Tag Archive for 'hearst argyle'

Who Bid on WTVJ?

Published
by
admin
on 7/1/2008
in Local Media and WTVJ Sale
. 38 Comments

From the previous post about the imminent announcement of a WTVJ buyer someone left this comment:

Companies that are out:
Sunbeam (bid was too low)
Gannett (WTVJ GM said the buyer will be a company she never worked for before, so they are out)
Media General (financial trouble)
Hearst-Argyle (Company has no CEO & no money)
FOX (Pulled out)
Disney-ABC (not buying anymore TV stations)

The split is still an option. While Sunbeam couldn’t afford to buy WTVJ, Post-Newsweek still could. Other possible contenders include COX and Tribune.

Jodie:

It needs to be Belo or Cox, for the sake of WTVJ, its employees and it legacy.

Several other visitors have echoed the sentiment that Cox and Belo would be the best thing to happen to WTVJ.

I’ve read a few things about Belo and it looked to me like they run their stations well. KHOU (Houston), WFAA (Dallas) and KING (Seattle) are at the top of the ratings and come off as pretty serious, newsy, stations. If they were to buy NBC6 it would be interesting to see if their approach works in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale market

update 7/2: someone sent this Broadcasting & Cable blog post from May 28th which says Hearst-Argyle and some private equity companies were looking at WVIT in Hartford, CT which NBC put out for sale in March along with WTVJ.

WPBF’s New Interactive Online Weather Radar

Published
by
admin
on 5/29/2008
in Local Media
. 3 Comments

Hearst-Argyle launched a new interactive weather radar for all of its web properties. WPBF being an H-A owned station got it too.

Weather First Interactive Radar is basically a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with radar data overlaid on top of it.

Visitors have the option to set the map at aerial or street level, show cloud cover, storm cells or turn radar loop on and off. There’s also an option to point the map location locally, nationally or to the most active weather spot anywhere in the country.

The whole app is done by MyWeather.net which it looks to be the online extention of WeatherCentral, a company that provides the on-air graphics for many TV stations. I believe WPLG and WSVN use the WeatherCentral.

It’s pretty well done, very lightweight. It doesn’t make my Firefox browser choke and lag when the maps load and I turn the radar loop on like some of the other similar maps.