#09: Boston/Manchester over the past year.
This is one of my favorite markets. Let's see how they changed over the past year.
This is one of my favorite markets: Boston/Manchester. I love this market. Here’s what changed from there over the past year.
First off, a small change was noted here from WBZ. They’ve expanded their Saturday morning news to an hour at 8:00 a.m. WBZ now runs their weekend morning news on both Saturdays and Sundays from 5:00-9:00 a.m. In terms of competition, it competes against WCVB (ABC), WHDH, and WFXT at that hour.
Also, from WBZ, because of the dropped News NOW format, WBZ has re-added a half-hour weeknight newscast at 9:00 p.m. over on its sister station WSBK. This means that WSBK now airs WBZ’s primetime news from 8:00-9:30 p.m. It still has the ONLY 8:00 p.m. news but competes against WHDH’s first half-hour at 9:00 p.m. This took place back on September 5th.
Speaking of WHDH, it has added yet another hour of its weekday morning news at 10:00 a.m. The expanded hour of 7 News - Today in New England was added back on June 26th and is anchored by Amaka Ubaka, Brandon Gunnoe, and Amanda Crawford, and now competes against WFXT’s own weekday morning news at that hour. They’ve cut the 4:30 a.m. half-hour of its morning news in favor of the expanded hour, which replaced Dateline from their schedule.
Finally, WBTS. For the first time in the station’s history, they cut a newscast from their schedule back last week on Monday, September 11th. The 4:00 a.m. hour of their weekday morning news no longer exists; the weekday morning news is still on from 5:00-7:00 a.m. It does mean that there’s no more 4:00 a.m. news in the market. However, not all is lost…
Because WBTS moved that hour into the afternoon… at 2:00 p.m. They introduced a new newscast called Boston News Daily which airs from 2:00-3:00 p.m. The ONLY local newscast is on at that hour, its an interesting new choice in an interesting timeslot on their schedule but it did replace Rachael Ray from their schedule. I can’t provide more details on this as WBTS doesn’t seem to provide more details of their own about this.