Reports coming out about a major COX corporate/station staff meeting at KIRO7 where as many as 11 cuts have now come, and the suits warned that budgets are tight with no end in sight. This comes at the beginning of summer when vacations come in bundles. Look out, below.
Retired TV journalist, on-air and manager, former university writing professor and station trainer, published author of a sports team biography, Kent State U alum, Pittsburgh native and self-appointed Seattle TV news critic.
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So many questions about KIRO right now, that all lead to the same thing…
Are they even going to be a CBS affiliate by the end of the year? The problem though, with any affiliate change is the only real option would be KSTW… and since they got rid of their Seattle News Now newscast, they don’t have any news department either.
And I truly don’t think anyone at CBS wants to relieve the KSTW affiliation era…
That Seattle News Now was fed from KPIX in SFO and KDFW in Dallas. Locally there was one MMJ, I believe to gin up some video. No news dept. It was for CBS O&Os with no local news staff.
What’s next that KIRO TV won’t have local news but it’ll be a regional news recap of the day’s news
Right. There will be a hub, a COX station in Oregon that does a recap and KIRO will carry it between their MyTV lineup of sitcoms.
Agreed. Would love to see what their affiliation agreement with CBS requires regarding local news – if anything. Though I would have to imagine there is some sort of bare minimum standard that they have to provide. Even the puny DMAs have some kind of local news broadcast, albeit it’s common to pool a single production across multiple affiliates.
About a year ago, KIRO cut their Saturday morning broadcast. Maybe they cut weekend news completely? Maybe the weekday noon broadcast goes away?
These cuts are interesting to me because I remember NBC making headlines over the fact that they wanted to eliminate the 10pm primetime hour and return that to affiliates for local programming. This kind of move by KIRO seems counter to that, unless they’re content to completely give up and air cheap syndicated programming.
How many people will be there by Christmas? Two?