Syracuse CBS affiliate closes newsroom, merges with competing station

WTVH-TV (CBS) Syracuse, NY announced at a staff meeting this past Monday morning that effective immediately, the station's day to day operations would be outsourced to another station in town. Granite Broadcasting, the owner of WTVH, has entered a joint sales agreement and a shared services agreement with Barrington Broadcasting, the owner of the Syracuse NBC affiliate WSTM-TV. As a part of the deal, 40 people where laid off from WTVH and the newsroom has been shut down. Only a small transition team remains to continue producing television and website content. Eventually, all operations will move to WSTM's studios just a block or two away on the same street. The current WTVH studios will be closed and sold.

This sounds confusing, but is actually pretty simple. Granite will continue to own the broadcasting license for WTVH and collect revenue from it. The difference now is that it will no longer operate the station. That's what the deal with Barrington and WSTM is all about. Granite will pay them to run their station and to produce their news content. On the air, television programing will not change on either station except for the local newscasts, where both stations will have the same reporters. Behind the scenes, the same people will do all of the work for both stations. There is a similar arrangement in Rochester, NY between where the local fox station is run by the CBS affiliate.

Any good professional journalist would say that this is a bad thing for the Syracuse community. It is important to have various sources of news in a community, with each source having an independent newsroom. Each newsroom can develop biases, and so having a variety ensures that the public gets complete coverage of local news. The news release from WTVH claimed that “This arrangement provides opportunities for substantial operating efficiencies by allowing us to use existing infrastructure to expand the breadth of local news and services provided to the viewers of Central NY, while enhancing the revenue and profitability of both stations." How is having one newsroom instead of two producing newscasts increasing the "breadth" of local news? It's not like they are combining them...usually what happens is only a few (like one or two) reporters move to the new station under these types of agreements.

There is also the emotional and historical loss to the community. WTVH was the first TV station in Syracuse, beginning as WHEN in 1948. It was the first station to incorporate live reporting from remote locations away from the studio. For so many years it was the best station in town, blowing away the competition with talent who would move on to make it big. The Today Show's Al Roker got his start here. So did ESPN sportscaster Mike Tirico, and ABC News anchor David Muir. And there was the face of Central New York who generations of viewers will never forget. Ron Curtis is the local anchor who could have made it big but was too dedicated to his local viewers. After over 40 years of excellence at the station, it is probably a good thing that he did not live to see his newsroom closed, and his station reduced to this.

Sure, it's true that WTVH has been declining for at least the last decade. It slipped from first to last in the ratings as its newsroom acted like "revolving door," with a constant change of anchors, reporters, and managers. Perhaps the fatal last straw came last year, when the station fired its most senior anchor with 22 years at the station, Maureen Green. They abandoned the last person viewers tuned in to see, and so the viewers abandoned them. In hindsight, there was a clue that it could come to this. I blogged actually blogged about it (click here to see the entry). One of the biggest local sports stories of the year in Syracuse was SU's firing of football coach Greg Robinson. It was the headline on every local news website, except there was something that caught my eye on WTVH. Their story was by the Associated Press. This was one of the biggest stories of the year - the ABC affiliate in Rochester, an hour and a half away, wrote it's own story. I knew then how bad things were there. It was clear that it was a station more concerned about increasing its profit than staffing its newsroom. One might argue that this new agreement doesn't make any difference then, considering how bad their news was. My response is that the newsroom should never have been allowed to slide that far in the first place. That is the part that is sad and frightening for the future of local news in America.

Below are some videos from the WTVH archive that show better times at the station, and the excellent newscasts they were once known for. The first video is from 1998 - the station's 50th anniversary. It looks back at the history of the station and some of the major stories they covered. The second video is their Emmy award-winning newscast from Syracuse University on the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103. The third video is a tribute to Ron Curtis that aired on his last day at the station in December of 2000.

50 Years of WTVH:



Emmy-winning Pan-Am 103 newscast (3 parts):







Ron Curtis Farewell - 41 years at WTVH: