Pre-produced, Packaged News Replacing LIVE newscasts

For years, local TV stations proudly expanded their news schedules—pushing past 10, 12, even 14 hours a day and adding more weekend coverage. The race to fill more time slots, often by competing directly against network soap operas and game shows, seemed endless. Lately, however, that expansion has slowed, and a different reality has taken hold. Many stations no longer produce fully original, live-anchored newscasts for every time period. Instead, common practices include:

A-block: The opening segment (from the show open through the first commercial break), usually reserved for the day’s top hard-news stories.
B-block: The next segment, traditionally softer or secondary news. Increasingly, this is where stations insert repeats of material recorded during the earlier dinner-hour newscasts.
C-block, D-block, and later blocks: These often feature weather, sports, or features—and frequently recycle segments from earlier in the evening. (Examples include KCPQ and other Seattle stations.)

Content-sharing arrangements have also become widespread. Under local marketing or shared-services agreements, one station produces news that appears on another, sometimes resulting in nearly identical newscasts across channels in the same market. In the Seattle area, for instance, FOX 13+ and KONG 16 (digital companions to KCPQ and KING 5) regularly air material originally produced for their main channels in an effort to attract additional viewers. KTVU in San Francisco offers a milder version of the trend, rebroadcasting its 8 a.m. half-hour at noon.

WMAR in Baltimore has taken a more dramatic step. Details on that change are coming up in our C-block…

Heavy use of pre-produced/packaged stories, national feeds, and “evergreen” or filler segments mixed with limited live elements, plus, cost-driven reductions in staff and live production hours, accelerated by the shift toward streaming and 24/7 digital platforms, will inevitably lead to a loss of viewership.

A 2025 University of Delaware study found that in nearly 40% of U.S. TV markets, stations aired substantially duplicative local newscasts. Larger-market stations (like KTVU in San Francisco) still maintain multiple original live newscasts, but the industry overall has moved away from wall-to-wall traditional live anchoring due to declining linear TV ratings, advertising pressure, and corporate cost-cutting.

So much for what appeared to be a march toward all news-all the time.

WMAR specifically, (Baltimore’s ABC affiliate, owned by E.W. Scripps) recently made high-profile changes along these lines. In mid-August, the station laid off staff, including anchors, producers, and directors (union reports noted multiple affected employees, with further cuts reported afterward, including morning anchors).
It debuted an anchor-less format for at least its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts. These open with weather, then run a sequence of prerecorded local reports mixed with national Scripps content, connected by graphics (with some dead air noted between segments).

Longtime evening anchor Kelly Swoope (at the station since 2003) did not appear on those shows. This is part of a broader Scripps strategy emphasizing 24/7 streaming, prerecorded packages that can run without live intros, and reduced traditional staffing. Other WMAR newscasts still use anchors, and the company has said the goal is continuous local journalism rather than limiting it to scheduled live shows. The change has drawn significant local attention as a signal of industry shifts.

In short, while fully live multi-hour newscasts remain standard at stronger major-market stations, these practices — repeats, shared content, and increasingly pre-recorded or anchor-minimal formats—are real and growing, especially under groups like Scripps.