Re: WBZ using CBS News on overnights?

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Joseph Gallant wrote:
>Now that WBZ is usig CBS top-of-the-hour news on overnights (I thought
>this would occur four or five years ago!), I wonder how long it will be
>until WBZ starts using CBS on-the-hour news during the daytime and
>evening hours.
>
>My guess is-----very near future.
<snip>

        You could be right, but there's another dynamic at work. The
old-line CBS o'and'o's, even doing all-news, actually have, at least in
times past, wished/wanted to get out of running the hourly news from the
net, or at a minimum wanted to run only the first three minutes or so. The
theory is, the top of the hour is when you want to do a main local newscast
because local is what you're really selling. Even with all-news stations,
there's a left-over listener habit to look for the news on the hour. I can
easily imagine the local WBZ programmers not at all wanting to take the
network news 24/7.
        OTOH, in some markets now, the wanting to be local on the hour may
be less of an issue because there's really only one station doing real news
anyhow. I don't think Boston is quite there yet. There's WRKO, WBUR, WMEX.
        Take WCBS as an example. They go to the network while WINS starts
the hour with its own news, which is almost always heavy with local.
There's a long history of the o-and-o's, along with other major affiliates,
feuding with CBS to get the OK to run only part of the news, to get the
built-in cues to dump out of the hourly news early, etc.
        I don't know WCBS's current schedule of carrying the few remaining
extended hourly newscasts from CBS (i.e., World News Roundup), but at
various points they either wanted to or did dump out early. I've heard them
at times in the past several years so desperate not to be away from local
for the 8,9,10 minutes of the World News Roundup at 8 a.m. that they'd use
the local commercial cutaway, and maybe even cover some of the network ads,
to give real fast weather/traffic/headlines, instead of selling the time.