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TXCN to close down April 1

M

Mediafrog+

The statewide cable news channel will shut down on April 1: http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/texas-news/2015/03/03/txcn-to-sign-off-on-april-1/24341769/

TXCN had great promise when it signed on in 1999, with its own staff and content augmented by material from the Texas Belo stations, but languishing in the obscure upper reaches of digital cable tiers kept the audience to a minimum. Never caught on like corporate sibling NWCN in the Pacific Northwest. After most of the staff was cut around ten years ago it has been running edited versions of local Belo>>>Gannett newscasts.

Belo also had some unsuccessful local news channels such as News 24 Houston and News 9 San Antonio. The cuts at TXCN came shortly after the shutdown of those local efforts.

I'm surprised TXCN lasted this long under the new Gannett ownership; I thought it would be quickly axed after the merger in December 2013. Gannett probably wanted to get rid of it before the company splits in two this summer.
 
It's sad. TXCN seemed (and still seems) like a great idea. Most of their newscasts weren't live, which took away a lot of the sense of immediacy to me.

Their channel positions weren't bad in many places. In most of the metroplex, they were on 38. It would have been a great .2 or .3 for all of the Gannett stations in Texas. They probably could have negotiated for better cable positions in other markets.

I had a slight bit of hope that Gannett would actually re-ignite TXCN, using content from the existing stations and adding all of Gannett's new markets.
 
It's now April 4th and TXCN is still going, so apparently the shutdown date got pushed back. Still on Xfinity channel 230 in Houston. Has it disappeared from other systems yet? There may have been some issues with inadequate notice to cable systems about the loss of the channel.
 
I'm still seeing it in Dallas. Of course, it has been all-digital for quite some time now, so you can still only see it with a box.

(Interesting: the picture is overscanned today. The stock ticker at the bottom of the screen is barely visible. I don't know if it's TXCN or if it's the cable box blowing up the picture to fill the screen.)
 
And a further update: At a 7:10am check on May 1, TXCN is gone. The channel is still mapped to Comcast in Houston, but is in black. The TXCN website states that the channel shut down at 12:01am http://www.txcn.com/

TXCN was a well intentioned idea when launched in 1999, but was never given the support and promotion it needed.
 
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