re: What happened to WWL New Orleans

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the Jesuits sold out to Belo in the mid 90's and that's when things began to deteriorate. Growing up in NOLA in the 70's and 80's, WWL was the premier news station and it wasn't close.

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This is exactly it. Once ownership was no longer local, and as Belo expanded, merged, etc, the C-Suites realized that NOLA was the 40th or so largest market, and started cutting costs at WWL. Older talent who wanted to stay in the market moved to Fox 8 or moved to other local things (like Mike Hoss did, forming his own company, and eventually becoming involved with the Saints).

Younger talent moved on to a bigger market and bigger payday.

Used to be that WWL could pay talent comparable to what a bigger market would pay, because the ratings were so dominant that ad revenue was bigger than what our market would expenct.

But cutting costs and bleeding the station dry has led to this.

WWL now is basically a few lifers who don't need the money, and a bunch of young talent, half of which sucks and leave the industry, and the other half of which move on to bigger markets.

WWL in the old says consistently outpucnhed their weight class. Now, it's just an average station in an average market.