Peoria Pundit

Two sources confirmed today that staff meetings are scheduled Monday at WHOI and WEEK. One source confirmed and another said it was highly likely that it will be announced that the news staffs will be consolidated.

One source says that no more than six people from WHOI would be retained by WEEK. Four will be on air people, and two would be engineers and/or sales people.

As has previously been reported, WHOI’s owners — Barrington Broadcasting — is essentially outsourcing its news programming to WEEK, which is owned by Granite Broadcasting. The end result will be a single newsroom producing news programs for two stations. WEEK has built a separate HOINews set within the walls of their spacious WEEK studios. The two stations will essentially be running the same news stories. I would expect the two stations to use different anchorpeople to try to create the semblance of different programming.

Who how does ONE station produce two separate news programs that air at the same time? Simple: Film of them an hour ahead of time. WHOI’s 10 p.m. show will be filmed at hour in advance of air time, surrendering the option of airing breaking news during its nightly news broadcast.

And the early deadline will cripple both local and national sports coverage. There won’t be enough time for video and scores to come in from high school or Bradley University. National sports video feeds often don’t arrive until after 9 p.m.

Oh, and apparently WEEK isn’t going to renew its contract with the Associated Press, leaving the station without access to any wire service.

And then add the previously reported fact that WEEK planning to begin using a canned weather report based in Indiana.

One would think a vote on an amendment to block the return of the Fairness Doctrine* would be good news. Actually, not so much:

It’s unclear whether the amendment will survive as Congress debates the voting rights bill. But the measure served to effectively put the Senate on record as opposing a revival of the Fairness Doctrine.

However, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin also won approval for an alternate amendment that would order the Federal Communications Commission to encourage radio ownership “diversity.”

A DeMint aide said Durbin’s measure will “impose the Fairness Doctrine through the back door by trying to break up radio ownership.”

The aide called the Durbin proposal “an attempt to break up companies like Clear Channel and hurt their syndications and therefore putting many local radio stations out of business that depend on those syndicated shows for revenue.”

In other words, the Feds aren’t going to yank radio licenses for not being “fair” as defined by the federal government. Instead, they are just going to take licenses away from current holders and give em to folks who they expect to be friendlier to Obama and Durbin.

Gotcha.

* This IS a link to FOXNews, so any apologist who needs an excuse to dismiss this, feel free. Anything to get you through the night.

Via Boston Business Journal:

Struggling newspaper publisher Gatehouse Media Inc. has had its lines of credit reduced by $35 million through an amended loan agreement with its lenders.

[snip]

As of Sept. 30, Gatehouse had roughly $1 billion in debt on its books.

GateHouse owns the Peoria Journal Star, the Peoria Times-Observer and many other daily and weekly newspapers in the Peoria area.

Hat tip: Turner report.

UPDATE: Now I am told that the segment will run locally at 7:30 a.m.

A heads-up from my inbox: A profile on U.S. Rep Aaron Schock will be airing tomorrow morning, Friday Feb. 27, on NBC’s “Today Show” at 7:30 EST/6:30 CST.

The guy who runs Chi-Town Daily News — an all online news site — is causing a mini-sensation with his assertion that with as little as $2 million a year, his site could create a newsroom that could replace the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. I’m not going  to argue with his numbers,* but I agree with his premise.

I’ve been saying this for years.

Online distribution of the news is vastly more efficient, more user friendly and far less expensive than newspapers. The value in a newspaper is NOT that is printed on paper. It’s value is in the news itself. But the companies that own newspapers base their profits on the fact that it costs too much money for anyone to compete with them. Then the Internet came along and buggy-whipped that business model. Now, newspapers are tossing all their content online for free, thus making it hard for anyone else to come along and compete with online start-ups that are funded with small subscription fees.

* Actually, I think the guy is kidding himself if his thinks the costs of lawyers, accounts, etc. is going to be negligible. And he may not be spending money on a staff that sells ads, but public radio and television DO have employees devoted to doing nothing but talking people and organizations out of their nickles and dimes. And some of their support comes from taxpayers.

A buddy and I sat down once and jotted down on a napkin how much we estimated it would cost per year to operate a for-profit online news organization with two full-timers and a handful of part-timers and interns. It was close to $100,000 as I recall. Meanwhile, a handful of citizen journalists in Peoria is doing a halfway decent job watching the watchers already.

From the Peoria Journal Star: Amateur architects are champions for a span

Students vie for top honors in bridge-building competition

PEORIA — After months of designing and building bridges, it was time to watch them all come crashing down.

Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation reports on an internal memo revealing that Howard Owens, GateHouse Media’s director of digital publishing, is no longer with the company. Nothing in the memo reveals if the leave was voluntary. On Twitter, Owens implies he has found employment elsewhere.

It’s not quite true that I’m out of a job. I’m just no longer employed by GHM. Details in a week or two.

Kennedy says the following of Owens:

Within journalism new-media circles, Owens is a highly respected thinker. Before joining GateHouse in September 2006, he helped launch pioneering new-media ventures at the Bakersfield Californian and, before that, the Ventura County Star, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At GateHouse, Owens pushed a strategy of Web-first journalism, exhorting reporters and editors to post breaking news stories on the company’s Wicked Local sites before running them in their print editions. He was also a strong advocate of quick-and-dirty video for the Wicked Local sites. In addition, he’s a co-founder of the Wired Journalists social network.

Owens’ blog, HowardOwens.com, appears to have gone dark, although a “whois” search reveals that he’s still the owner. Worth keeping an eye on, I’d say. He continues posting to Twitter.

Owens possesses one of the more interesting minds I know in new-media journalism, combining vision and practical experience. Yet his blunt, occasionally caustic manner has not played well with many of GateHouse’s reporters and editors, who work long hours for short money.

I’d agree with Kennedy’s assessment. I know Owns only electronically. We disagreed on the future viability of subscrition-based online news organizations. He thinks history shows the public won’t buy it. I think they won’t as long as the media keep offering up dead tree versions of the news.

No it’s NOT me. It’s Mike Nadel. Since GateHouse Media sent him on a permanent vacation back on January 15, the “Baldest Truth” columnist has been blogging up a storm. He has some pretty damn good insights on the steroid mess, if you want to check it out.

And he’s a Libra.

Via Gantdaily:

Sinclair Broadcast Group announced it has cut 200 jobs and suspended its quarterly dividend in anticipation of less advertising revenue this year because of the recession and despite a preliminary fourth quarter earnings report that found earnings up by 56 percent.

And:

Other cost-cutting moves include a salary freeze and reducing promotional spending and travel, company officials say.

Sinclair owns Bloomington-based WYZZ, which broadcasts a 9 p.m. news report produced by WMBD-31 in Peoria.

Enjoy WEEK, WHOI and WMBD while you can. The Wall Street Journal is predicting the end of local stations that affiliate with national networks:

Local television stations like Ms. Howfield’s dominated the TV business for more than half a century. They inspired the term “network”: a web of Channel 7s and 11s that delivered shows from ABC, CBS, NBC — and later, Fox — plus local news, syndicated reruns and talk shows. Because the stations owned the licenses to the airwaves that broadcast TV signals, big networks couldn’t distribute content without them. In turn, local stations became the vehicles for the greatest mass-market advertising blitz in history.

Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture. Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.

In December, CBS Corp.’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, told an investor conference that moving the CBS network to cable would be “a very interesting proposition.” Two days earlier, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, warned more broadly that the entire broadcast-TV model must change. “Otherwise it will be like the newspaper business or the car business,” he told investors.

My two cents: Of what use to the viewers are Peoria’s three television station if they do in fact loose their network programming? Seriously, what original content do they provide? Local news? They are cutting staff. Other original programming? There’s not much, except for Bradley games, telethons and MAYBE some a special or two.

OH! I know! All DVT switchover, all the time!

Local stations have no one to blame but themselves for their growing irrelevency. At one time, stations filled their airwaves with local programming. Once the networks pull the plug, there’s little left to do but show the news, and they have increasingly little use for that.