Joseph,
Yeah, pretty much already knew that KCNC-CBS4 was going to pick up Oprah in 2006 but didn't know what date it was gonna happen. I thought it might happen in Sept 2006 at the start of the 2006/2006 Season but we now know that it will happen on May 29th 2006. This is a great thing for CBS4.
While Dick Kreck at Denver Post has an article so does Rocky Mountain News's Dusty Saunders....
link to dusty's story:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/dr...mnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_84_3985143,00.html
It's called planning - a necessary survival strategy in the television business.
CBS 4's acquisition of Oprah Winfrey's enormously popular show, effective May 29, is half of CBS 4's plan designed to upgrade the station's news audience ratings.
In September 2006, CBS 4 will again program a half-hour of local TV news weekdays at 6:30 p.m.
While co-hosted by Jim Benemann and Molly Hughes, the newscast will be "distinctly different" from the current local 6 p.m. report, according to Walt DeHaven, CBS 4's vice president and general manager.
The half hour will include local arts and cultural coverage by Greg Moody, along with national and international news,
The addition of Oprah, currently aired on 7News, and the unnamed CBS 4 newscast, could have an impact on late-afternoon and early-evening viewing habits in Denver.
At least that's what DeHaven is hoping. CBS 4, with financial help from parent company Viacom-CBS, paid a bundle to King World, the national syndicators, to wrest Oprah away from 7News, owned by McGraw-Hill Broadcasting, which has aired Oprah in the 4 p.m. time period for 15 years.
While the price of the six-year programming buy was not announced, DeHaven said the obvious: "Oprah is very expensive."
Her show, the most widely-watched program in the history of daytime television, is the engine that drives audience ratings for numerous early-evening local newscasts across the country - many on ABC-owned or affiliated stations, as is 7News.
In several recent Denver Nielsen audience ratings, 7News has finished first and CBS 4 third in the half-hour 5 p.m. local news battle.
Part of 7News' success in the time period is attributed to the strong Oprah lead-in.
The May sweeps report showed Oprah's 4 p.m. hour with an 18 audience share. The shares of the hour-long local newscasts on 9News and CBS 4 were 11 and 9, respectively. (An audience share is a percentage of viewers tuned into a particular station.)
Darrell Brown, vice president and general manager of 7News, was unavailable for comment.
However, program director Linda Bayley said the station wasn't "blindsided" by the move, noting it had been in the works for four years.
"We just won't sit back and not care about that time period," Bayley said. "Obviously it's important to us. Oprah's show always has been a significant lead-in.
"We have several months to explore new programming ground.
"Right now we're concerned with the fall schedule and the 2005-06 season."
A logical choice for 7news would be some sort of local, hour-long news at 4 p.m.
While a lot of syndicated talk programming will be available, it would seem unlikely 7News would go that route and abdicate the 4 p.m. news period to 9News.
Meanwhile, the insertion of a 6:30 p.m. newscast on CBS 4 should bring back some viewing memories of the well-produced Colorado Evening News, which aired in that time period from December 1984 to September 1998.
Best described as an erudite newscast, the show was free of the typical news-weather-sports format that dominates traditional local half-hours.
Co-hosted by Bill Stuart and Reynelda Muse, and featuring Ed Greene and Tom Martino, the program covered key local stories more in-depth.
It was added to the schedule when CBS 4 was an NBC outlet, run by Roger Ogden, now president of Gannett Broadcasting.
The Colorado Evening News was canceled after the station was involved in a network affiliation switch, moving from NBC to CBS.
The CBS network programmers, looking to cut local expenses, inserted the syndicated Hollywood Squares into the lineup.
The time period currently is occupied by The Insider, a fluffy syndicated show business series that thrives on gossip.
<P ID="signature">______________
Dawn H</P>
Make sense now?