WCPO Cincinnati

Scripps-owned ABC affiliate WCPO Cincinnati has a full-time “comics journalist” on staff. He illustrates serious stories that others might avoid, stories that are difficult to photograph because the subjects are too vulnerable.

Scripps’ Cincinnati ABC affiliate leads a tight social media race among its local competitors according to Shareablee data. Its edge comes from lots of native video, its website’s editor-in-chief says, including experiments in live music and weather-inspired stunts.

Scripps moves the news veteran from a corporate post to oversee the newsroom at its Cincinnati ABC affiliate.

The TV ratings “sweeps” period started Oct. 27 and there is still no WCPO news director after eight months, and no WKRC chief meteorologist to replace Tim Hedrick who died six months ago. What’s up?

Anna Clark goes in-depth on WCPO, the Scripps-owned CBS affiliate in Cincinnati that several executives described as a “petri dish” of digital experimentation. The idea, Clark writes, “is less to demonstrate an entire model that can be replicated elsewhere than to test a variety of editorial, technological, and marketing strategies.”

The Scripps-owned Cincinnati ABC affiliate’s aggressive new marketing campaign exhorting consumers to #DropThePaper – that paper being Gannett’s Enquirer – is drawing backlash. The campaign positions the newspaper as an outmoded delivery mechanism for their news.

Make it four for four. When WCPO Cincinnati News Director Alex Bongiorno announced Tuesday she would be leaving the Scripps-owned ABC affiliate in early March, she’ll be the fourth of the market’s four TV newsroom bosses to step down in eight months.

The E.W. Scripps-owned WCPO.com is moving in on Cincinnati.com’s turf, though both outlets ultimately see the competition as driving richer, deeper journalism for the city and the greater Cincinnati region.

Scripps-owned WCPO Cincinnati was the first television station to launch a paywall around premium content. Fifteen months later, Scripps is holding the station’s subscriber numbers close to the vest, but it says it’s meeting internal revenue targets thanks to aggressive sales, and it’s planning to roll out its “Insider Rewards” program to other stations.

WCPO.com takes a backseat in traffic to Cincinnati.com, the website for the Gannett-owned daily Cincinnati Enquirer. Before WCPO’s paywall, from July to December 2013, Cincinnati.com led the market with 1,107,000 […]

The prospect of a lone gunman wreaking havoc at Cincinnati’s 2015 All-Star Game. The ravaged lives of a heroin epidemic blooming across Ohio and Northern Kentucky. The last watch of […]

The Scripps Cincinnati station is betting big that people will pay for in-depth local content with value-added member benefits.

E.W. Scripps-owned ABC affiliate WCPO Cincinnati (DMA 35), has hired Jennifer Ketchmark as meteorologist for its Good Morning Tri-State. She will join the broadcast’s team of anchors Katherine Nero, Chris […]

Under the leadership of CEO Rich Boehne and Digital SVP Adam Symson, the E.W. Scripps Co. is engaged in an earnest effort at multifront innovation to do a rare thing in local media — proactively getting in front of its destiny. Here are some lessons that other media companies can learn from.

E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne says he’s “never seen real R&D units work,” so he created the Digital Solutions Group, a unit directly tasked with executing Boehne’s vision of aggressively developing new business lines in this increasingly digital time. The five-person team works side by side with the company’s corporate leaders. This is the fourth in a series of Digital Deep Dive special reports on Scripps.

The WCPO Cincinnati experiment, whose boldness derives from an unprecedented ask of its users, ultimately has The E. W. Scripps Co. re-examining its entire approach to TV news content and cross digital/broadcast news production. Scripps is reframing its marketing message to consumers, and, in the process, re-examining how to give value to consumers beyond a content play, using the consumer data it’s now more closely collecting and parsing to heighten user affinity and personalization. The first in a series looking at digital innovation across Scripps.