#01: New York City over the past year.
Finally! The finale! Or is it... ? Anyways, changes happened in NYC as well.
Well… here we are. Finally made it. I made it to the last of the changes from over the past year and of course, its the New York market that gets mentioned all alone here.
First, we have to mention WCBS and WLNY. With WCBS, despite the rebranding effort across its CBS O&Os, they only changed their general branding to CBS New York. The newscasts still go by CBS 2 News.
But the bigger story is that while WLNY is still an Independent station, there have been some changes to the newscasts WCBS produces for them. This includes now adding an hour-long morning newscast (again) at 7:00 a.m. which puts them up against the longtimers in the market, WNYW (FOX) and WPIX (CW).
Also, because the News NOW format went defunct, WCBS went to work and replaced it with a new earlier half-hour version at 8:00 p.m. While its still the ONLY local news on at that time in the market, unlike other sister stations who are providing news in primetime, this is only a half-hour as it gets repeated again at 8:30 p.m. Also, no more weekend editions as well.
Finally, and what a way to end this series, we end it with the most-watched local news station in the country: WABC. Just like sister stations WPVI in Philadelphia and WTVD in Durham/Raleigh, they also added an hour-long weekday morning newscast at 10:00 a.m. However, theirs debuted on Tuesday, September 12th instead of Monday, September 11th due to 9/11 memorial coverage that took up all of WABC’s morning time.
The new Channel 7 Eyewitness News Mornings at 10:00 a.m. is the ONLY local morning news at that time in the market (unless you also count cable-only options from either Spectrum News NY1 or News 12). The newscast is anchored by Shirleen Allicot and Mike Marza with ABC 7 AccuWeather from either Meteorlogists Sam Champion or Dani Beckstrom who sometimes fills in for Sam when needed.
Okay! That’s it! I should finally be done! Or am I… ? Stay tuned.