Oregon Media Insiders

Tribune Broadcasting has reshuffled its management, landing KRCW in the lap of new executive VP Ray Schonbak. The name may be familiar to former Emmis employees. I'm curious as to how long the agreement between the local CW affiliate and KGW for the 10 o'clock news slot is for.

Overnight (in case anyone cared) we lost the first real channel created for the digital subchannel market. The Tube as it was aptly called was a 24/7 network devoted to music videos for a wide variety of age groups. This OMI user will particularly miss it as I loved the mix of music the channel gave off. I even put it on in the background some days while I worked instead of the radio.

I love technical things about news so I wanted to post this.

On KGW's Newscast at 10 on Portland's WB, the newscast started, but with color bars and program audio. That lasted a while and then the color bars changed and had some black and white in it and there was no audio. Just noise. That only lasted for 30 seconds or so and went back to how it was. That lasted untill 10:12pm. Then it stayed stuck on the noise. It was like that untill 10:18 and then some commercials with audio ran, but once they were over, it was just black for 5 min. Then more commercials. They they were on for weather and sports.

Shoulda edited this a while back. This open thread is now turned to discussion of the UPN/WB merger this fall, which looks right now as if Tribune (KWPB) and Meredith (KPDX) are going to split the difference. Each of them owns stations in Portland and Seattle; Meredith gets the network affiliation in Seattle, Tribune in Portland. So KPDX is left without an affiliation come fall, unless another crappy network starts up.

UPDATE: Apparently I'm wrong about Meredith owning a Seattle station. So I don't know what the heckity-heck the deal is.

Categories: UPN, WB, KWBP, KPDX, Meredith, Tribune, CW, network, television, Portland, Oregon

An Anonymous Insider tells us in email:

There are some happy faces at KGW this month, thanks to the performance of the WB news @ 10.

Last Friday, The WB news did a 3.0 rating/6 share, and KPTV's 10 O'Clock News did a 3.7/7 for the hour. That's spitting distance, and the WB show has only been on the air for 5 weeks!

Even though KPTV's prime-time numbers are basically even year-to-year, they're down at 10 pm.

The numbers at KPTV are low enough that they cancelled their $1,200-a-night watch & win contest early. You know you're in trouble when you can't even pay people to watch your newscast.

Is Patrick about to shake things up? Has the sex offender du jour news run its course in Portland? Will their photographers start using tripods during live shots? What will become of the infamous prop drawer? Tune in and find out!

mee-yow.

KPTVers? Your ball.

Categories: KPTV, KGW, news, television, Portland, Oregon

And they're not expected to be good on the national level. E&P doesn't have any preview numbers for Newhouse (owners of the O), but it does have bad news for the corporate parents of KWBP (Knight-Ridder) and KGW (Belo). I doubt that kind of news will directly affect those stations, but you never know what will trigger a cost-cutting wave.

Categories: newspapers, media