Saturday Night Live Shuffles Actors
"Saturday Night Live" has cut two and added two for the season premiere on September 26th. Numerous media outlets are reporting Michaela Watkins and Casey Wilson are out and comedians Jenny Slate and Nasim Pedrad have joined the show. Watkins joined the program last fall as a featured cast member. Wilson joined "SNL" in 2008 after the Hollywood writers strike.
Former WKYC General Manager Bill Scaffide Heading South To Retire?
The Virginian Pilot newspaper reports former WKYC General Manager, most recently GM at WTVZ in Norfolk, is heading to Florida - not for another job, but to apparently enter semi-retirement. Scaffide left the station last week as the moving trucks planned to head for West Palm Beach. Bill was proud of making that station profitable during his 3 year tenure. We have lots of memories of Bill doing the same thing at WKYC and Multimedia when deep staff cuts were made after the station was acquired from NBC.
Digital Broadcasting Nearly 100%
Seems the public has finally figured out they need to switch over to all digital tv to get any sort of decent programming that low power stations just can't afford. Lower power stations are the only ones still allowed to broadcast analog signals. Nielsen reports DTV penetration is now about 99.4% across the nation. Nearly 1.2 million homes have made the switch since June 12th when the U.S. television industry finally made the switch. Only 710,000 homes remain non-digital ready.
TV Viewing Continues to Increase
Good news for broadcasters...the public is watching more television lately - about 141 hours per month during the 2nd quarter. Previous fears of viewers replacing one medium for another as new technology emerges so far hasn't happen. Instead, Nielsen is finding that people are adding new mediums to their daily lives, while keeping the traditional ones - like television. Nearly 57% of Americans with internet access currently use both television and the internet at the same time at least once a month. That amounts to about 2 hours and 39 minutes each month of simultanteous use helping both mediums grow this year.
Leno Debut Being Pushed on Radio
NBC is using the power of radio to help promote the debut of Jay Leno Show next Monday, September 14th at 10 p.m. The network is primarily buying time in the top 25 markets, which includes Cleveland. The spots will feature a sampling of Leno's comedy bits and will air mostly in morning and afternoon drive at about 10 minutes past the hour.
In Case You Missed It
Even network tv newscasts have bad moments. Last week while NBC's Brian Williams was anchoring in the field from the California Wildfires for NBC Nightly News, he got rather excited by the news that ABC anchorman Charlie Gibson was stepping down at the end of the year. He'll be replaced by Diane Sawyer, which by our calculations makes Brian the only remaining male anchor on the Big 3 newscasts, unless Katie gets the boot soon. Just as he started ribbing ABC about what this means for competition at 6:30 p.m., his cameraman either started to die laughing or tripped as the camera jerked right off Brian. Was the last laugh really on Brian?
