TV Q&A: Why no noon newscast on weekends?
Share this post:
Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen answers reader questions every Wednesday at TribLive.com in a column that also appears in the Sunday Tribune-Review.
Q: Your recent column about KDKA+ starting an 8 p.m. newscast reminded me of something that’s puzzled me for some time. Local news coverage has expanded greatly over the years, yet none of the stations have a noon newscast on the weekend.
Maybe they think people are too busy on weekends to bother with such a newscast, but I have often wished there was one, especially in the fall when football games often preempt the 6 p.m. news.
Do you think any local stations are considering such a move?
— Joe, Greensburg
Rob: I would be surprised if any local station added a noon weekend newscast. Weekends are a low priority for stations because fewer people watch television on weekends, especially during the day.
I also chatted with one local news director who pointed out that sports commitments, especially in the fall during the NFL season, would regularly pre-empt a noon weekend newscast so often as to not be worth doing one. No one will put on a newscast if it can’t air consistently.
Q: WQED-TV did it again: They preempted the Jan. 3 “PBS NewsHour” at 6 p.m. with an episode of “Antiques Roadshow.” After about 35 minutes, someone apparently woke up and switched the broadcast over to “NewsHour” (already in progress).
— Mark, via email
Rob: Alas, my understanding is we can again blame WQED’s gremlin-bedeviled automated master control system for the error.
PBS does livestream “NewsHour” on YouTube, so there are other options when disruptions occur in that particular time period, but “viewers like you” shouldn’t have to scramble to watch a scheduled PBS program. One hopes in 2024 WQED will finally manage to find a solution (a replacement system? bring humans back to operate master control?) to this ongoing problem that routinely vexes WQED viewers.
Q: My question is why Bob Ross’s “Joy of Painting” is being replaced on PBS’s Create Channel (Channel 13.2) by a documentary on Neil Young. All the promos on TV clearly show “Joy of Painting” but then the Neil Young interview shows up. I have put up with “Joy of Painting” shows being repeated in the same week. I would rather watch a “Joy of Painting” show repeated five days in a row than a Neil Young interview. I would like to know if there are plans to discontinue “Joy of Painting” on Create.
— Ralph, Sandy Lake
Rob: There are no plans to discontinue “Joy of Painting” on Create Channel, where the show airs at 5:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. weekdays. There were some intermittent technical issues last month – Create Channel issues this time, not WQED — that resulted in programming anomalies.
Q: The Nostalgia Channel (Channel 69.4 over the air) that used to be Classic Reruns TV is now FTF Sports. Would you happen to know when this change occurred? Has the Nostalgia channel been moved? It seems that in the past year or so, local over-the-air channels change suddenly and without warning, which doesn’t give viewers a lot of options as to where to turn next. In addition to 69.4 changing, Channel 61.2 is now something called Binge-TV, which I can’t find anything about online other than an Australian network by that name.
— Alienboy170, via email
Rob: These all happened on low-power, over-the-air stations that don’t always give me a heads up about such changes, much as I wish they would so I can share the information with viewers.
The national networks they carry can sometimes be low-budget, rinky-dink operations, which makes getting information from them difficult if not impossible.
The change from Nostalgia to FTF Sports occurred on Dec. 1 because, according to station manager Ron Bruno, “Nostalgia failed to honor the contract.”
Nostalgia Network’s website still lists Channel 69.4 as its Pittsburgh home. As best as I could ascertain, Nostalgia is owned by Classic Broadcasting LLC, but I could not locate a phone number to contact them.
As for Binge-TV, it’s a newly launched over-the-air network on Channel 61.2 locally. Bruno’s TV stations (in Pittsburgh, Albany, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla.) are the first to roll out the channel. To live up to its name, episodes air back-to-back in lengthy blocks so viewers can “binge” their favorite shows (e.g. “Hunter” airs noon to midnight Tuesday, “21 Jump Street” airs noon to midnight Thursday, “Rowan Martin’s Laugh-In” airs noon to midnight Friday).
The Binge-TV over-the-air channel has the same name and ownership as a streaming channel on Roku, but the programming lineup is not identical.