alerts each station may have sent out via their own mobile apps.

Which brings us back to where we started with this hypothesis: Maybe in the present day, running on-air crawls or even doing special reports on breaking news via a station’s air signal isn’t that important? Certainly, any local TV meteorologist who has gone on the air with breaking coverage of severe weather warnings can detail the abuse they have likely received from viewers whose “absolutely favorite show ever” has been interrupted for some critical emergency information. More and more these days, viewers will even be upset about a severe weather crawl airing (especially if it happens to cover the scoreboard graphic of a sporting event.)

And yes, we do understand that this story broke on a Sunday afternoon, when any local station is probably minimally staffed. But what happens in these moments is where reputations for coverage can be made–or lost. It was clear that each station moved to deploy multiple people to cover the developing story of what had happened in Boulder.

We just wonder what happens when at least some portion of the audience decides to turn on their televisions to see if their local station is covering the nearby breaking news that they are getting those alerts on their devices about?

In case you missed the breaking industry news this afternoon, CBS has announced that come this August, it will be moving its affiliation from Gray’s WANF-TV to CBS-Owned WUPA. If you were counting old school UHF channel numbers, that is a drop from Channel 46 down to Channel 69, though WUPA was repacked to actually transmit on Channel 36 years ago when all those high numbered UHF channels became spectrum for cellular phone service.

If this sounds familar to long-time television followers, it has happened before. CBS moved from it’s long time home in Detroit of WJBK-TV, when New World Communications stunned the television industry in 1995 by moving all of its major market stations from CBS affiliations over to the upstart FOX network. In Detroit, CBS landed on Channel 62, formerly known as WGPR before adopting the legendary WWJ call letters (Those call letters had started on Channel 4 there and lasted until 1978, before that station became WDIV.) WWJ-TV is now better known as “CBS News Detroit” as it appears WUPA will adopt the owned-station branding of “CBS News Atlanta.” That also means that like in Detroit, CBS has to create a local news operation from scratch.

The New World stations exodus from CBS in ‘95 also forced the network to then seek a new home in Atlanta. That was because New World owned WAGA-TV there, and CBS had been on Channel 5 in Atlanta since it signed on the air in 1949. For those of us who grew up in the southeastern United States, CBS was synonymous with the Channel 5 position as the network was carried on that channel position in Atlanta, Nashville (on WLAC-TV, renamed WTVF), Raleigh NC (on WRAL-TV from 1985 to 2016), Mobile, AL (WKRG), and Charleston SC (WCSC-TV.) Much like CBS was on Channel 2 in the largest three markets (NYC, LA and Chicago), it was on the 5-spot on the dial across a good swath of the Southeast.

And then it wasn’t. In Atlanta, the move from WAGA-TV, a strong station in the market, then owned by Storer and competing hard with Cox’s WSB-TV for news ratings leadership. CBS was left scrambling for a new address on the TV dial. It would land on UHF Channel 46, then owned by Tribune Broadcasting and known as WGNX. It was the only network-affilated station that Tribune operated (the newspaper giant owned major market independent stations such as WPIX in New York, KTLA in Los Angeles and WGN-TV in Chicago, the company’s homebase where it owned the Chicago Tribune newspaper.) Tribune didn’t put a ton of money or effort into the station, especially in terms of local news.

The station would be rebranded in 2000, when Tribune unloaded the station to Meredith. WGNX became WGCL-TV, and the CBS station’s news product became known as “Clear News.” In an attempt to redefine what local news might be if it was focused on being “clear” what quickly became clear was that viewers weren’t moving from WSB-TV or WAGA to see this new-fangled version of local news.

In 2021, Meredith sold its TV stations to Atlanta-based Gray Media, which gave the growing operator of stations a network affiliate in it’s hometown. Gray has since pumped a lot of money and effort into the station, which it renamed “Atlanta News First” with the call letters WANF-TV in 2022. The station’s newscasts and ratings have gotten stronger, but as Gray has done in all of its markets, it moved to eliminate any station branding that included the CBS “Eye” logomark. As part of today’s announcements, Gray noted that it had signed a new corporate affiliation agreement that will keep the CBS network on its 52 other CBS stations across the country–and it will move WANF-TV to being a local-news centric independent station, joining the ranks of former network affiliates turned local news focused stations such as WHDH in Boston, WJXT in Jacksonville and soon WPLG in Miami. (We aren’t mentioning WSVN because of its current FOX affiliation and soon adding the new “ABC Miami” operation on its 7-dot-2 subchannel.)

All of today’s news does lead us to wondering whether the highly anticipated relaxing of ownership rules from the Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to jumpstart television station buying and selling, now might include more interest from the network-owned station groups to expand, along with the usual suspects of major group owners Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, etc. Or was this just a one-off for CBS to move the network in a major market to a station it already owned. Is it worth noting that CBS also owns stations in Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL (WTOG) and Seattle, WA (KSTW) that don’t currently have the CBS network on their air?

We’re checking to see what other squares are open on our bingo card for the rest of 2025.

We fired up our trusty laptop yesterday around lunchtime to watch the TV NewsCheck webinar titled “The Multi-Platform Newsroom in 2025.” The online event featured five “industry experts” as Contributing Editor Glenn Dickson introduced them. From the outset, we applaud TV NewsCheck’s effort in bringing together these panels on a regular basis to discuss some of the industry’s most pressing topics. While we may have some criticism about what was said in this particular session, we think the discussion is always worthwhile.

If we had one specific criticism of this effort, it would be that it sometimes seems like a vendor or advertiser to the publication is always part of “the panel of experts.” And while Chris Kelly, Director of Technical Solutions for Production Workflow at Ross Video, participated in this webinar, there was no indication that Ross was a sponsor of the program. Therefore, our assumption is that Chris’s presence was to represent makers of newsroom and broadcast systems among the panelists.

The rest of the panel was made up of Rene Gonzalez, Technical Product Manager, Content Tech for NBCUniversal News Group; Ernie Ensign, AVP of News Technology & Operations for Sinclair; Ernesto Mourelo, VP of Digital News, Hearst Television; and Sean McLaughlin, VP of News for Graham Media Group, and now also the just named VP & General Manager for Graham’s KPRC-TV in Houston, TX.

A caution to readers, given the subject matter, we apologize if this article gets a little too “in the weeds” as we detail what was discussed. We’ll do our best to explain as we go through it.

The overarching theme from all of the participants was evident pretty early on. Sean McLaughlin wasted no time in spelling it out when answering the first question: “We can’t continue to do it this way,” he flatly stated, after noting that he sees the same challenges everyone is facing in all TV newsrooms. “The infrastructure is the same that has been used for some time, and we (the business) have to look at all of it to save money.” He continued by declaring that there is a need to “tear down the current system and have one system that controls the entire process.” Finally, he noted that “people are comfortable with iNEWS and ENPS.”

We took him to mean that people in the newsroom are too comfortable with either system they may be working on now. The one they are likely using to crank out somewhere between 35 and 70 odd hours of newscasts on TV. each week. Not to mention everything else they are producing for all those “other platforms.”

Moderator Dickson asked a follow-up question concerning the obvious fear about new technology adoption: “What about staffing levels?” McLaughlin responded with some generic language about “looking at workflow, while protecting the quality that people have come to expect.” That sounded encouraging before he would go on to add, “There are too many hands in the process, and that doesn’t work in 2025. It didn’t work in 2020 either, but the technology wasn’t ready.”

Much of the rest of the hour was spent discussing the specifics of what that technology will be, and when it will be deployed in working TV newsrooms. While each participant offered some broad insights into what their companies are working on, the key takeaways all seemed to revolve around the pursuit of an idea to have what was called “single pane of glass,” a type of a dashboard screen from which all news content can be managed across all platforms (whether broadcast, digital, social or whatever else comes along) as well as making all content available across all properties owned by the company, regardless of where they might be located.

Given the various tools currently in use in local newsrooms to produce the content churned out each day, this was an intriguing notion.

A big key to unlocking this plan centers around the use of cloud-based computing services. We couldn’t help but think back to the scene in the 2014 movie “Sex Tape” where Jason Segel is desperately trying to explain to Cameron Diaz how the video recording of their previous night’s activities has somehow ended up online. In a moment of frustration, Segel’s character shouts, “Nobody understands The Cloud! It’s a mystery!”

Maybe that was the technology that wasn’t ready in 2020?

Moving these new newsroom solutions “off-prem” (That’s IT speak for centralizing the hardware infrastructure in a single location and then delivering the services over the internet.) Rene Gonzalez of NBCUniversal pointed out a key example of this challenge in developing a “browser-based video editing platform integrated into the newsroom computer system.” (NRCS is the industry acronym for News Room Computer Systems such as Avid’s iNews and the AP’s ENPS, along with newer names such as Ross Inception, Dalet Galaxy, Octopus Newsroom, and Cuez.app to name a few.) Gonzalez said their system vendor (which he didn’t name) has been working for some time on this key idea of integrating a video editor into a web browser that could be used directly in their “single pane of glass” solution. He noted that this would be a streamlined video editor with needed features, but it wouldn’t replace more robust editing software (such as Adobe Premiere Pro for example.) That would still be used for more complex “craft editing.”

Another key concept discussed during the webinar was the goal of merging the NRCS currently used in the broadcast production workflow with the CMS (Content Management System) typically used in the production of digital content by each newsroom. This branched off from the discussion by a few speakers who espoused the need for a “storycentric” workflow as a radical transformation for newsrooms.

We’ll note here that the “storycentric workflow” concept isn’t really new. When the local news channel New York 1 launched in NYC in 1992, it produced each story individually. Each story was recorded onto a beta tape and then played back by a computer-based rundown that controlled a large robotic Betacart “jukebox.” New stories would be continuously produced and added to each hour’s rundown. This model would evolve onto video servers that were introduced a few years later, when owner Time Warner Cable built additional local news channels in over a dozen markets. Some years later, research showed that viewers preferred seeing the news in a more traditional linear presentation, and the local news channels would move to a more traditional newscast production model.

Sinclair’s Ernie Ensign spoke about his company’s “Content Center Transformation Initiative” and the desire to deliver a “familiar product to viewers” that will be “assembled differently.” One concept he noted was not needing a control room because reporters would feed their stories directly into “a cloud media pipeline.” Anchors would also submit intros and such into this same pipeline. Then this series of “bite-sized chunks” would not only be assembled automatically into a linear newscast, but would also be able to be used as independent elements for consumption on other platforms.

Hearst’s Ernesto Mourelo captured this philosophy a bit more succinctly earlier in the session, describing his company’s motto as “One Team, One Product, All Platforms.” He said, “Understanding that the audience is now on different platforms, the company’s newsrooms have to meet the audience by being a reliable news source on those platforms.” He stressed that the news on those platforms has to be “a different product, while remaining authentic.” He also discussed another key topic, Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI). Noting that Hearst had an “AI ML (Machine Language) Team” in place for some time, they see AI as being “a tool to discover efficiencies and discover new content.” Providing an example from the company’s WMUR-TV in Manchester, New Hampshire, he explained how AI tools were helping the station cover news across the entire state, leveraging the tools and technology to surface content from various sources and stay ahead of the competition.

Mourelo detailed another specific example of technology being deployed in Hearst’s newsrooms, specifically the digitizing of the news archives at each station. He pointed out how the company’s Oklahoma City station, KOCO-TV, recently completed the conversion of their archive and had used it to uncover a significant amount of material for their coverage of the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building there. Documentaries for the station’s OTT platform were produced using material that hadn’t been seen since the event, thanks to the ability to search the archive in a detailed manner, utilizing the metadata created during the digitization process.

The topic of metadata was further explored by Sinclair’s Ernie Ensign, who noted that “metadata enrichment” is essential for the development of accelerated workflows. We understood that to mean that improving the creation of detailed notes about content, either at its creation or when it is later digitized into a searchable archive, can speed up the daily use of that material. He also noted that coalescing all of the metadata associated with the tens of thousands of hours of original content produced each week by Sinclair’s TV stations would lead to further opportunities to create and monetize additional new content.

Ensign also offered an insight into the challenge of acceptance in deploying these new technologies in newsrooms, highlighting the strong resistance to change, typically embodied in the response, “But we’ve always done it this way.” Panelists agreed that this was the most challenging part of the process. Chris Kelly of Ross Video equated the challenge to the one faced in the deployment of automated production control room systems (such as his company’s “OverDrive” product). He mentioned that he dealt with this in training television directors on the new software. The objective was to preserve the institutional knowledge while retraining staff on an entirely different way of doing their jobs.

Kelly did point out that the deployment of these automated systems had reduced staffing in the control room to just one or two people, now responsible for the job once done by a larger production crew. That reinforced Sean McLaughlin’s earlier observation that there were “too many hands in the process.” McLaughlin would go further, describing the need for “rethinking everything.” He laid out two metrics that will matter most going forward: “What is the percentage of newsroom staff who actually go out in the field to gather the news?” And then “How much of their time is actually gathering the news, rather than on production or distribution?” The future to be faced is that there will be more platforms that have to be serviced, and we also know there will be fewer staff to do that work, because budgets will be smaller.

That may have been the point at which we mentally checked out of the session.

Let’s try to summarize everything we heard during this session: First, there will be more work to be done in gathering more content, so more of the newsroom staff (however small that remains) will need to be out in the field gathering news each day. New technology (that isn’t here quite yet, but will be soon) will be relied upon to facilitate the additional work required to produce all the story-specific content for each platform. Additionally, the content must be created in a way that is more relevant to the viewers on each platform.

We’ll point out that none of the experts in this webinar suggested this “reinvention” might lead to stations doing fewer hours of TV newscasts in a given day. Or how producing news content for all the digital platforms might replace the revenue being lost in the traditional broadcast side of the business? Or even how this transformation might be accomplished while maintaining the primary revenue stream generated from local newscasts on each station? You know the joke about “trying to replace an aircraft’s engine while the plane is flying at 30,000 feet.”

There was some acknowledgement as the webinar came to a close that “the degree of difficulty for change management might have initially been underestimated.” To which we blurted out loud to no one but our laptop screen: “You think?!”

We might have then gone in search of what would be described as “an adult beverage.”

Once upon a time, the linotype machine was called “the eighth wonder of the world.” That technology made it possible for newspapers to be printed faster with fewer people. The story is detailed in a fascinating documentary that you can watch now on YouTube. For decades, these hulking mechanical beasts were essential to turning out newspapers from The New York Times to your hometown ones. Now they are mostly museum pieces. Each generation’s new technology is always succeeded by “the next big thing.”

There is a saying in business that goes “You can have good, fast, and cheap for anything, but you can only have two of those attributes.” From our perspective, we believe that new tools, which enable newsrooms to tackle the significant challenges they face each day, are fundamentally a good thing. (Apologies to Martha Stewart.) If the technology can expedite the process of getting the news to the viewer, even better. However, if that technology is merely an excuse to reduce the number of people involved in the process, we cannot help but believe that the end result will suffer in both quality and quantity.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” We promise to keep an open mind going forward.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed that our LinkedIn Feed seems to be filled with two kinds of posts. The first is from all the newly graduated college and university students from journalism or mass communications schools proudly announcing their graduation. Many are also announcing that they are about to start their first job in television news. Let us add our congratulations to all of you on launching your careers, and we wish you each success and happiness in your new positions. For those of you still looking for that first job, don’t give up hope! Continue the process of applying for and interviewing for opportunities in your chosen field. We know it can be a grind out there right now. Be creative and consider expanding your job search to increase your chances of proving to a potential employer what you can bring to their newsroom. Best of luck in your search.

On the other hand, the second kind of post we’re seeing lately are dispatches from those folks who have seemingly escaped from the terrible time they had when they previously worked in television news. Much of their criticism of the business appears to have been triggered by the recent story of a pregnant anchor in Albany, New York, whose water broke before the morning newscast began. The fact that she stayed and anchored the show before going to the hospital and later gave birth to her first child has led to a fair amount of commentary. (We’ll add here the critical detail that both mother and her newborn son are reported to be doing well, so congratulations to them both.)

Now we aren’t sure why WRGB-TV decided it was necessary to make a viral moment out of their anchor’s decision to stay at work after her water broke. Or why her co-anchor documented this on social media in real time, rather than insisting she leave work and head to the hospital. Frankly, we aren’t sure of any of the circumstances in this situation, and we aren’t about to judge anyone’s actions in this matter.

Something about that whole idea of getting all the facts before writing the story about what happened and why.

However, the nature of the story led to it being widely reported (according to the TV station’s website), including getting a “shout-out” from CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert. Then it became fodder for those who would criticize the anchor’s decision to stay at work and the notion that the demands of her newsroom or the entire industry itself somehow compelled her to make a questionable decision.

At this point, we want to state that we have neither the medical knowledge nor the life experience to judge whether her decision to stay at work was the right thing to do. And we’d certainly be shocked if there was any manager who would suggest that she make her priority at that moment about staying in the anchor chair. We’ll add that if this were a newsroom we were in charge of, we would be respectful of a colleague’s desire to keep working — but would have insisted that she leave immediately for numerous reasons, the primary one being that it would be the right thing for everyone involved.

Heck, we would have offered to drive her to the hospital as we have done on a few occasions over the years.

As for the critics who suggest that this woman’s decision was somehow forced upon her by the overwhelming, unrelenting, and inhumane demands of working in the television news business, that rings a bit hollow. Yes, we understand that the work can sometimes be challenging, the pay isn’t always what it should be, and it often requires some personal sacrifice. To those points, we would ask, what job isn’t described that way? Other professions are undoubtedly subject to the same challenges or far worse. (Teaching in a public school comes immediately to mind as one prominent example.)

Every job is called work for a reason.

We acknowledge some potential bias in this view, given our experience working in a television newsroom for fifty years before stepping away a few months ago. Yes, along the way, we worked for and with some who might have suggested that the job was more important than anything else. Some people do think and manage that way, though we believe their number has dropped in recent decades as the idea of work-life balance has gained significantly more importance for both employees and employers.

Sacrifice along the way, in terms of missing important events with family or friends? Check. Working in situations that probably weren’t 100% safe and secure? Absolutely. A feeling of not being adequately appreciated or compensated for our effort? Of course. But feeling like we had no choice but to stay in the job when we knew we could do something or anything else? Never.

And before you retort with the obvious “what about those under a contract?”, let us point out that a contract specifies terms and conditions of employment. A contract cannot force a person to work, should they choose to leave or not to work. Forcing someone to work is considered involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by law. (Careful disclaimer, this is not to be regarded as legal advice. Contracts can specify damages for a breach of contract. Anyone considering action that could lead to breaking a contract should definitely seek legal counsel before doing so.)

Legal considerations notwithstanding, our point remains that everyone is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That last part is mostly within our own control. We get that working in television news isn’t for everyone. Working in certain situations just may not be right for you. But there are always alternatives. The idea that the job demands are so unreasonable seems a bit hyperbolic. Especially when compared to those working in many other fields. Talk to those who work on the frontlines of healthcare, for example, and you’ll likely hear stories of things that happen on the job that will make being in a newsroom seem not nearly as bad as you might have thought.

If life for you is ultimately better by doing something else for a living, by all means, go and find what brings you more joy. We sincerely wish you nothing but success in the pursuit of happiness. But perhaps also recognize that others might find joy in the work you left behind. And no, they are not some delusional members of a cult that need to be rescued through some online course or life coaching. They might even enjoy what they do–hopefully at least most of the time.

They are happy to be called journalists. Maybe we should be more grateful that there are still individuals willing to undertake that vital work, even on TV.

As we start the Memorial Day weekend, let us take just a moment to deliver an important reminder about this holiday and how it is covered. Bob Dotson, the legendary correspondent for NBC’s Today Show, reminds us of what to do in his excellent 2015 book about “writing and packaging visual news.” And he summed it up in just three simple words:

Make It Memorable.

While Memorial Day is the unofficial start to Summer for many, it is also one of the most solemn holidays our nation celebrates. It is the day in which we mourn and honor our deceased service men and women. (Differing from Veteran’s Day which is celebrated each November and honors all those who have served the country.)

Memorial Day, originally known as Decoration Day, has a long history that goes all the way back to the Civil War. From its humble beginnings and evolution over the years, the last Monday in May is celebrated in many different ways across the nation. And because we cover these stories each year, there can sometimes be a utilitarian approach to how we produce such coverage.

But there is so much opportunity to take the storytelling beyond that on this holiday.

We’ve seen amazing stories over the years, ranging from profiles of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in World War II to those who fought and died in the wars since. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other locations where those who served were stationed. Those who served in combat as well as those who served in the unseen–and mostly unknown roles, each supported an effort, which in turn supported a greater cause.

Their stories deserved to be told. And they deserve to be told in a way that they will be remembered.

We urge you to think a little differently about this Memorial Day and approach the stories of this holiday with a sense of curiosity and a willingness to put in some extra effort to make each one more memorable. It is a great opportunity to try something different, like perhaps a visual essay using only natural sound. Or a profile of one particular person’s legacy as honored by those who survived them.

By capturing the special moments of this Memorial Day, and in turn, crafting better words and video to present those stories, you can honor those who gave their lives in the service of their country.

Their memory certainly deserves it.

The announcement today that Wendy McMahon is stepping down from her post as President of CBS News and Stations was a surprise announcement that didn’t seem that much of a surprise, at least to anyone who has been paying attention to the palace intrigue at the place once called “the Tiffany Network.”

Back in those heady days, employed as a promotion producer for the network’s New York City flagship station in 1980, we produced a promo in which we had animated the legendary CBS logo “eye” to appear to quickly close and open. It aired once before triggering a call from a high-ranking executive in the network’s corporate headquarters (The building at 51 West 52nd is known as “Black Rock,” due to the black granite facade of the building designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen.) The executive commanded that the animation be removed from the air immediately. Why? The icy reply: “Because the CBS eye does not blink.”

That animation never aired again, at least on our watch.

Wendy McMahon’s career has been the type that many graduating from colleges and universities this month would hope for. In her first decade, she went from being a station promotion manager in local markets such as Savannah, Jacksonville, Austin, Minneapolis, and Boston to joining the Disney/ABC family at KABC-TV in Los Angeles in 2009. Less than a decade later, she would become the President of all the ABC Owned Stations. Though we don’t know her personally, it is safe to say that she knows the television business very well.

Her industry cred made her a stellar pick by CBS CEO George Cheeks to lead the CBS-owned stations in 2021. That year, The Los Angeles Times published a devastating investigation into the misdeeds of her predecessor as head of the CBS-owned stations, Peter Dunn. The exposé and the fallout led to Dunn’s termination along with the then-VP of News for the local stations, David Friend.

McMahon’s arrival at CBS was just part of a then-curious combination of the network’s long-storied news division and the owned stations to create a new CBS News and Stations division. McMahon would originally share leadership of this newly combined unit with former Hearst executive Neeraj Khemlani. This reorganization would come just a few years after another scandal had rocked the network’s news division. In 2017, The Washington Post published a story detailing decades of misconduct by morning anchor Charlie Rose. The subsequent mess from both missteps led to the unusual move to combine the news and stations groups, which have always been run as separate business units at the other major networks.

As a former CBS Stations employee, we were doubly puzzled by the combination of the two entities and the power-sharing arrangement. While one might think that the idea of formally combining the newsgathering resources of the network and its 28 local stations, located in 17 of the nation’s largest markets, could produce great “synergy.” However, combining the 5,000 or so employees in very disparate cultures and quite different businesses would be no simple task. And it would turn out to be anything but.

Khemlani returned to CBS, where he had once been a Producer for “60 Minutes,” after spending a dozen years at Hearst, working in varying leadership capacities. His knowledge of the news and editorial side of the business and McMahon’s strength in station leadership set up the pair to hopefully create a stronger approach to dealing with the shifting fundamentals of a business going through the digital transformation that has changed much of the nature of broadcasting in recent years.

But Khemlani’s reportedly “rude and bullying behavior” (detailed in stories from The New York Post) as he openly pursued significant cost-cutting goals, led to his leaving for a “first-look” producing deal with CBS’s parent, Paramount, after just two “tumultuous” years in his position. As half the duo left, Wendy McMahon dropped the “co-” from her title and took on the single role of leading the CBS News and Stations division.

Less than a year later, in July 2024, Paramount Global and Skydance Media announced intentions to merge their two companies in a deal in which Skydance, primarily a Hollywood entertainment company known for live-action and animated movies, would acquire National Amusements, the company controlled by Shari Redstone. National Amusements is Paramount’s largest shareholder. Subsequently, Skydance would do an all-stock deal to merge with Paramount Global and its media empire, including CBS.

The review process for the merger has been anything but simple, complicated further by the change in administrations in Washington, DC, last November. Then candidate Donald Trump would sue CBS News’s 60 Minutes broadcast, initially for $10 billion-later revised to $20 billion- over the editing of an interview with Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, which aired in the run-up to election day. The lawsuit, which Paramount called “baseless,” typically would be strongly fought by a news organization the stature of CBS. But now, it impedes getting the Paramount-Skydance merger across the finish line.

Now-President Trump has been vocal about his displeasure with subsequent strong reports from 60 Minutes on topics ranging from the situation in Gaza to executive orders being used to target some of the nation’s largest law firms. The unblinking reporting has reportedly also angered Paramount Chair Shari Redstone, who stands to make $2.4 billion–if and when the merger with Skydance is completed. 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens was clear in his resignation last month that his departure was in large part over corporate meddling in the coverage produced by the venerable newsmagazine that is typically among the most-watched programs on television.

The lawsuit isn’t the only thing slowing down the merger. Newly installed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has piled on with an inquiry by the commission into the 60 Minutes interview with Harris. This is unique because the FCC has no direct authority over CBS News, as the network and its news division are not licensed by the government. But the broadcast stations owned by CBS (and part of the CBS News and Stations division of CBS, and its parent Paramount) are licensed by the FCC. Before re-election, then-candidate Trump called for CBS to “lose its license.” The previous FCC Chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic appointee, denounced that position and stated that the Commission “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Today’s departure by Wendy McMahon seemingly indicates that she is also leaving over the struggle for “editorial independence.” As reported by TheDesk.Net, McMahon wrote in her farewell email to the CBS staff: “The past few months have been challenging. It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

And just before we were going to push the “publish” button on this column, The Desk’s Matthew Keys scooped the story that 60 Minutes pulled a story from this past Sunday’s show that was set to air, examining the order to lay off thousands of “probationary employees” at the Internal Revenue Service. A Paramount spokesperson told The Desk that the story was rescheduled after producers learned that the IRS had reversed the layoffs and that the story will be broadcast “in the future.”

Apparently, in this same time frame, CNBC reports that CBS CEO George Cheeks was meeting with Wendy McMahon on Saturday and asked for her resignation. She apparently agreed, and the Paramount board was informed of the decision in a call held on Sunday.

As much as today’s announcement of her departure shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, don’t be further shocked if, in the coming days or weeks, there is an announcement of a settlement in Mr. Trump’s pending lawsuit against CBS. Just as ABC and its parent, Disney, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump last year with a $15 million contribution to a future Trump Presidential library, we could see another contribution coming from Paramount.

As we typed that last paragraph, up pops an alert from The New Republic that ABC is back in the spotlight of criticism from the 47th President for its coverage of the proposed donation of a Boeing 747 jet from Qatar, purportedly to be used as a new “Air Force One” and then perhaps given to the not-yet-announced Trump Presidential Library.

In the current climate, settling lawsuits against news organizations that might have been vigorously fought in the past may just be “the cost of doing business.” Maybe it all just comes down to figuring out who will blink first.

And maybe after all this time, the CBS eye does blink.

We’ve got an interesting idea for something worth watching this weekend. The details, in our sister blog at tvnews.coach We also got a podcast series recommendation for you there.

Please check out the latest post on tvnews.coach when you have a chance by clicking this link.

One of the things we miss the most about our former position as a TV news director was having an office just off the newsroom. The general hum (and occasional outburst) in a newsroom became a comforting rhythm over the years, not unlike those “white noise” machines some people get to help them sleep. We often miss that newsroom hum–more than we thought we would. Another thing we miss was having a bank of televisions on the office wall, allowing our almost-ADHD-addled brain to watch four or more newscasts simultaneously. No matter how fast you are with a remote, you can’t really switch back and forth between a couple of newscasts at the same time on a single TV.

We enjoy watching multiple newscasts, if only to see which stories were given different levels of importance in the editorial process of each newsroom. Since installing numerous TV screens in the living room of our home-based world headquarters wasn’t possible, the problem of how to watch everything became tougher to solve.

Let us point out that one of our most significant recommendations to anyone working in the TV news business is watching your newscast. And by that, we mean to watch it at home, as your viewers do. In the newsroom, you will have a very different viewing experience. Being at home frames your work differently, which you need to understand. Of course, it’s also important to watch your competition as well. How did they treat the day’s news differently or the same as your station did?

So we have discovered a way that allows us to record all four local newscasts at any given time and watch each of them on our own schedule, without a ton of equipment. This way allows for better analysis of what each newscast is doing and allows us to skip around (and past commercials). It is a far less frenetic experience than trying to watch multiple TV screens, as if we are some sort of crazed stock day trader staring at too many screens.

Our process is made possible with a small device few people seem to know about. It is called TABLO, an over-the-air home television DVR. Our TABLO is a small, 5-inch round white plastic box connected to a small bowtie-shaped digital antenna, which sits in a window on the upper floor of our townhouse. Because we live about 10 miles from the towers that carry nearly all of the local digital television transmissions, we don’t need an outdoor antenna, but TABLO can also work with one of those. It connects to our home WiFi system by plugging a single Ethernet cable into our WiFi router (The connector looks like the wire that plugs into a wired telephone, but with a plug that is a little larger.) That’s it, just two connections, plus plugging in a power cord. The whole installation took us a whopping 15 minutes. TABLO has an app that walks you through the process.

We should explain that TABLO combines digital TV tuners, a streaming box, and a digital video recorder. That mouthful means that once you set up the TABLO, it can tune and record up to four different things from any over-the-air (OTA) television signal in the current digital (ATSC 1.0) standard. More on that in a second. It then streams any of these signals to any connected screen in your home. That includes connected television sets, meaning those with their own internal App Store, such as Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and the like. (Oddly, TABLO has some issues working with televisions made by Vizio, so be aware of that limitation.) TABLO can also be accessed by any television set with an external streaming device such as Roku, AppleTV, Chromecast, FireTV, and others.

Just as those late-night TV infomercials love to say, “But wait, there’s more!” There are TABLO apps available for almost every mobile device you might have. So iPhones, iPads, Android-based phones, and tablets can all access the TABLO to allow you to watch good old free TV–as long as they are connected to your WiFi network. One disappointing limitation is that the current generation of TABLO is not accessible on laptops or desktop computers. You also have to be connected to your home’s WiFi network to access your TABLO device’s signal. (Before you hardcore geeks come at us, sure you could likely VPN into your home network and make a remote connection work. We haven’t tried that yet, and we figure most non-tech-obsessed regular people won’t be looking to do that much work either.)

Aside from the 60 or so current over-the-air digital TV channels and subchannels we receive here in the Twin Cities, the TABLO device also receives over 100 FAST channels. So cord cutters rejoice, many viewing options are available on the TABLO programming “grid” that looks much like the old school TV schedules that used to be standard fare in the daily newspaper. From this grid, you can change channels, select shows to be recorded, and manage your TV viewing on TABLO. Regarding storage, the TABLO can save about 50 hours of programming internally. The device also has a standard USB-A port, allowing you to connect an external hard drive to easily increase your TABLO’s DVR storage capacity. We have a 2TB drive attached, which provides an additional 200-plus hours of storage on our TABLO.

And that brings us to the bottom line. Specifically, how much does TABLO cost? The base unit can be purchased for $140; you will need to add another $20 if you need the indoor digital TV antenna. (Again, if you have an antenna now, it will likely work fine with TABLO.) Should you not need to watch or record 4 channels simultaneously, you can get a TABLO that records only 2 channels simultaneously for about $20 less. You can purchase a TABLO unit from Amazon by clicking here. (A reminder that this is an affiliate link, so if you complete a purchase, we receive a small commission from Amazon on your purchase.)

Then, if you want/need the additional DVR storage for recording shows, add from $70 to $150 for an external hard drive to connect to the TABLO. And there is the monthly subscription fee, because everything has one. But not TABLO! That’s right, there are no monthly fees for it. Once you buy the initial hardware, that’s it. TABLO automatically downloads TV program schedules over the internet, and it just works without additional charges.

We need to return for a moment to the previously mentioned limitation that the current, 4th-generation TABLO unit is strictly a current digital TV device. When (and some might say “if”) all local television signals move over to the ATSC 3.0 format, also known as “NextGen TV,” the TABLO box will become a nice door stop. Currently, the National Association of Broadcasters is proposing a 2028 deadline for stations in the largest 55 markets to switch to broadcasting in ATSC 3.0; remaining stations would have until 2030 to do so. With just 10 million or so television sets in use that can even receive NextGen TV signals, we will be surprised if these proposed deadlines don’t slip even further. That said, a TABLO purchased today might only have three to five years of useful life, depending on where you live. Even if the transition to NextGen TV happens on time, it works out to be about $50 a year to watch and record four OTA television signals on your home’s TVs and mobile devices.

That’s a fairly decent bargain to do something that we believe is critical to your development as a journalist working in (or leading) a television newsroom. If you have a different process that works for you, so be it. The key here is not the technology, but making it easy to do this important exercise on a regular basis.

How do you expect the viewers to do it if you don’t do it yourself?

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We admit to never being big fans of the branding campaign that some stations adopted a few years back. It centered around the idea of “Getting Answers” (in a more extended version, it might have been “Asking Questions, Getting Results.) This promotion spun out of the “advocacy-based” positioning that news consulting firms added to their roster of big ideas. We don’t object to the idea that local television stations and, in turn, their news operations should be advocates for their communities and their viewers. Our experience is that this is more of a “price of admission” type of thing. By that, we mean that the idea of advocating for the viewer is what is meant by the FCC’s regulatory language, which states that “broadcasters shall operate in the public interest.”

Does that mean that having a reporter chase down a reluctant official, shouting questions at them, is “getting answers?” Or that making massive Freedom of Information Act requests for public records to unearth potential corruption is? Maybe just making a couple of Google searches to find out some information related to what might be open or not on any given holiday?

In other words, just what answers might your viewers be looking for your station to get for them?

Last week, a development in the online search industry emerged that may provide a clue to that answer. In case you missed it, Eddie Cue, the head of Apple’s services unit, was testifying in a federal courtroom, and he dropped what turned out to be a bombshell bit of news. Cue stated that in the last two months, the number of searches in Apple’s Safari web browser had decreased.

Let’s unpack that a bit. Since the inception of the modern World Wide Web, the web browser has been the primary means by which most people access what they need. How many times each day do you open a browser on your computer or smartphone and either type in a specific web address (such as Amazon.com) or a query along the lines of “How many smartphones are being used in the world?” (The answer is 7.21 billion, according to Google.) You perform this query in the Safari web browser if you are using an Apple device, and typically Chrome on Android, Windows, and other devices. Yes, we are aware that there are different web browsers, including Microsoft’s Edge, Firefox, and Opera, among others. But Safari and Chrome are Home Depot and Lowe’s of this industry. We also know that on many devices, specific applications (“apps”) are used to access online destinations directly, such as Amazon or your station’s website, but that’s a focus for another day.

For years, all such web queries, also known as searches, were mainly sent to Google for responses. The Chrome browser is a Google product, and Google has paid as much as Apple $20 billion a year to be the primary search engine that powers the Safari browser. In fact, that arrangement is exactly why Mr. Cue was testifying in a federal courtroom. The United States Department of Justice is suing Google, alleging that it has a monopoly in the online search business. So, when Cue said that searches in the Safari browser had declined over the past few months, that fact caused Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to drop by over 7%–a move that did not go unnoticed on Wall Street.

The reason this development matters is that for the first time in 22 years, searches that Google would usually answer went somewhere else. And that somewhere was the “new hotness” in all things digital: Artificial Intelligence, also known by its shorthand moniker, “AI.” More online questions are being asked to ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Claude, and their competitors on an ever-expanding list. Each of these AI products can be accessed in various ways. However, each has a “natural language interface to a large learning model,” also known as a “chatbot.” These chatbots enable users to input a simple question or a very detailed premise. The big difference between using an AI chatbot and a typical web search is that the AI response is likely to be a more complete answer to your question, rather than just a series of links to webpages that are probably related to the topic you are interested in. Depending on the detail in the query posed to the chatbot, you can get everything from a simple statistic to the beginnings of a fully formed business plan.

We’ve heard it described as going to the library and asking a question, where one librarian points you to the section of books on the topic you’re asking about, and another librarian simply provides the answer to your question. Which librarian would you go to the next time you had a question?

All of which means exactly what to those of us in the television news business? We suggest considering the implications of this shift in digital habits, where more people are adopting AI applications as their primary source for answers. It may mean that, given a choice, your viewers are looking for more detail than just an answer to a question. Earlier, when we asked about the number of smartphones in the world, the AI response was more than just a link to a source, such as the Global Systems Mobile Association. It was a couple of paragraphs about the specific number of smartphones, along with additional detail on the growth of that number over the past few years, the individual nations with the most significant percentage of smartphones, and so on. It was an explanation.

In the information age we currently live in, viewers can get answers to questions anytime they want, without waiting for your newscast to deliver them. What they couldn’t get from their digital devices before was more context in those answers. Explaining, and more importantly, demonstrating the potential impact of the answers, where television still holds an advantage. And yes, if the questions can’t be easily answered–then chasing those officials down the hallway may make the difference in understanding why someone doesn’t want you to know the answer to the question being asked.

We get it, a promotional slogan along the lines of “We Provide More Context For Your Questions” probably isn’t the next big marketing innovation for a television station. But demonstrating to viewers that your station can help make more sense of the ever-changing world they face every day? Now, that can be at the very heart of what a local newscast does to be more intrinsically valuable to the audience. The idea that help is delivered by actual human beings, who live in the same community, is a distinct advantage over any AI chatbot’s text-based response.

At least it is for now.

Have you subscribed to get The Topline delivered directly to your email? We are preparing an upcoming special report on the use of AI in the newsroom. It will be made available exclusively to our subscribers and will not be displayed on our website. Make sure you will receive this special report by hitting the Subscribe button at the top of our webpage at TVND.com. It’s free to subscribe, and we’re introducing additional subscriber-only benefits soon. If you have already done so, thanks for being a subscriber! We appreciate your support.