Handing Him the Wheel of the Titanic — FTVLive
This new News Director is tasked with an almost impossible job…
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Things have to be bad at WJAR for this to happen
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Boston Globe takes a hard look at Channel 25 woes
- Thread starter Fenway1912
- Start date
www.ftvlive.com
Things have to be bad at WJAR for this to happen
WFXT is in a lose-lose. They have terrible ownership in Apollo Global Management that will not invest in their emaciated news department, but no one is watching their newscasts so it's not worth plowing money into. News is cheaper to run than syndicated programming but they'd make a profit with no news at all. The station should be sold but who'd want a neglected, forgotten station that got usurped by WHDH almost a decade ago?
Before he died, Ed Ansin told the Globe that he hoped WHDH could take over as Boston's Fox affiliate. And he reached out to Fox multiple times about the idea. It's easy to see why. The real story isn't about WCVB's dominance, it's WHDH surviving and thriving and taking full advantage of mistakes at WFXT made by Cox Media that misread the market entirely. Apollo is merely finishing the job.
Before he died, Ed Ansin told the Globe that he hoped WHDH could take over as Boston's Fox affiliate. And he reached out to Fox multiple times about the idea. It's easy to see why. The real story isn't about WCVB's dominance, it's WHDH surviving and thriving and taking full advantage of mistakes at WFXT made by Cox Media that misread the market entirely. Apollo is merely finishing the job.
Boston 25 is shrinking. You won’t be surprised to learn that private equity is to blame.
I knew that the news staff at Boston 25 was getting squeezed, but I didn’t realize how deeply until I read Aidan Ryan’s report in The Boston Globe (I’m briefly quoted). Ryan write…
dankennedy.net
Boston is an AFC NFL team market. That's why.
They should start enticing WFXT employees to jump ship. WFXT morning news is so watered down I can only stomach an half hr now. Unless someone purchases WFXT that is not a holding company, they are done.
The Affiliation should be pulled to WHDH or swap programming with WLVI.
The real reason is Fox needed to trade a high-profile station along with WHBQ to Cox in order to get KTVU. It had nothing to do with Boston being an AFC market (let alone that Fox now carries a few Patriots games per year anyway).
WFXT was merely expendable.
But KTVU is an NFC market and WHBQ is another AFC market, so it's not like that wasn't at least a factor.
KTVU was the largest affiliate Fox did not own. That's the ONLY factor. Thinking about these types of transactions in terms of "an NFC market" or "an AFC market" is extraneous, unnecessary detail that had no bearing on the deal itself.
Plus WHBQ isn't in "an AFC market" because it has no NFL team. It's a station in a mid-major market with a stagnant population base and a regional economy that's struggled for decades.
True too given the situation. OK if we are to strictly discuss regional economy as the factor for getting KTVU it would be based on how venture Capitalist companies, big tech and start up operations are a factor in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area.
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