It had been getting a bit crappier than I was comfortable with lately due to cuts but Clear Channel affiliate WWTI ABC announced today that it was cutting its 6 pm and 11 pm news broadcasts to focus on hourly updates and weather...oh, and the internet. [I think they will be investing in the use of technology - wizards!] Just a year and a bit ago, they had an hour and a half of local Watertown, NY news and sports every evening at 6 pm and more at 11 pm with a special Friday night high school sportscast called the Sportsblitz...or rather the Sportsblitz.
Now, the best source of corny local sports is gone. How will I know how Lafargeville or Pulaski do in high school lacrosse next spring? How will I follow Sackets in the Class K, Division XXIV NY state boys basketball regionals? Why do I care? Through my life, local TV news has going the way of other slowly dying things. In the good old days, CBC Halifax TV in the '70's had the resources to do news broadcasts from Tomaso's pizza and other wacky places and WLBZ Bangor brought Dick Stacey's Country Jamboree to the Maritimes via cable TV (blogged about here...it even made The Christian Science Monitor), Wingham Ontario's CKNX-TV in the 1980's did a feature on my brother in law and his chicken that would ride on his bike handlebars, Pembroke CHRO-TV in the '90's, now an Ottawa station, covered the local court scene I was working in. It is not entirely over as Kingston still has an hour of local CKWS news at 6 pm and another half hour at 11 pm and Watertown NY still has one local TV newscast on WWNY-TV but they are affiliates using a lot of national feeds and the local hokey sportscasts are the first to go.
Sad. We'll all eat the same cheese from squeeze tubes by the time I am 83.
Comments
Alan - August 10, 2004 12:55 PM
Here is the impressive replacement local sports page on the new WWTI customer service improving web page.
Alan - September 28, 2006 11:56 AM
Eddie Driscoll of WLBZ passed away last weekend and Mike has written an excellent tribute. From a link under the link under my link, this from the Bangor Daily News obit:<blockquote class="smalltext">"It was an important part of growing up; you watched him every day," said Bill Green, who grew up in Bangor watching Driscoll from afar and for 2 1/2 years in the early 1970s was a cameraman for Driscoll and his antics. Green, host of "Bill Green's Maine," still can recite the introduction to Driscoll's "Supper Time Super-Show" and he still has the code card used to send and receive coded messages from Driscoll's show "Weird." The shows had lasting impact, even though many of them weren't taped and are gone except for pictures and memories. During the 33 years Driscoll had been on the air, he was in 26 series and amassed quite a following. Driscoll's other shows included "My Backyard," "The Great Money Movie" and "Mason Mutt."</blockquote>