New England Cable News

[Jeremy Mixer]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Sean Smyth wrote:

> Paul Anderson writes:
> << NECN is my preferred source for news.  It's not so Boston-oriented as
>
> the Boston stations (naturally) and offers less coverage of car
> accidents in Weymouth and more coverage of the rest of New England. >>
>
> Funny, I could swear I've seen the northern New England folks on this
> list (Mssrs. O'Neill and Billings) say the opposite.

On NECN there is hardly ever any coverage of Maine unless it is something
that NBC/CBS/CNN etc are covering as well. There are exceptions but for
the most part Maine does not exist to them.
 >
> In my opinion, CN8 and NECN are becoming even more blurry in the
> defining line between the two. Why have two channels serving the same
> mission, especially when they're owned by the same company? A CN8 airing
> some of NECN's stronger programming (i.e. Newsnight and such) would be a
> lot stronger channel than the two separated.
>
> Continental/Media One/AT&T/Comcast has always owned 50 percent of NECN
> and Hearst/Hearst-Argyle has always owned the other 50.
>
> << Why would Comcast want to kill NECN? >>
>
> If The Powers That Be found that a two-channel combo of CN8 and an
> all-sports channel would be more profitable than keeping CN8 and NECN as
> is, they'd do it in a heartbeat. And Comcast Sports Net, especially
> CSN-Philadelphia, offers a better product than the Cablevision-owned Fox
> Sports Net outlets (as opposed to the Fox-owned Fox Sports Net outlets).

I think the ideal thing would be to focus the best parts of the twoo news
channels into one, and the other one should be a sports station, and they
could be very effective with this. Just my thoughts, but could be
effective if they did it right...

Jeremy