Your Primary Editorial Voice(tm) will be heading back to Northeast Ohio by late Saturday, it appears.
And those working in media will breathe a sigh of relief…no, not because they’re glad to have us back in town.
If you’ve followed the Mighty Blog of Fun(tm) since we started in mid-2005, there’s one particular truism. When we leave Ohio for any lengthy period of time, major changes happen in the media world. At one point, then-Cleveland Browns general manager Phil Savage actually lost his job temporarily. (Maybe we shouldn’t have come back. Heh.)
OK, so we’re mostly joking, but since we left the OMW World Headquarters earlier this week, there have been two format changes – with Dispatch hot AC WBNS/97.1 dropping its long-time “Mix” format to become the primary home of the AM side’s “Fan” format, and Saga’s oldies outlet WODB/107.9 swooping in to become hot AC “The New Mix 107.9” the next day.
So, hang in there until the end of the week…
NOT MYFOX: We actually didn’t expect this one, but it happened this week.
Local TV Fox affiliate WJW/8 “Fox 8” has dumped the Fox Interactive “MyFox Cleveland” website it adopted when it was owned by the network, and has debuted the new “Fox8.com“.
The move is not necessarily a direct result of the station’s sale from Fox to Local TV. Fox Interactive has built many “MyFox” websites for Fox affiliates not owned by the Newscorp mother ship.
But we believe Local TV has a website deal with its other stations not acquired in the deal with Fox, so it makes sense to change.
A quick look at Fox8.com shows that it still offers items such as online video of the station’s news stories, but we’ll have to dig deeper to see what’s missing and what’s not…
RTN’ING IT: The digital TV subchannel expansion continues in Ohio.
We reported earlier that Raycom Cleveland MyNetwork TV affiliate WUAB-DT 43.2 will finally replace the “We Didn’t Kill The Tube” slide with actual programming from MGM’s This TV, part of a multi-station Raycom deal. (We haven’t heard when that change will take place.)
In Columbus, viewers are getting the Retro Television Network (RTN) via a subchannel of Media General NBC affiliate WCMH/4:
RTN 4.2 has retro television at its best from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s! It has something for everyone including Leave it to Beaver, Knight Rider, Wagon Train, Rockford Files, and Black Sheep Squadron. Plus, look for current local programs including encore performances of NBC 4’s Daytime Columbus with Gail Hogan, weeknights at 8:00 p.m.
The latter shows some flexibility that the new “diginets” have – local stations can carve out time for non-network programming, though those that wish to run the services 24/7 can do so.
Or, they can dual affiliate, as Sinclair ABC affiliate WSYX/6 has done with the digital subchannel it established as Columbus’ MyNetwork TV affiliate. That station now also runs, if we recall right, the aforementioned This TV in hours outside prime-time MyNetwork TV programming.
Missing in the Columbus digital subchannel equation? A player based in the Columbus market itself.
“.2 Network”, the locally-based subchannel programmer…it’s run by the Guardian Group, the Columbus-area company that sold WSFJ/51 “GTN 51” in Newark OH to Trinity Broadcasting a while back. “GTN” recamped on a low-power outlet on channel 23, and is still struggling to retain cable carriage it had as a “must carry” on 51.
But from recent trade reports, we learn that “.2 Network”‘s start has been pushed back again. The Guardian folks were quoted in an article about new digital subchannel programmers getting some affiliate resistance – because the would-be affiliates were focusing resources on their main channels in this flagging economy.
Still, with This TV and RTN both picking up major groups in the past few days, we’re left to wonder if the problem is more .2/Guardian getting squeezed out by its two largest subchannel programming competitors.
This TV is backed by studio giant MGM, and even with some financial and operational questions recently (mostly linked to its split with troubled Equity Broadcasting), RTN is still managing to sign up big broadcast groups…
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