WLNE NO LONGER WILL BE CARRYING KINGWORLD SHOWS

[Dighton Rockhead]

I don't know how much it costs WLNE to produce a newscast. But if they got rid of News altogether and fired the entire staff, I'm sure they would save a lot of money. So the question is... would they end up better off? They just might be. I know the station wanted to improve their news image, but it's clear that they can't afford to do it. So it might be time for a new approach. Scrap all the newscasts. Replace it all with syndicated programming.

Now comes the interesting part.......

Instead of Newscasts they could just run a scroll on the bottom of the screen with news and weather updates every so often. They could even start doing this during Network programming too. A one minute News ticker every half hour just to let people know what's going on. It just might be crazy enough to work. It would actually make it look like WLNE has more News than other stations because everyone would see that ticker every half hour no matter what show they are watching. People will remember that!

I think it's a good affordable way to stay a news source without needing to maintain an entire News operation. No anchors, no producers, no staff. They could just have one or two college kids monitoring various news sources on a computer and write a minutes worth of headlines about things that are going on. Same thing with weather bulletins. When tickers hit the screen there could be a little sound effect that makes people take note. NBC has chimes. Well ABC6 should have something too that indicates News headlines are now being scrolled. For Special Weather bulletins it could be a clap of Thunder. Then stick a live radar image on the screen. It's just another element to draw attention to the News ticker. Maybe even sponsor the tickers to bring in some additional revenue. Every ticker can include the logo of a company.

Bottom line is that I do believe there is way out of this mess for them. They just need to think outside the box and become creative about it.

I'm all for thinking outside the box......I'm just not sure this whole news crawl at the bottom of the screen thing is the way to do it. Sounds too much like what you see now when you watch any of the cable news channels.

And......sponsoring the tickers / crawls sounds like that tacky thing Channel 6 did back in the 1970's, when they would sponsor the top of the hour id's......essentially, it would be an advertising card up on the screen (one example I remember is Fiore Pontiac)......with a small electronic readout of the time and temp on the bottom of the screen......then......you would hear the legendary Bob Bassett's mellow voice announcing: "WTEV, New Bedford-Providence"......

My idea would be for WLNE and the Providence Journal to pool thier resources to co-produce newscasts. This could be beneficial to both sides, sicne it would allow WLNE to trim its news budget, and it would provide the Providence Journal with a greater reach than they have now.