CNN star Anderson Cooper has reportedly made his feelings clear about working with CBS boss Bari Weiss in a merger that would put CNN and CBS under the same ownership.
Paramount, which owns CBS, is poised to acquire CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a massive $111 billion consolidation.
According to The New York Times, Cooper, has told colleagues at CNN that he does not want to work for Weiss.
Cooper overlapped with Weiss when he worked as a correspondent for the CBS flagship program 60 Minutes, but he left the show this spring after 20 years.
There are exceptions to the rule. KGY/Olympia has maintained a local on-air crew for most dayparts. Unfortunately, morning drive is a syndicated team from Los Angeles.
KYYO FM (KAYO Country) has a syndicated morning show and a weather service from a national organization.
KBRC, Mt. Vernon sounds local. Glen Harris, live and local in morning drive, local news and sports coverage with Local Radio Network’s crew filling out other dayparts.
Small town local — serving the community often better than major market stations.
Below was my final report to the team at KBTC, the KBTC Association and the Board of Trustees at Bates Technical College. My on-air farewell is on my Facebook page – scroll down into May.
*****
Season 17 of Northwest Now is in the rear-view mirror with 30 more programs in the book.
In seventeen seasons there have been 475 Northwest Now programs on the air with 435 done by yours truly. Within those 475 programs, 1,055 guests came to the station to appear on set, and another 597 participated within the 218 stories we told from the field. That’s a total of 1,652 local voices heard during the program’s nearly 18-year run.
So yes, season seventeen is finished, and as you know, I am as well. After forty-two years of work, fourteen of which were happily spent at KBTC, I’m retiring.
A new general manager always poses a risk to a TV station and the staff people working there, but DeAnne deserves a great deal of thanks for her steady hand at the helm, and as a part of that, strongly supporting and advocating for Northwest Now. I am grateful for her leadership, and friendship.
Next, a special thanks goes out to Chris Anderson who has been toiling away in the Northwest Now salt mine for going on twelve years now. He helped the program run and continues to serve our online platforms with his Digital First content.
Thanks also to the late Steve Kiggins. In his three and a half years with us, Steve produced more than fifty NWN stories and participated in three specials that won SPJ first place awards. His passing in February was a hard pill to swallow. Storyteller Phillip Townsend also deserves special recognition for being part of a team that won two SPJ first place awards. Additionally, my thanks also go out to the half-dozen or so other extremely talented freelancers who engaged with Northwest Now over the years. I think we provided a platform that encouraged outstanding work and gave people who knew what they were doing the freedom to do it well.
Since the spring of 2012 when I started as a freelancer, 22 Emmy nominations came our way. How many wins? Wait for it: one. I’m glad I wasn’t paid based on wins. With that said, we’ve received nine first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. All of you on the KBTC team can claim a slice of that recognition because of the role you played in amplifying the program or maintaining and operating the vital infrastructure supporting it.
Northwest Now worked tirelessly highlighting the work of several local organizations every year, but the Washington Coalition for open Government stands above the rest for recognizing our efforts to amplify the importance of government transparency with the organization’s Andersen Award. We produced fourteen annual open government programs which generally included field pieces we shot all across the state. My thanks to WashCOG.
This past season I’m also particularly proud of our Emmy-nominated and SPJ winning special, Fire on the Horizon that was shot in six counties across the state last summer highlighting the very real possibility of landscape-scale catastrophic wildfires sweeping through Western Washington. Fire on the Horizon joins a collection of award-winning specials including the six-part Saving the Salmon series.
My most sincere thanks to all of you who made Northwest Now possible, from the administrative team to the KBTC Association, to Dr. Zhou and Bates Technical College and again, to the KBTC staffers who in one way or another helped support and amplify Northwest Now. I especially appreciate those of you who became good friends over the years.
I am amazed at the fact I never missed a studio session despite traveling about 72,000 miles across 60 mostly driving round trips from Helena starting with season 13 in September of 2021 when I started working remote. We never had to opt out due to illness or weather, we never had shoot days cancel, and that we never failed to make our slots despite covid, sometimes wonky technology, hacks and phishing, social unrest, frequent road closures, bridge(s) damage, construction, forest fire air drops (barely missed me), sniper attacks (Idaho last year), government shutdowns, car problems, plane problems, remodeling, fire drills, and all the hundred other things that could have gone sideways or that did go sideways that we overcame.
In that vein, a special thanks also goes to Jeff and Jaimie and everyone who pitched in on production days. Programming and engineering were vital too. The team’s reliability facilitated and sustained my reliability about which I am very proud – because I know the blood, sweat and tears it took to deliver it. I hope it stands as an example to whatever comes next.
Finally, as I said when reporting out on season sixteen at this time last year, I continue to believe that KBTC’s future success ultimately rests in producing well told local stories and convening important conversations. I think there will always be room for relevant, independent, and well executed local programming and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
So that’s it for me. Picture me either entertaining my four crazy grandchildren, annoying Shari, missing another four-foot putt, or fishing on a quiet river.
Thank you for great stories and interviews for nearly two decades on KBTC. Hopefully, the station can put something in place that comes close. The loss of Steve Kiggins was a shock. We enjoyed his reports.
KGMI runs a lot of conservative talk shows from the satellite weekdays. However, they also run local news, interviews and features so it still sounds pretty local in mornings and afternoons. Mid-day is dependent on syndication. The talk show at 4pm is local and they beef up local news again later in afternoons. Weekends they have local shows on various topics, mainly interviews and some call in, that are clearly paid for by those appearing on the shows.
Thanks for the counterpoint regarding KGMI. Things may be bad, but they are not that bad. There is some local programming, as you state, but not very much compared with what was available in the past.
The day the layoffs were announced kzok was off the air for about three hours. Day before yesterday I tuned in to it around 3:30pm or so. Just silence with no music or anything. Then it went static transmitter shut off. This was a couple hours later. Then it came back at a lower audio level and signal was poor. Can’t believe a radio station in a big market like Seattle could possibly be off the air that long. They must not have enough people on staff to fix this sort of thing. Or at least have a backup system that’s regularly maintained or checked frequently enough to make sure this doesn’t happen. Sad state of affairs.
It happens, but is more obvious in the middle of the afternoon. It happens on overnight shifts as well. I was on the air at KMTT – The Mountain/Seattle when the station went off the air at around 2:30 a.m. I immediately called the Chief Engineer. From his home, using his laptop computer, he got the station back on the air. Not all technical issues can be solved that way — we got lucky.
September 1968 – Dan Coughlin/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
If you owned both a television set and investments, you might be a J. Elroy McCaw right now. For the past seven years this Seattle businessman and stock market investor has been a pioneer in the potentially profitable, if sometimes frustrating, business of owning and operating television stations. THE STORY may be apocryphal but it’s being spread around Channel 13 here that he last October made the station his business from a TV “white elephant” into a viable station in the country to devote so much time to the market. The only station in the country to do so, it is perhaps isn’t so startling when you consider the recent growth in the number of people who count the stock market as their number one hobby, and that fact doubtless contributed to the station in the first place. THE STATION claims to have some 20,000 viewers at any one time, many of them businessmen who keep one eye on their office desks to watch the “Big Board” projections from time to time on the television monitor. It’s a bit of a responsive group, too, Mr. Below likes to point out. Whenever he announces a new investment or a stock pick, he says, the station went dark for a few minutes. If he were to announce that he had sold a stock, or salvage at least something. The station gets 68 calls within a few minutes. Some of the callers, doubtless, felt they had somehow come into money. If the viewer feels he should buy or sell or at least something, he can place a telephone order at a desk set up in the studio and may or may not exactly enthuse all of those back in television. Below says, without pretense, “the idea’s catching on.” When the new Seattle-First National Bank finally decided to go into television, the bank’s trust department will have a set on his desk to keep quick track of the market’s up and downs. EXCEPT for the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, the picture follows action on the big board by 15 minutes but doesn’t bother to be bothered by the delays. The time delay isn’t enough to give many investors, even the quick traders, many heartaches. They’re almost as up-to-date as an insider on the floor. For his part, Mr. Below handles many a handicap shared by persons in either the print media or broadcast brokerage or investment field. He’s a pretty good man, because of a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling prohibiting him from owning stock in a company.“ A voice inflection could, probably, cause a price runup,” he says. Below sees the idea of a market-oriented station spreading throughout the country in the future.
(March 18, 1962) Harry Holland will take over the 7 p.m. to midnight show on Radio KVI starting Monday. The new station manager plans a nighttime show partially directed to college students in Western Washington. He will report on all collegiate sports activities, interview campus correspondents at colleges and junior colleges. MOST RECENTLY Holland was manager of KXLY in Spokane. He also worked at stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Omaha, New Orleans and San Antonio. A Marine Corps veteran of World War II, he ended up as a member of the Armed Forces Radio in China. He has served in the Marines during the Korean War. A former band singer, he has recorded several records. Seattle-Tacoma radio announcer turned tv talk show host in the 1960s. KTVW 13 tv host: Stairway to the Stars talent show (1964) host and his own late night tv program (1967). In 1968, Holland became the newsman for KTVW’s 7-hour daily stock market coverage, which was hosted by Merrill Mael.
Terrestrial radio has become a real shit show. This week, iHeart Media has begun another round of layoffs. Few radio stations have LOCAL deejays in major dayparts. Reasons to listen to local radio? Your input is welcome. Because I can’t think of reasons to listen any longer. Sorry, I’m out!
Anderson Cooper Disses Bari Weiss
Reader Submission • June 27, 2026
CNN star Anderson Cooper has reportedly made his feelings clear about working with CBS boss Bari Weiss in a merger that would put CNN and CBS under the same ownership.
Paramount, which owns CBS, is poised to acquire CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a massive $111 billion consolidation.
According to The New York Times, Cooper, has told colleagues at CNN that he does not want to work for Weiss.
Cooper overlapped with Weiss when he worked as a correspondent for the CBS flagship program 60 Minutes, but he left the show this spring after 20 years.
— The Independent
I'm not crying, You're crying
Jason Remington • June 27, 2026
(seen here – Madison Wade KING 5) Geez! It’s a job. Where else but on tv do people make so much of leaving a job!
People need to get over themselves…
Exceptions to the rule
Jason Remington • June 27, 2026
There are exceptions to the rule. KGY/Olympia has maintained a local on-air crew for most dayparts. Unfortunately, morning drive is a syndicated team from Los Angeles.
KYYO FM (KAYO Country) has a syndicated morning show and a weather service from a national organization.
KBRC, Mt. Vernon sounds local. Glen Harris, live and local in morning drive, local news and sports coverage with Local Radio Network’s crew filling out other dayparts.
Small town local — serving the community often better than major market stations.
Tom Layson retires from Northwest Now on KBTC
Tom Layson • June 27, 2026
Below was my final report to the team at KBTC, the KBTC Association and the Board of Trustees at Bates Technical College. My on-air farewell is on my Facebook page – scroll down into May.
*****
Season 17 of Northwest Now is in the rear-view mirror with 30 more programs in the book.
In seventeen seasons there have been 475 Northwest Now programs on the air with 435 done by yours truly. Within those 475 programs, 1,055 guests came to the station to appear on set, and another 597 participated within the 218 stories we told from the field. That’s a total of 1,652 local voices heard during the program’s nearly 18-year run.
So yes, season seventeen is finished, and as you know, I am as well. After forty-two years of work, fourteen of which were happily spent at KBTC, I’m retiring.
A new general manager always poses a risk to a TV station and the staff people working there, but DeAnne deserves a great deal of thanks for her steady hand at the helm, and as a part of that, strongly supporting and advocating for Northwest Now. I am grateful for her leadership, and friendship.
Next, a special thanks goes out to Chris Anderson who has been toiling away in the Northwest Now salt mine for going on twelve years now. He helped the program run and continues to serve our online platforms with his Digital First content.
Thanks also to the late Steve Kiggins. In his three and a half years with us, Steve produced more than fifty NWN stories and participated in three specials that won SPJ first place awards. His passing in February was a hard pill to swallow. Storyteller Phillip Townsend also deserves special recognition for being part of a team that won two SPJ first place awards. Additionally, my thanks also go out to the half-dozen or so other extremely talented freelancers who engaged with Northwest Now over the years. I think we provided a platform that encouraged outstanding work and gave people who knew what they were doing the freedom to do it well.
Since the spring of 2012 when I started as a freelancer, 22 Emmy nominations came our way. How many wins? Wait for it: one. I’m glad I wasn’t paid based on wins. With that said, we’ve received nine first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. All of you on the KBTC team can claim a slice of that recognition because of the role you played in amplifying the program or maintaining and operating the vital infrastructure supporting it.
Northwest Now worked tirelessly highlighting the work of several local organizations every year, but the Washington Coalition for open Government stands above the rest for recognizing our efforts to amplify the importance of government transparency with the organization’s Andersen Award. We produced fourteen annual open government programs which generally included field pieces we shot all across the state. My thanks to WashCOG.
This past season I’m also particularly proud of our Emmy-nominated and SPJ winning special, Fire on the Horizon that was shot in six counties across the state last summer highlighting the very real possibility of landscape-scale catastrophic wildfires sweeping through Western Washington. Fire on the Horizon joins a collection of award-winning specials including the six-part Saving the Salmon series.
My most sincere thanks to all of you who made Northwest Now possible, from the administrative team to the KBTC Association, to Dr. Zhou and Bates Technical College and again, to the KBTC staffers who in one way or another helped support and amplify Northwest Now. I especially appreciate those of you who became good friends over the years.
I am amazed at the fact I never missed a studio session despite traveling about 72,000 miles across 60 mostly driving round trips from Helena starting with season 13 in September of 2021 when I started working remote. We never had to opt out due to illness or weather, we never had shoot days cancel, and that we never failed to make our slots despite covid, sometimes wonky technology, hacks and phishing, social unrest, frequent road closures, bridge(s) damage, construction, forest fire air drops (barely missed me), sniper attacks (Idaho last year), government shutdowns, car problems, plane problems, remodeling, fire drills, and all the hundred other things that could have gone sideways or that did go sideways that we overcame.
In that vein, a special thanks also goes to Jeff and Jaimie and everyone who pitched in on production days. Programming and engineering were vital too. The team’s reliability facilitated and sustained my reliability about which I am very proud – because I know the blood, sweat and tears it took to deliver it. I hope it stands as an example to whatever comes next.
Finally, as I said when reporting out on season sixteen at this time last year, I continue to believe that KBTC’s future success ultimately rests in producing well told local stories and convening important conversations. I think there will always be room for relevant, independent, and well executed local programming and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
So that’s it for me. Picture me either entertaining my four crazy grandchildren, annoying Shari, missing another four-foot putt, or fishing on a quiet river.
My Best,
Tom
Northwest Now
Jason Remington • June 28, 2026
Thank you for great stories and interviews for nearly two decades on KBTC. Hopefully, the station can put something in place that comes close. The loss of Steve Kiggins was a shock. We enjoyed his reports.
Local radio
Steve • June 26, 2026
Local radio really can’t be that bad. Does KGMI just broadcast syndicated programming all day? There must be a certain amount of local programming.
KGMI
Jason Remington • June 26, 2026
Not seeing any local programming….
MONDAY – FRIDAY
12:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m. – Coast to Coast AM
3:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m. – America’s First News with Gordon Deal
6:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. – The Morning News
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Markley, Van Camp, and Robbins
12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. – The Lars Larson Show
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – The Charlie Kirk Show
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. – KGMI Konnects with Joe Teehan
5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. – The Afternoon News
6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. – America At Night with McGraw Milhaven
9:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. – Our American Stories
10:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. – Coast to Coast AM
Typical
Jason Remington • June 26, 2026
Name the station, Google it, check the program schedule. You will be disappointed 9 times out of 10.
KGMI
Steven Smith • June 26, 2026
KGMI runs a lot of conservative talk shows from the satellite weekdays. However, they also run local news, interviews and features so it still sounds pretty local in mornings and afternoons. Mid-day is dependent on syndication. The talk show at 4pm is local and they beef up local news again later in afternoons. Weekends they have local shows on various topics, mainly interviews and some call in, that are clearly paid for by those appearing on the shows.
KGMI
Steve • June 27, 2026
Thanks for the counterpoint regarding KGMI. Things may be bad, but they are not that bad. There is some local programming, as you state, but not very much compared with what was available in the past.
KZOK was off the air
Roy Otis • June 26, 2026
Hello,
The day the layoffs were announced kzok was off the air for about three hours. Day before yesterday I tuned in to it around 3:30pm or so. Just silence with no music or anything. Then it went static transmitter shut off. This was a couple hours later. Then it came back at a lower audio level and signal was poor. Can’t believe a radio station in a big market like Seattle could possibly be off the air that long. They must not have enough people on staff to fix this sort of thing. Or at least have a backup system that’s regularly maintained or checked frequently enough to make sure this doesn’t happen. Sad state of affairs.
Off The Air
Jason Remington • June 28, 2026
It happens, but is more obvious in the middle of the afternoon. It happens on overnight shifts as well. I was on the air at KMTT – The Mountain/Seattle when the station went off the air at around 2:30 a.m. I immediately called the Chief Engineer. From his home, using his laptop computer, he got the station back on the air. Not all technical issues can be solved that way — we got lucky.
Harry Holland - Seattle/Tacoma radio & tv
Jason Remington • June 25, 2026
September 1968 – Dan Coughlin/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
If you owned both a television set and investments, you might be a J. Elroy McCaw right now. For the past seven years this Seattle businessman and stock market investor has been a pioneer in the potentially profitable, if sometimes frustrating, business of owning and operating television stations. THE STORY may be apocryphal but it’s being spread around Channel 13 here that he last October made the station his business from a TV “white elephant” into a viable station in the country to devote so much time to the market. The only station in the country to do so, it is perhaps isn’t so startling when you consider the recent growth in the number of people who count the stock market as their number one hobby, and that fact doubtless contributed to the station in the first place. THE STATION claims to have some 20,000 viewers at any one time, many of them businessmen who keep one eye on their office desks to watch the “Big Board” projections from time to time on the television monitor. It’s a bit of a responsive group, too, Mr. Below likes to point out. Whenever he announces a new investment or a stock pick, he says, the station went dark for a few minutes. If he were to announce that he had sold a stock, or salvage at least something. The station gets 68 calls within a few minutes. Some of the callers, doubtless, felt they had somehow come into money. If the viewer feels he should buy or sell or at least something, he can place a telephone order at a desk set up in the studio and may or may not exactly enthuse all of those back in television. Below says, without pretense, “the idea’s catching on.” When the new Seattle-First National Bank finally decided to go into television, the bank’s trust department will have a set on his desk to keep quick track of the market’s up and downs. EXCEPT for the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, the picture follows action on the big board by 15 minutes but doesn’t bother to be bothered by the delays. The time delay isn’t enough to give many investors, even the quick traders, many heartaches. They’re almost as up-to-date as an insider on the floor. For his part, Mr. Below handles many a handicap shared by persons in either the print media or broadcast brokerage or investment field. He’s a pretty good man, because of a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling prohibiting him from owning stock in a company.“ A voice inflection could, probably, cause a price runup,” he says. Below sees the idea of a market-oriented station spreading throughout the country in the future.
(March 18, 1962) Harry Holland will take over the 7 p.m. to midnight show on Radio KVI starting Monday. The new station manager plans a nighttime show partially directed to college students in Western Washington. He will report on all collegiate sports activities, interview campus correspondents at colleges and junior colleges. MOST RECENTLY Holland was manager of KXLY in Spokane. He also worked at stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Omaha, New Orleans and San Antonio. A Marine Corps veteran of World War II, he ended up as a member of the Armed Forces Radio in China. He has served in the Marines during the Korean War. A former band singer, he has recorded several records. Seattle-Tacoma radio announcer turned tv talk show host in the 1960s. KTVW 13 tv host: Stairway to the Stars talent show (1964) host and his own late night tv program (1967). In 1968, Holland became the newsman for KTVW’s 7-hour daily stock market coverage, which was hosted by Merrill Mael.
Turn Out The Lights
Jason Remington • June 25, 2026
Terrestrial radio has become a real shit show. This week, iHeart Media has begun another round of layoffs. Few radio stations have LOCAL deejays in major dayparts. Reasons to listen to local radio? Your input is welcome. Because I can’t think of reasons to listen any longer. Sorry, I’m out!