ABC Owned Stations

Fair, pictured, spent 50 years with ABC Owned Television Stations, 20 of them at WPVI in Philadelphia and the last 30 at KABC. (Image courtesy ABC)

ESPN and 18 other Disney networks as well as ABC stations have gone dark across Spectrum, the No. 2 cable TV service in the U.S. Charter Communications, which runs Spectrum, and Disney had been locked in a distribution dispute since well before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week. In the coming days, college football and the NFL will kick off, potentially putting two massive sports properties on the list of programming unavailable to Spectrum customers. Along with the ESPN family of networks, the carriage fight also involves FX and a number of non-sports networks as well as ABC stations.

Executives from Nexstar, Cox Media Group, Gray Television and ABC Owned Stations shared how their content businesses are evolving into 24/7 news networks, diginets, FAST channels, hyperlocal offerings and more at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at NAB in Las Vegas last week. Pictured (l-r): Brad Wall, LTN Global; Adrianne Anderson, ABC Owned Stations; Steve Pruett, Cox Media Group; Sean Compton, Nexstar Media; and Pat LaPlatney, Gray Television. (Alyssa Wesley photo)

Top executives from Cox Media Group, Nexstar, Gray Television and ABC Owned Stations frame up how they’re building content everywhere lineups, then branding and promoting them locally and beyond in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 16. Register here.

Solutions journalism, which presents news consumers with constructive responses to problems, has been gaining traction among station groups including Graham, Gray, Nexstar, Hearst, ABC and CBS. Viewers once put off by relentlessly negative reporting are tuning back in for it.

The end of September brought in the expiration of another carriage deal with no agreement in place to renew it. At midnight on Sept. 30, the Disney-owned television stations that carry ABC programming as well as cable networks ESPN, FX Networks, Nat Geo, Freeform and Disney Channel, are no longer available on Dish and Sling TV. The news comes just a couple of days after the Game Show Network was restored on Dish and Sling TV after it too went dark over a carriage dispute. The disruption also comes as ABC is launching the new seasons of its series at the start of the broadcast season,

Executives at NBCUniversal Local, Sinclair, ABC Owned Stations and Avid shared stories of their accelerated shift to the cloud and virtualization in a TVNewsCheck virtual conference last week.

Data-driven reporting and storytelling is on the rise at station groups including ABC, NBC, E.W. Scripps and Tegna, where ever-more sophisticated visualizations and interactive digital projects are helping viewers better navigate — and make more sense of — complex information. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Here are the complete videos and story links for TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum, featuring a keynote interview with veteran news producer David Bohrman and news and technology leaders from ABC News, Hearst, Tegna, NBCU Owned Television Stations, CBS Owned Stations, ABC Owned Stations, Gray Television, Graham Media, Sinclair, E.W. Scripps, Meredith, BBC, AJ+ and more.