As you may have heard, Fox O&O stations are teaming with other stations in their markets to create a pooled news service to feed news to both stations and cut costs.
The latest examples came Wednesday when Fox announced a deal with E.W. Scripps stations to pool resouces. According to TVNewsday.com, Fox and Scripps stations in Tampa (WTVT-Fox, WFTS-ABC), Phoenix (KSAZ-Fox, KNSV-ABC) and Detroit (WJBK-Fox, WXYZ-ABC) will create local news services to pool content gathering, allowing the stations to reduce costs by not sending multiple crews to news events.
How will it work? Reports TVNewsday: “The news service management will autonomously identify the stories to be covered each day and make arrangements to collect and deliver the video back to each of the participating stations. Each station will then decide how to use the video adding their own reporting and editorial style.”
So, the question for O-Town watchers: What station will WOFL-Fox 35 team with to start a local news service here? I’m guessing WESH-2. Why? WESH owner Hearst-Argyle and Fox both have O&O stations in five markets: Boston, Orlando, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Winston-Salem/Greensboro/High Point, N.C. WFTV owner Cox Enterprises and WKMG owner Post-Newsweek don’t have as much market overlap with Fox as H-A.
So, we’ll see what happens — but I would bet the farm Fox will be partnering with someone in O-Town in the not-too-distant future.