re: Advocate reporting KATC (Lafayette) plans on ending live evening broadcast

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Gets to the end of the episode, ole rob comes on talking and showing off their new Doppler radar about weather in fricking lake Charles. Like, is that south Louisiana? Is that lafayette area? Didn’t get to see the end of the episode. People were pissed.

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Lake Charles at a time imported CBS and ABC affiliates on cable and satellite since there were not enough stations to take all those affiliations. Fast forward to digital TV and multicasting and satellite finally able to carry enough primary affiliates for all markets, ABC goes on a sub channel of the Fox affiliate and then CBS gets in bed with a low power station to close off the market on the satellite side of importing stations. The Fox/ABC affiliate is then sold to the NBC affiliate but sold to different management company that will use NBC affiliates resources as its operations.

Funny that is how News 15 and Lafayette got a NBC affiliation. Nexstar bought Fox 15 and added NBC to a sub channel and introduced news again on that station. A year later, Nexstar bought Media General and with the FCC rules at the time, they couldn’t own both stations in the same market or even do a joint sales agreement or shared services agreement. So Nexstar sold KADN and NBC subchannel to new entity Bayou City Broadcasting. Bayou City was eventually purchased by Byron Allen’s Media Group.

The crazy thing is with the medium dying a slow death mergers and acquisitions are leaving a mark on these properties. Scripps who owns KATC lost over 600 million dollars. That is part of the reason for the changes. I wonder if debt now with higher interest rates from previous mergers and acquisitions are starting to come due and causing ripples in the industry. Same is true with the regional sports channels. All those mega broadcast deals that worked just a few years ago are unsustainable with the newer avenues of media and content distribution.

Just look at the what went on in newspapers a decade ago where formerly Gatehouse Media now Gannett was buying up newspapers for their properties and then sold off the assets from their printing presses to their buildings. Now they are managed by regions and may have only one or 2 reporters in the field covering an entire area for a paper. Gone are the local copy editors, sales staff, printers, etc. The physical paper is printed a day in advance and trucked in.