Launching on the Fox Television Stations this fall, the return of the classic game show has also been sold to stations from other station groups, including Sinclair, Nexstar, Scripps, Meredith, Gray, McKinnon, Standard Media, Block and Sun Broadcasting.
Around the country, educators and local television stations have teamed up to help teachers make their broadcast debuts and engage children who are stuck in the doldrums of distance learning. The idea — in some ways a throwback to the early days of public television — has supplemented online lessons for some families, and serves a more critical role: reaching students who, without reliable internet access or a laptop at home, have been left behind.
NTF 2020 | TV Reporters Grapple With Heightened Hostility On Social
Social media experts at newsrooms including those of Gray, Fox, Graham and Scripps stations and national outlet Newsy says viewers have ramped up aggressive attacks on their social posts this year. At TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum on Dec. 18, they said a more polarized audience has heightened their need to be more circumspect on social and to diffuse often hostile salvos they receive.
The latest network from Allen Media Group, targeted to African Americans, will be carried on subchannels of the 11 Fox Television Stations starting Jan. 15, 2021.
TVN Focus | Stations, Vendors Meet Challenge Of Nonstop News
News and technology executives from Fox Television Stations, Graham Media, Gray Television, Avid and Latakoo have embraced new technologies and workflows in a year of huge stories and largely remote production. They’re going to need to maintain that embrace while producing even more content in 2021, they said at a TVNewsCheck webinar last week.
In something of a blast from the past for those who have followed the peripatetic course of New York Post-related waivers, Fox Television Stations has asked the FCC for a permanent waiver of the newspaper-broadcast crossownership rule for WWOR Secaucus, N.J. It already has a permanent waiver to own WNYW New York, dating back to 1993, but only a temporary waiver to own WWOR, which it bought in 2001.
Exclusives
25 Words or Less, Divorce Court and Dish Nation get green lights through the 2022-23 season.
A pair of TV station GMs will join the head of news services for Gray Media Group and two technology experts to examine how local TV news organizations are contending with growing demand for local news in an increasingly competitive media ecosystem. Set for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. ET, the webinar will feature speakers (clockwise from left): Bob Ellis, VP-GM, WJXT-WCWJ Jacksonville, Fla.; Lew Leone, SVP-GM, WNYW-WWOR New York; James Finch, director of news services at Gray Television; Craig Wilson, product evangelist for broadcast and media enterprise at Avid; moderator Glen Dickson, contributing editor, TVNewsCheck; and Paul Adrian, CEO and co-founder of Latakoo. Register here.
Station group buyers and suppliers of syndicated content from Sinclair, Fox Owned Stations, Debmar-Mercury and Litton Entertainment said at a TV2025 panel that streaming’s accelerated growth has put more pressure on their content pipeline and that the ecosystem could use more — and bigger — players in the mix. Read the story and/or watch the full video above.
The Mediator with Ice-T, a weekday, half-hour legal series hosted by the veteran rapper and actor, will get a limited four-week run on Fox-owned stations, premiering in March 2021.
Big TV Groups March Toward IP, Cloud Platforms
Technology executives from Fox Corp., Hearst, Sinclair and Tegna have already virtualized many of their functions, replacing some aging infrastructures with IP routing and broadening their use of the cloud, they said at a TV2025 panel last week. Read the story and/or watch the full video above.
The Fox stations’ new segment is a multi-station experiment in audience engagement that features panels of regular viewers to comment on issues in the news.
Pandemic Proves OTT Workflow Resiliency For News
Executives from CNN, Sinclair, Fox Television Stations and Gray Television say COVID-19 has tested the capacities of their streaming workflows and found them even more adaptable and robust than they imagined.
Chaotic 2020 Sparks News Streaming Creativity
Executives from NBC LX, CBS Local Digital, Graham Media and Fox Television Stations say the pandemic, protests and other dramatic news developments this year have spawned creative programming decisions, along with innovative new remote workflows to realize it.
Fox Television Stations says this new incarnation of the legendary game show — hosted by Jay Leno — “will preserve the show’s trademark humorous interviews and unpredictable banter with each contestant, famously originated by Groucho Marx.”
Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy says the group’s decision to target African-American viewers on OTT with Fox Soul was part of a broader strategy to break from the pack in streaming news. News Now, its multiplatform streamer, takes a different tack using live coverage stitched together and “deejayed” from its Phoenix station with other O&Os soon to contribute.
TVN Executive Session | Fox’s Jack Abernethy: TV Leadership Has ‘Never Been Tested’ Like Now
Political is bolstering a comeback for TV advertising, but as COVID-19’s uncertainties continue to loom, Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy says managing in a climate of fear continues to be challenging.
Sony Pictures Television and the Fox Television Stations are partnering on a four-week test of off-Game Show Network’s Common Knowledge starting Aug. 3, the partners said Monday.
Is Fox 29 Philadelphia Turning Into Fox News?
Several former and current employees at Fox-owned WTXF in Philadelphia allege that the station’s newsroom is run by “toxic, super-white, and Trump-apologizing management.”
A TVNewsCheck webinar featuring top engineers from Fox, Tegna and Gray found stations are settling well into their COVID-19-induced remote workflows. Some of those workflows, including IP contribution, cloud-based collaboration and production automation, are likely to stay even after the pandemic subsides. “There’s no going back to what it was before this started,” says Tegna’s Robert Lydick.
TheCoronavirusNow website went live on March 10. It was a quick launch triggered by a brainstorming session among senior Fox Stations executives late in February. CoronavirusNow, a lesson in rapid innovation, is an online aggregation site that combines content from 18 owned stations and other company assets (such as Fox Business). But unusually, there are also multiple links to stories from other sources — not just agencies like the AP or Reuters but organizations like NPR and the BBC.
TVN To Present: At-Home Production And The Future Of News Workflow
The coronavirus pandemic forced television news operations to produce almost entirely from producers’ and anchors’ homes. During a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar, set for May 28 at 1 p.m. ET, leading television engineering and operations executives will talk about what they’ve learned while facilitating this massive shift in workflow and the long-term changes likely to flow from it. Above, l-r: Speakers Richard Friedel, Fox Television Stations; Clint Moore, Gray Television; and Robert Lydick, Tegna Media.
Tech One On One | For Fox-Owned Stations, Pandemic Responses Look To Be A Precursor Of Future Workflows
Richard Friedel, Fox Television Stations’ engineering chief, says the pandemic will likely accelerate the industry’s transition to IP and the cloud, slow down the NextGen TV rollout this year and permanently shift many station operations remotely. “We are going to have different workflows,” he says. “Some will probably continue forever.”
As production quickly shut down across Los Angeles in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fox Television Stations turned to their syndication partners to help keep them in the day-and-date programming that they prefer. And those partners stepped up.
The station group will air national and local services on Easter Sunday as the coronavirus pandemic continues to keep peope in their homes.
Fox-owned WNYW in New York has been on the front lines of the coronavirus epicenter for weeks, weathering sick employees, virus vulnerabilities and the gauntlet of covering a metastasizing story with endless moving parts. “It’s the most challenging environment I’ve ever had to manage through,” says VP-GM Lew Leone. Above, Rosanna Scotto interviewing Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fox News and Fox Television Stations will provide unlimited access to facilitate public availability of latest COVID-19 information.
Fox Corp. COO John Nallen says the company will cover their company medical insurance payments for the next six months and will waive the copay for telemedicine.
She takes over the syndicated show distributed by Fox First Run from Lynn Toler.
WAGA Atlanta’s new show, The Road to November will examine national, state, and local politics. The program will analyze the key moments of the week in political news, from the presidential race, to Georgia’s two U.S. Senate races, and several key U.S. House races in the Atlanta area.
Fox Stations and Debmar-Mercury will roll out a revamped magazine show in September, offering two original weekly half-hour episodes. The move follows a test run during the November 2019 sweeps.
Executive Session | With Fox Soul, A Niche Approach To OTT
Steve Chung, chief digital officer for Fox Television Stations, says the group’s first foray into OTT is a deliberate attempt to break from the pack with an emphasis on live programming and interactivity in an AVOD model. With Fox Soul, which launched this week, Chung says Fox has laid the foundation to spin up other streaming efforts nimbly and quickly.
The new OTT offering targeting African Americans is live, interactive and advertising supported.
A syndicated talk show starring RuPaul won’t go forward for a national launch. The show, featuring the RuPaul’s Drag Race host and executive producer interviewing celebrities and newsmakers, had a three-week trial run in the summer on seven Fox stations.
Feeding The Voracious Multiplatform Beast
As television news broadcasters move to expand their reach into web, mobile and OTT platforms, they are adopting a number of tools and strategies including more automation, better collaboration tools and, in some cases, internal software development. L-r: Gray’s Mike Fass, Avid’s Ray Thompson, Fox’s Emily Stone and ABC’s Fabian Westerwelle. (Photo: Wendy Moger-Bross)
Co-producer and distributor Debmar-Mercury says Fox will serve as the launch group for the eponymous talk show, giving it access to nearly 40% of U.S. TV homes and a fast start on clearing the rest of the country. Cannon is best known for his hosting duties on Fox’s The Masked Singer and NBC’s America’s Got Talent.
25 Words Or Less, Divorce Court and Dish Nation get a green light for the 2020-2021 season.
Plans vary from station to station and feature a mix of coverage on-air, on websites, social media platforms and duopoly stations.
