coronavirus

Madeleine Noland discusses the impact of COVID-19 on deployment, NextGen TV presentations at NAB Show Express, new 3.0 planning teams and 5G.

Comedy Central’s latenight franchise will go from a half-hour to 45 minutes each night starting Monday. The expansion is the first in the show’s 24-year history. The change comes as the show has found an increased audience and a number of high-profile bookings during the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus is the cause of the company’s predicting a 10.6% decline nationwide across all U.S. local advertising from its original 2020 forecast.

Each day attracted record audiences. Thursday’s first round averaged 15.6 million, Friday’s second and third rounds 8.2 million and Saturday’s final four rounds 4.2 million. ESPN and NFL Network had a combined production all three days while ABC had separate telecasts Thursday and Friday before simulcasting the ESPN/NFL Network feed Saturday. ESPN Deportes also had a separate broadcast.

E.W. Scripps President and CEO Adam Symson feels the audience increase its stations have experienced since the pandemic will endure through to the other side of the crisis. For now, he says, the company is on a firm financial footing and jobs are secure, “but the real questions that we have to wait and see on are how deep this goes and how long it lasts.”

The 4-8-minute television segments will be aired live on Baltimore’s Fox affiliate WBFF and will be shared as potential news and digital content for use by 73 Sinclair television station newsrooms across the U.S.

The now virtual annual meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 6, at 11:30 a.m. ET. Shareholders of record at the close of business on March 9 are eligible to attend, participate in and vote.

COVID-19 has triggered an explosion of innovation among local station groups. Stations are also experimenting with content and creating new programs that could point the way to a more flexible and less formulaic approach to storytelling down the road, even when the worst of the crisis has passed. One impressive example: Field Notes, a new magazine show on Facebook Watch and other digital platforms produced by Hearst Television and based on the virus-related reporting of its local stations in all 26 of its markets.

President Trump on Thursday lashed out at reporters who questioned a report from the Department of Homeland Security that suggested the new coronavirus can be suppressed by heat and humidity. “I’m the president and you’re fake news.”

The rough-and-ready video quality of journalism during the coronavirus crisis is changing the way we engage with the media.

Many of Fox Sports’ on-air anchors and analysts will take a temporary pay cut, largely in tandem with compensation decreases among top executives at parent company Fox Corp.,  which is, like many other media conglomerates, grappling with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on operations.

The cast of Parks and Recreation is returning to Pawnee, Ind., for a one-night charity special benefiting Feeding America, NBC announced Thursday. Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman and Adam Scott are among the sitcom’s stars to be featured in the half-hour special airing 8:30 p.m. ET Thursday, April 30. The story reflects the real-life crisis, with Poehler’s Leslie Knope striving to stay in touch with her friends while observing social distancing.

The local broadcast TV trade association’s annual event goes virtual on Oct. 1

The pandemic created an opportunity to stress-test distributed and virtualized workflows right now that stations and networks were already considering for the future. The industry’s shift may now be ahead of schedule because of it. Above, NBC Universal’s Boston Media Center is one of the latest all-IP broadcast facilities.

We at RTDNA are hearing complaints from members in parts of the country about how some public officials are restricting access to journalists and questions during their daily, or otherwise regularly scheduled, COVID-19 briefings. Many, we are told, no longer allow reporters and photojournalists to attend in person; instead, they must submit questions either by telephone or email. At this moment, during the greatest pandemic and, many say, the most consequential news story, of our lifetime, government officials’ responsibility to provide the public with the full, unfiltered truth has never been more important.

News organizations have long believed it would be a conflict of interest to receive money from government when it’s their job to report on what it does. Yet the coronavirus has accelerated a 20-year death spiral for traditional media.

The latest COVID-19 legislative package will apparently not include a couple of things that would have helped media outlets facing plunging ad dollars and a public’s increased reliance on critical news and information. A compromise bill was struck Tuesday (April 21) on a $480 billion successor bill to help small businesses. Broadcasters and newspapers, with the help of some legislators, had pushed for the next COVID-19 aid bill to include billions of dollars in federal advertising expenditures-for PSAs or census response campaigns — to be directed specifically to local media outlets.

Sinclair’s streaming STIRR service added a coronavirus channel last month, stitching together daily press conferences on the pandemic from around the country. That content will evolve as the pandemic continues, STIRR’s GM says.