Via Columbia Journalism Review. A few larger TV stations are cutting loose from the networks and becoming truly local.
Best of all, it’s not about Trump, it’s about MONEY. The stations decided that networks are charging too much for nothing meaningful except big league sports. Most people get their entertainment elsewhere now. The stations also believe they can make more money by selling advertising directly to local sponsors, instead of letting the network take part of the profit.
I can’t play my usual IT’S NOT NEW game here!
Networks came fairly late in the development of radio. In 1949 when TV was practically launched, the radio networks were well established. TV was formed by the networks, not locally. If these stations succeed, they could re-create the pre-network era of radio where local musicians and local actors produced locally flavored music and drama.
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Another item found in the same source made an interesting correlation with the AI bot behavior I’ve been seeing. These bots never read current writing. They stay at least two years back, generally congregating on one insignificant item for a while. A study of bots stealing from “news” sites found the same avoidance of recent items and the same two-year threshold: Old articles received some of the highest AI referral traffic — half of the most referred stories from ChatGPT were older than two years, and both had more than decade-old stories in their top 10.
Polistra's Mill 