Believing Sinclair's stock price undermines its performance, Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO David Smith said the company has discussed going private. Smith's revelations occured on a conference call discussing the company's first quarter results, which saw broadcast revenues up 8.5%. 

"Anybody that's looking at the Sinclair stock today would have to say there's a tremendous amount of value," Smith told investors. "[But] for whatever reason, the valuations just don't show up from a market standpoint in our equity." 

MediaPost has more on Smith's musings [registration required].  

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The New York Times has more detail on NBC restructuring operations in New York and debuting a 24-hour news channel in the fall. According to Bill Carter, there will be neither hirings nor firings at NBC (three separate New York offices, not including the 30 Rock headquarters, will be consolidated in a new facility), though there will be extensive training to get everyone up to speed on cross-platform content creation and distribution. 

Producers, for example, whose previous focus has been “getting the show on the air at the assigned time,” will be re-trained to produce video segments instead of shows, aiming to spread the segments across the various local NBC platforms.

The Times also has the name of the new cable channel: New York's Newschannel...Read More

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While poking around the Web for some perspectives on Young Broadcasting's not-all-that-bad Q1 earnings report today, I stumbled upon the "Young Fired Me" blog, penned by a couple laid-off KWQC Davenport (Iowa) staffers. 

Reads the initial post in early February:

Did Young Broadcasting Fire You?

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WNYW New York is taking a unique approach to Mother's Day. Tomorrow morning, Good Day New York reporter Jodi Applegate investigates the life of her secretive mother on the anniversary of her mom's death. 

Applegate visits her birthplace, Wheeling, West Virginia, to gather info on her mother, who died of cancer when Applegate was 17. A few peculiar details emerge from Applegate's past: she was conceived while her mother was single, her mother hid the pregnancy, and later returned to Wheeling, Jodi in tow, telling all (including Jodi) that she'd adopted the baby. Applegate did not learn that her mother was her birth mother until after she died.

If nothing else, it's a refreshing change from the same-old 'take Mom to brunch' segments on the news.

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We were leafing through the latest issue of B&C, as we tend to do on Monday mornings, when something in the tail end of the mag caught our eye. It was a Help Wanted for KSWB San Diego, which switches from a CW to a Fox affiliate August 1. 

"Welcome to Speedoville," the ad begins. 

The listing says the new affiliate "will make Outward Bound look like a picnic...You'll beg for mercy over the next year and only the strong will survive but if you got the guts and the drive to be the  very best and want to live next to heaven in San Diego [Editor's Note: Does that mean Mexico is heaven?], we may have a job for you." 

KSWB is of course a Tribune station, and the above language is of course the way ...Read More

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Some Fox stations will soon allow smaller advertisers to create their own display and video Web ads through an auction system, reports Lost Remote. FIM Adstore (FIM stands for Fox Interactive Media) also connects advertisers to producers and writers to take care of their creative needs. 

The Adstore model sounds a bit like Google's plan for TV advertising, which director Michael Steib talks about here, though it appears Adstore is only for station sites. 

An outfit called ClickZ unearthed Fox's plans at a Drilling Down on Local conference in Seattle. 

"We're capturing that market where small businesses can create their own ads without having a lot of touchpoints," FIM Senior VP/GM Ron Berryman told ClickZ.

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It's been an eventful week in West Palm Beach. First off, we profile the goings-on--the rich, the poor, the hurricanes--in the #38 TV market. Then, general manager Viki Regan up and leaves WPBF on Monday, and today, TCPalm.com reports that Steve Wasserman is sliding into the general manager's office at Scripps' market leading WPTV. 

Wasserman comes from WDIV Detroit. He succeeds Brian Lawlor, who's on to a VP of Sales gig at Scripps corporate. 

WPTV is a force in West Palm, commanding over 32% of the 2006 local TV revenue, reports BIA Financial. In the West Palm profile in B&...Read More

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Public broadcaster WLIW New York will produce an internationally-focused news for it and several other PBS stations, reports the NY Times. With the working title Your World Tonight, the nightly program will replace BBC World News on "an undetermined number of the more than 200 public stations nationwide." 

Educational Broadcasting Corporation president/CEO Neal Shapiro said he was dissatisfied with the BBC program's limited context.  “I thought the show we had was not as good as it could have been,” he told the Times. (Educational Broadcasting owns WNET and WLIW). 

The new newscast starts in October, will have an American anchor, and will be executive produced by Marc Rosenwasser.

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Interesting story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the tiny non-profit station WYBE airing five-minute shorts that would-be producers pay to have on the air. The station charges a yearly fee ranging from $75 for individuals and $1,000 for corporations to help them get their ideas to air.

"It's short-form programming, in which we let the community come to us and let them and viewers tell us what they want," says Howard Blumenthal, the station's chief executive.  

Blumenthal alternately refers to the programming as "Sesame Street for grown-ups" and the early days of MTV. He stresses that it is not infomercials, and that the station can kibosh any conten...Read More

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These are hardly banner days for banner ads, says the new study "Online Promotions: The Big Shift" from Borrell Associates. "We are seeing a distinct shift of business spending away from classic online advertising per se," states the study, "toward non-advertising marketing expenses – the more nebulous category of 'promotions'." Those include contests, sponsorships and incentive m...Read More

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The multicast network LATV is off to a strong start, say station partners and media buyers, but still has its work cut out in terms of hitting a broader audience. We quoted Terri McKinzie of the multicultural communications company Tapestry in our LATV story in the new issue; McKinzie had a bit more to say that didn't make it into the mag. 

She details the challenge ahead of LATV:

1.  Distribution: While they have made gains, the majority of growth has been as part of digital side channels on English language stations across the country. This distribution model is getting exposure in markets -- but until the digital conversion is complete next year, many potential viewers are not aware of the network. Netw...Read More

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Barrington's WNWO Toledo has laid off reporters, photographers and editors, reports the Toledo Blade, as VP/General Manager Jon Skorburg constructs what he calls "a new model of operation."

Skorburg would not say how many people were laid off, but said no "front line" anchor men or women were let go. He said he wanted to respect those who are losing their jobs by not publicly announcing who is being laid off.

He said the television news business is struggling because of competition from the Internet. "We're facing a brave new world here, and models we've used for 40 or 50 years are no longer applicable."

WNWO is an NBC affiliate.

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