Peoria Pundit

Barrington Broadcasting (owner of Creve Coeur-based WHOI) has released its 4th quarter and year end financial statements. Radio and Business Report says this:

Pilot Group LP, the sole shareholder of Barrington Broadcasting, injected $16 million of new capital into the TV group owner last month. Meanwhile, Barrington reports that Q4 net revenues increased 7.2%, or 4.3% on a same station basis. Like so many others, Barrington has been cutting costs, although CEO Jim Yager notes that not a minute of local news has been dropped.

Oh sure. The company fired it’s local news staffs (the wonderful severance package was four weeks worth of pay, from what I hear)  and outsourced the “local news” to former competitors (in Peoria’s case, WEEK). This means that the same news reports are now running on two stations in the same market. But they didn’t “drop” news. They just deprived viewers in their market of one source of information.

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.

WHOINews anchor Tim McGinnis made the following remark on his Twitter page:

That’s it, my last WHOI newscast, maybe my last 10p.m. ever.

Oh, boy. I didn’t watch WHOI today. Does anyone know what was said?

UPDATE: Good news for Tim, from his Twitter page:

@PeoriaPundit I am moving to myrtle beach,sc. To be the anchor at WPDE. The boom was not lowered.

Congrats to Tim.

Via the Record Eagle:

TRAVERSE CITY — Ten staff members were let go at TV 7&4 as its parent company reported an “extremely challenging” business climate due to the economic downturn.

Nine full-time staffers, including some on-air positions, and one part-time job were eliminated by the local NBC affiliate this week, station president and CEO Jill Saarela said Friday. The station is owned by Barrington Broadcasting Group LLC based in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

Via The Monitor:

KGBT-TV, the Valley’s CBS affiliate, quietly laid off 10 staffers Tuesday and finalized plans to cut the noon newscast starting Monday. It was the third round of cuts for the station which in 2008 saw then-reporter Janine Reyes and longtime weatherman and Valley fixture Larry James join the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

“‘It’s part of what is going on around the country, and we’re having to cut you just like them,’” [weatherman Romeo] Cantu recalled being told when he was let go minutes after finishing a 9 a.m. news segment. “The only thing I really regret is I didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye to the Valley.”

Cantu was told moments after he wrapped up morning news, denying him the opportunity to say goodbye to viewers. Stations go to make it seem like their personnel are part of viewers’ families. That’s a pretty crappy to treat family.

KGBT is owned by Barrington Broadcasting, owner of Creve Coeur-based WHOI.

Edgar Sandoval is reporting that this Friday may be when staffers at WHOI and WEEK hear what will happen under the long-expected management contract that supposedly will mean WEEK will start producing news for HOI. Edgar, a former local TV newsman, had this to say:

… It’s not much better in many of the big markets and many of the same things, like ownership issues/consolidation, are happening there too. Some big markets stations have moved towards one man bands so unlike when I was coming up and there was the explosion in growth with FOX affiliates… there are fewer and fewer jobs.

And as the mainstream media continues to perform these acts of self vivisection, the door is opens wider for online, community based citizen journalism, like what we are doing at the Blog Peoria Project, which is now accepting new bloggers.

Only six days after I posted the information I received about WHOI’s imminent takeover by WEEK, Journal Star media reporter Steve Tarter gets around to mentioning the issue in his Sunday column (as opposed to, I duuno, getting it in print as soon as possible). He does have some new details:

No one is saying anything official – that may come this week – but the word is that WEEK-TV Channel 25 will take over as host station. Channel 19 would still exist but two staffs would reportedly be blended into one.

That’s got WHOI employees more than a little worried since WEEK has already gone through its own staff contractions. In fact, fiber optic cable just went in at WEEK to insure a good connection between here and Fort Wayne. Ind., the Granite Broadcasting outlet that will soon take over WEEK’s control room duties, displacing many of 25’s most-experienced technicians.

But there are more than just rumors going around over the 19-25 merger, there’s a little matter of a set being built in the WEEK studio identical to one used by WHOI. Draw your own conclusions.

I’m not surprised that they are trying to pull off the fiction that these are two separate newsrooms by using separate sets in the same studio. At least it’s obvious that WMBD does the news for WYZZ because the same sets and the same reporters are used.

I had been hoping because that the rumored Thursday announcement never happened, that clearer heads prevailed and this monstrocity of a takeover would go by the wayside. Apparently, no such luck.

If anyone can tell me how this is all supposed to make Peoria news consumers better informed, I’m waiting. From a news consumer standpoint, HOI might as well as simply shut its doors and go out of business. I wish it had, that way there would be a license up for grabs and maybe some company with better ideas and more guts could come along and give it a try.

Frankly, I think the government ought to prohibit these sort of management contracts. If a company cannot compete in a market, they ought to loose their right to hold a broadcasting license. After all, isn’t the ability to stay in business a criteria for determining who is awarded broadcasting licenses in the first place?

* Oh, good God no:

President-elect Barack Obama is urging Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting, arguing that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air channels won’t be ready.

Yeah, that’s just great. More months of scary, misleading ads.

* WHOI’s Tim McGinnis has a daddy/tech blog.

* Progress Illinois has been putting up YouTube clips of FOXNews being, well, FOXNews. FOXNews asked Google to pull the vids down, and Google, being the sheep that they are, complied. So ProgressIllinois is gonna sue. The difference between this and what GateHouse is doing to the New York Times is that ProgressIllinois is actually engaging in fair use to make comments about FOXNews, politics and news.

A Fox Chicago spokesperson said the media company issued the takedown notice because it believed the material violated its copyright.

But Kalven said that the brief clips constitute a fair use of Fox material. “These were not full segments from Fox broadcasts,” he said. “They were clips and snippets from longer reports and they were generally accompanied by links to their Web sites. We tried to drive traffic their way.”

Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer with consumer rights group Public Citizen, said the clips appeared to constitute fair use, based on the publicly available knowledge about them. Specifically, he said, the clips apparently consisted of relatively brief excerpts of longer broadcasts, and were non-commercial. “Under those circumstances, it seems like it would be pretty hard for Fox News to prevail,” Levy said.

Tomorrow’s Cannonball Friday programming is available online here. Well, probably. Or some site like it.