‘Right This Minute’ Adds Stations, New Set

Right This Minute, the joint venture between station groups Cox Media, Raycom Media and E. W. Scripps, is kicking off its second season on Monday, Sept. 10, with a handful of new stations, a sharp-looking new set and a renewed hope that the show can snag major market affiliates.

This season, it will air on 45 stations in 42 markets, reaching just over 25% of TV homes. That’s up from about 20% its first season.

Of its seven new stations, six are owned by Scripps, including ABC affiliate WXYZ Detroit and ABC affiliates that Scripps acquired in 2011 from McGraw-Hill: KMGH Denver, WRTV Indianapolis, KGTV San Diego, KERO Bakersfield.

“We’re still endeavoring to sell the show beyond our partner markets,” says Phil Alvidrez, general manager of MagicDust Television, which produces the show. “But Scripps is totally on board. We are in all their markets. And we’re in half of the Raycom and Cox markets.”

The show’s biggest market is San Francisco where it airs on Cox’s Fox affiliate KTVU and its independent KICU. It’s also one of the show’s highest-rated markets. In May, it averaged a 1.0 adults 25-54 rating at 9 a.m. and a 0.9 at 9:30 a.m.

Right This Minute is a video-clip show where host Beth Troutman and four co-hosts with local news backgrounds talk about online videos.

The program has evolved from a one-hour show in which they showed clips and then talked about them into two half-hours where they track down videos before they go viral, like a recent clip of a woman in her military uniform breastfeeding her baby.

“You see a pop in the ratings with a great video that people haven’t seen in a lot of places,” says Lisa Hudson, who is RTM’s co-executive producer with Dennis O’Neill. “The website gets a lot more traffic and our name gets out there. People talk about us more.”

Often, RTM finds the people in the videos who the hosts talk to on camera via Skype.

The show’s new logo is a “press play” button with an arrow in the center in between the words, “Videos First. Before They Go Viral.”

Right This Minute is produced by MagicDust Television in Phoenix.

For its second season, the show is moving from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to a bigger facility but with a more intimate set. Instead of looking like a hip newsroom, the set now looks like a coffee shop where the hosts sit on barstools around a tall table while watching videos on a computer.