At 6:24 PM -0800 1/5/07, John Willkie wrote:
Tom; Sure it would, but it would be near-impossible to get NBC to accept an affiliation proposal without some local news, and it would be the same for ABC, CBS and Fox (at least for the last 10 years on the latter.) It's a low-hanging fruit kind of a station. Many advertisers, and not just ones that advertise on newscasts, won't permit their buying firms to place ads on stations without local news.
When WGFL signed the affiliation agreement with CBS one of the provisions was that they offer "local" news within a year. They met this provision by running newscasts from the Jacksonville CBS affiliate.
WESH has the best weather coverage, and perhaps the best local news in Central Florida, and a minimal news presence in Ocala and Gainesville, when there is a story of regional interest. You should have seen all the trucks up here during the Gainesville student murders, and again, when Danny Rollings was executed for these murders a few months ago.
I suspect that this is a major factor in the "deal" between WESH and NBC. Taking it a step further, all "local" TV news is moving to a regional basis as viewership declines and costs continue to increase.
The same thing that happened to newspapers is now happening to TV news. There's simply not enough audience to support three or four local news operations.
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