Drew Carey must be super jealous! 😀
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WBNX to be acquired by Nexstar & re-affiliate with the CW in Fall 2025 creating a duopoly with FOX affiliate WJW
- Thread starter NYAZSporty
- Start date
wbnx.com is now redirecting to fox8.com/cw55
For what it's worth, clevelands43.com is actively pointing to cw43.tv
Also, the 11:00 news on 55 is filmed ahead of time. I watched it through the Fox8CLE+ app, and it just buzzed right through it with no commercials, clocking in at about 25 minutes. They might do the weather and sports at the beginning live (PJ did say "here's a live shot" last night at the start, before they cut to commercials, which just showed the next segment of the newscast), but the anchored bits are 100% filmed ahead of time.
BTW, that's the best way to watch Fox 8 News: No ads, and all the news you need to know in about 25 minutes.
BTW, that's the best way to watch Fox 8 News: No ads, and all the news you need to know in about 25 minutes.
All the "potty humor" got old about 10 years ago. I'd much rather watch a show that asked "Name A Famous Person..." than "Give me another R-Rated term for ______________".
And how can you keep up with "returning champions" when the other 3-5 airings each day are from different runs of the show?
I wonder if they add any Akron content since 55 is technically an Akron station?
That would be nice. WAKR/WAKC did a good job with that. Now you have a fairly large city, with a station licensed to it, but no local news.
Not from what I saw. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it was the 7pm script, but they mention CW55 a few times and have it on display on the screen behind them, laid over the usual Cleveland skyline.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channelâ„¢
I would think that any television news organization would take a regional approach in order to attract loyal viewership. There's no reason why a Cincinnati station would ignore important stories in Akron ... or even Dayton, Columbus, or Indianapolis (depending on level of relativity to the viewers).
Here in L.A., stories are covered even when they are in the four adjoining counties ... or even San Diego on occasion.
Cincinnati? It is all the way on the other end of the state from Akron.
Akron is in the Cleveland market, and not all that far away from Youngstown. It's probably just an accident of geography (the placement of Cleveland and Youngstown) that Akron-Canton didn't morph into its own mid-sized market with affiliates of all major networks. Indeed, WAKR/WAKC was an ABC affiliate for many years.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channelâ„¢
That is why I added the qualifier "depending on level of relativity to the viewers".
There are times when L.A. stations cover stories in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Phoenix if they have significance to the local viewers.
WAKR-TV was for the longest time subsidized by WAKR radio. Had that not been the case from day one it would have easily ended up in the UHF morgue by the mid-50s, certainly after WEWS asserted itself as the other primary ABC affiliate.
The problem is Akron is far away enough but still far too close to Cleveland. It'll never be separated into its own market without causing Cleveland to plummet down from market #19 to the upper 30s/low 40s. And even then the Cleveland stations always beat the Akron station in the ratings... in Akron. It was never a fair fight.
Okay, got it, it just seemed like more of a reach than Dayton, Columbus, or Indianapolis would be. Many people in between Cincinnati and any of those three cities would get stations from either city, at least OTA.
Kind of similar to this, when the Pike County murders took place near Peebles in 2016, stations from Cincinnati, Columbus, and Huntington WV (can't speak for
Dayton, but I have to imagine them too) were all on the scene to cover the story. Pike County is in the Columbus market, but Adams County (where Peebles is actually situated) is in the Cincinnati market, and the Huntington stations have historically had at least some OTA viewership in the entire area (their market stops at Scioto County) with Huntington stations also being carried on cable in Waverly and Piketon. It was essentially a quasi-local story to all three markets, and tragic and gruesome as it was, it was of interest to viewers throughout each of those markets (as well as nationwide).
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channelâ„¢
I think that is an excellent example of what I intended with my remark.
Of course it won't be. An additional ABC affiliate wasn't really needed in Akron, but it was desirable for WAKR to have a network affiliation, and ABC didn't mind. (Many readers already know this, but to this day, ABC has dual affiliates in the Boston/Manchester, Tampa/Sarasota, and Grand Rapids/Battle Creek markets.) I don't believe Arbitron would want to carve out a separate market on the strength of solely a CW and an Ion affiliate.
At the risk of sounding tautologous, the only reason the Youngstown market exists, is because Youngstown exists. If neither did, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh markets would likely break around the midpoint between the two cities, where OTA reception of both cities is entirely feasible. Indeed, the Youngstown-Erie TV Guide always carried KDKA, as well as all major Cleveland stations.
Trying to make sense of which cities became their own TV markets and which didn't is almost impossible.
Across the southern tier of New York, the Elmira-Corning area is about the same size as the Olean-Jamestown area 90 miles west.
Elmira was mostly a one-station market until 1969, and it's only 50 miles west of Binghamton, which was its own three-station market by 1962.
Yet Elmira stayed separate and now has a full roster of affiliations (with CBS on a .2).
Jamestown? A couple of valiant attempts to make local TV stick.
Buffalo stations were at least sort of viewable in Jamestown as early as 1948, so viewers had their network TV even if it wasn't "local "
Elmira could get the one VHF station in Binghamton by 1949, but the weak Binghamton Us didn't get there well. So Elmira had just enough local viewership to survive.
(The Elmira station that survives there from 1953 on UHF made it through the 50s and 60s as a semi-satellite of Syracuse, so there's that, too.)
Poughkeepsie and Kingston, with more population, are far enough from NYC and Albany that they could have been their own market. There were at least two decent attempts on UHF in the 50s and 60s. What made the Hudson Valley end up not being a TV market? One big VHF, mostly - WRGB from the Albany market came in from the beginning, and then cable brought in NYC.
And don't even get me started on the New England oddities - why Worcester isn't a market but Providence is, both so close to Boston. And the weirdness of New Hampshire, which came so close to having its own big 3 and PBS as late as the 1980s.
Every market or non-market ends up being its own unique story of who got decent allocations, whether solid local owners were determined to build a market (as certainly happened in Youngstown with WFMJ and WKBN), which cities grew or shrank after the allocations were solidified 60+ years ago. Would the Youngstown of 2025 still merit its own full set of allocations the way it did in 1952?
How many growing western markets didn't qualify back then but would now? Building out TV in St..George, Utah would have been folly in the 1950s. Now it's probably the most distant growth market from the city where it gets its TV, which all comes from 350 miles away in Salt Lake.
Across the southern tier of New York, the Elmira-Corning area is about the same size as the Olean-Jamestown area 90 miles west.
Elmira was mostly a one-station market until 1969, and it's only 50 miles west of Binghamton, which was its own three-station market by 1962.
Yet Elmira stayed separate and now has a full roster of affiliations (with CBS on a .2).
Jamestown? A couple of valiant attempts to make local TV stick.
Buffalo stations were at least sort of viewable in Jamestown as early as 1948, so viewers had their network TV even if it wasn't "local "
Elmira could get the one VHF station in Binghamton by 1949, but the weak Binghamton Us didn't get there well. So Elmira had just enough local viewership to survive.
(The Elmira station that survives there from 1953 on UHF made it through the 50s and 60s as a semi-satellite of Syracuse, so there's that, too.)
Poughkeepsie and Kingston, with more population, are far enough from NYC and Albany that they could have been their own market. There were at least two decent attempts on UHF in the 50s and 60s. What made the Hudson Valley end up not being a TV market? One big VHF, mostly - WRGB from the Albany market came in from the beginning, and then cable brought in NYC.
And don't even get me started on the New England oddities - why Worcester isn't a market but Providence is, both so close to Boston. And the weirdness of New Hampshire, which came so close to having its own big 3 and PBS as late as the 1980s.
Every market or non-market ends up being its own unique story of who got decent allocations, whether solid local owners were determined to build a market (as certainly happened in Youngstown with WFMJ and WKBN), which cities grew or shrank after the allocations were solidified 60+ years ago. Would the Youngstown of 2025 still merit its own full set of allocations the way it did in 1952?
How many growing western markets didn't qualify back then but would now? Building out TV in St..George, Utah would have been folly in the 1950s. Now it's probably the most distant growth market from the city where it gets its TV, which all comes from 350 miles away in Salt Lake.
This is an excellent history. Some markets just "sort of emerged" over time, while, as you put it, some places that you would think could be TV markets never became one. As to Providence versus Worcester, much probably had to do, not just with the Providence/New Bedford VHF allocations, but being in a separate state that has a strong identity.
St George could easily be its own TV market, even if fed on a semi-satellite basis from SLC with local news and possibly other programming, but the SLC market is just too strong and entrenched, despite the distance. The SLC stations built out a dense, far-reaching daisy chain of translators throughout Utah, and as with Rhode Island, Utah has a strong and distinct identity, given its history and the cultural role of the Latter-day Saints in particular. St George would be no more unlikely of a market than Grand Junction CO, but I don't see that as ever being in the cards.
I thought the story of WAKR/WAKC becoming an ABC station was because, at the time, ABC was secondary on WEWS, and that's why they jumped over to Akron and a station that would clear everything without question, whereas WEWS would bump ABC programming for local content, i.e. The Morning Exchange instead of a portion of "Good Morning America." It just stuck around once WEWS lost the DuPont Network because there wasn't a reason to yank the affiliation, and there were never any plans to until Paxson bought the network and killed it off.