Local El Paso TV Station Ending Newscasts - Business, Redundancy, and FitFam El Paso. (1 of 3)
1st Part - How News Industry People Always Knew This Day Would Come, and how Big Business Experience Can Help You See It From a Mile Away
This one is long and best read on the Substack site or on the app. Email may cut off some of it.
Hello, Everyone. I just want to thank you again for reading my columns. It really is a labor of love, but I also love money. Ha.
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We’re going to get deep in the weeds of local media here today, but it is ok. I really love this topic.
First of all, let’s get one thing clear: Although I critique local media all the time on social media, I actually respect the hell out of the craft. It seems like a hard job, and in a town like El Paso where almost no one gets paid well except the primetime anchors, it’s something you don’t get to make a lot of money doing. I know people think that “Ooh, nice dresses, nice suit and tie! Must be making bank!” is a common thought for the average person who doesn’t know nothing about El Paso news reporters and anchors.
The fact of the matter is most are barely getting by, paycheck to paycheck, they are crazy overworked, and they get shit from idiots who don’t understand the industry.
I used to get that too while working at Bank of America. Damn, James, NICE SUIT! Must be making some good money.
Um… I ate 3 McChickens every day for $3.24 because I couldn’t afford groceries before my gf, now wife moved in and we were two incomes. It sucked. I was so broke, and a simple thing like a car repair would destroy me for weeks…all while managing a bank with millions of bucks.
Some of you may be interested to know that being a shift leader at Panda Express paid more than my last bank managerial job, and more than most MMJs (multimedia journalists) make in a year in El Paso.
How do I know their pay so well too? Well, I have helped many media members over the years in banking, so I got to see their direct deposits. I’ll never forget a KFOX morning anchor yelling at me for not refunding a $35 overdraft fee about 15 years ago. I couldn’t refund her. It’s all algorithm based on relationship.
It’s no one current, mind you, but it happened and it was unpleasant.
I helped someone who is a main anchor at another station ten years ago when they were in another role, and I was blown away at their pay. It was so low!
So, I got it. Plus I got when people moved to another market, because there IS more pay elsewhere. I also understood when some female media members started having kids, that they were keenly aware that news wasn’t going to sustain their cost of living, so they moved on to non-news roles in the community. They didn’t want to leave El Paso, so they left this dream that they had in favor of paying the bills.
So all that talk about money, what does it mean and pertain to what I am talking about today? As NBC Sports Head Dick Ebersol once said, “The answer to every question about business is ‘more money!’”
It’s true. It’s about making the most with what you got and finding ways to maximize that number for your long-term business goals, which can be in a big company, for the shareholders.
It’s simple as that, IT’S JUST BUSINESS.
So when Sinclair Broadcasting, an infamous media company with over 185 TV stations all across the country as of 2024 in 80+ markets decided to announce that KDBC, A station launched in the 1950s in El Paso as the CBS affiliate, maintaining that distinction over the years, was no longer going to produce newscasts, it was pretty stunning to finally see happen.
In my older content about banking, I always refer to “bank deserts,” places in urban and rural areas that don’t have a bank within 20 minutes of where a lot of people live. It’s a real thing in a lot of places.
El Paso with this move is slowly working its way to being a news desert, but hold on just a minute, my friend, there will still be news content on KDBC according to Sinclair’s statement.
"Beginning August 5, we will be making changes to the way we produce news in El Paso and refocusing our resources across our two stations in the market, CBS4 and KFOX14.
In the short-term, CBS4 will continue to air its 10pm newscast, adding a simulcast of KFOX14’s newscasts in other dayparts. A reconceptualized newscast will debut on CBS4 later this year.
KFOX14 will see an expansion of news content, with the addition of several hours of newscasts and The National Desk broadcasts joining the station’s lineup over the next several months.
Sinclair remains committed to local journalism in the communities which we serve. The refocusing of resources in El Paso will allow us to ensure the long-term success of the stations and continue to bring the top local, regional and national news to the market."
It really sucks. I know the sting of that corporate form letter filth. Although Sinclair is always the target of complaints about perceived bias or being a right-wing-leaning media company, which I cannot say for certain that those complaints are untrue. It doesn’t matter here, because it’s irrelevant to how this story is told. There’s no “LIMITING” of the news in El Paso, and I will show you why in a second.
For the record, “The National Desk” show they are adding to the news lineup is hot garbage. It is so boring, and it feels like a Temu version of a national broadcast or Fox News.
But first thing I thought of when I saw the KDBC story is, “NEW BAC PLAN” by Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America in 2013.
I was working the bank drive-up when I read it, and basically it called for the elimination of 10% of bank branches, it led to a lot of drive-thru banking eliminated, which pissed people off, but it brought people into the bank to sell them shit, and basically focused the efforts on showing people digital banking and atm banking, which ultimately led to a lot of jobs being lost myself included.
When I read that, I thought, “They would never close my branch down. Las Cruces has 120,000 people. It NEEDS two banks because of how ‘busy’ it is.”
That’s the problem. The busy was the problem. Moynihan and BofA saw those long bank lines as the problem, because most of those people were actually in line wanting to do things they could do in their undies at home. BofA and other banks nowadays want to get those damn “cloggers” out of line (that’s what my boss called them) and allowed us more time for people who were wanting new accounts, new credit cards, new home loans. I don’t give a shit if you need to send money to your mom in ABQ. I can show you how to do that on your app and you will NEVER bug me again.
It worked WAYYYYYY too well. Our volume from 2013-2018 fell off tremendously and then May 2018, we were told my branch would close. August 2018, it closed. We were promised either a job or severance, and all but one got neither. We all got screwed.
Here’s a 2011 clip of an article from BofA’S NEW BAC plan
I didn’t really read it in 2011. I was too busy having coworkers flirt with me and me in my own head about life in my late 20s, but it was all there. “FOCUS ON SERVING CORPORTATIONS MORE THAN CUSTOMERS.” We were lying when we were told we were there to focus on the individual client. I had so much animosity about BofA when I got canned, but then I realized, man, that’s all companies.
Sinclair is no different with KFOX and KDBC. Let me bring it back around to that.
Check this out though
So when Sinclair purchased KFOX and KDBC in 2013, it was groundbreaking. Never was a single company allowed to own two of the big 4 network affiliates at the same time in the same city. But it was allowed to go through for one very big unique to El Paso reason. The Spanish stations, KINT (Univision) and KTDO (Telemundo) had more viewers, while KDBC and KFOX were 5th and 6th in town.
The Heavily Spanish-Speaking Mexican population voted with their remotes that the Spanish stations were more important to them, and that allowed the sale to be rubber stamped, because it was almost seen as a necessary joining of forces for two fledging stations, both with network affiliations.
YOU GOT TO READ IT!
For nearly five years, El Paso’s oldest TV station, KDBC Channel 4, has broadcast its news programs from the corner of a studio inside a competitor, KTSM Channel 9, with little more than a desk, a chair and a news anchor.
That news was crummy. It really was. I never saw KDBC news as often as I should, because it always felt…local access.
It was fuzzy, it felt not as crisp and professional. Aside from the anchor Adrienne Alvarez, who I had a crush on, plus her just being so pleasant on the air, I never saw a reason to watch. I didn’t like it and the ratings bore that for many people in this area.
Let’s talk like real people here, folks.
The same article had this interesting tidbit, which is relevant today.
But the CBS affiliate will soon move into a renovated Westside office building with KFOX Channel 14, a Fox affiliate, where KDBC will once again have a studio, newsroom and sales force of its own.
Sinclair has plans to hire 40 people in El Paso. Most of the openings are for KDBC, which now has a staff of two – an engineer and administrative assistant.
“For the first time in years, CBS is going to have their own set, their own control room, their own reporters, their own team,” Hayes said.
In addition, Sinclair is buying its two El Paso stations new live trucks and updating the stations’ graphics, including a new logo for KDBC. Hayes says KDBC on-air talent like longtime weathercaster Robert Bettes remain under contract with KTSM.
KDBC was lost without Sinclair purchasing it. It had TWO PEOPLE EMPLOYED!!! That’s insane!
But a big thing of note were in those words… “…studio, newsroom, and sales force of its own.”
The average consumer doesn’t understand how business works. Let’s be honest. I was in the banking business, and I would say 40% of my clients thought my branch housed their ACTUAL cash in the vault that they can go pick up at any time. I’m serious.
So when you say ‘Sales Force’ to the average person, they don’t get that there are some very stressful jobs in local media where you have to sell ads for the station. You have to make outbound calls, have meetings, present options to potential clients, and if and when you do sell them ad time, you have to worry about making sure they have ads ready to air in between segments of shows the station airs, including their local news.
That’s what newspapers are, and that’s what fucking high school yearbooks are sometimes, with local sponsors buying space in the yearbook as a means of subsidizing the cost of the books for the students during the process.
I am currently trying to sell ad space on this column, my friends. I need to otherwise I will go bankrupt very soon! This is a real thing.
But the news business is a real thing, and part of it is a sales staff to grow the business, especially for a fucking behemoth like Sinclair Broadcasting.
People would notice the aesthetics of the new studio, better picture quality and better resources for the station, but maybe they don’t understand how a National Ford commercial airs during Judge Judy or a local dry cleaning commercial during the local news. The news is the vessel, the product is the commercials down your throat.
And that’s fine by me.
A decade ago, that article broached the subject of “new competition”
Despite threats from new media like news websites and mobile apps, Rodriguez said the broadcast industry is doing well.
“Local TV broadcasters are competing successfully, and the key to that success is their local presence. They develop programming and relationships that are unique to those communities,” Rodriguez said
Oscar Rodriguez, president of the Texas Association of Broadcasters is the person they were talking to. He has to say that. Why would he say, “Oh, the industry I represent is shitty” to anyone? He wouldn’t. He has to work with Sinclair, Tegna, Nexstar and all these big companies, and you have to put a front saying “Business is fine,” but even a decade ago, social media was usurping the local news media business, but not the way it is currently doing it.
But again from the article:
KFOX and KDBC will share a building but have separate studios, separate sales reps and separate newsrooms. A director of sales will oversee both sales staffs and a news director both newsrooms, according to Hayes.
“We don’t want KDBC to be a cut and paste version of KFOX. We are not going to have the same lineups,” Hayes said.
So now, the second paragraph references there won’t be redundancies, and nothing can be further from the truth in 2024 Sinclair in El Paso (more on that next column) But seeing that there was a director of sales overseeing “Sales staffs” (which means more than one salesperson) and a news director “both newsrooms” even though everything mentioned in the article says that everything will be separate and not a cut and paste version of one another? It makes no sense in retrospect.
That’s where basic business in big business comes in.
Bank example: My role, Sales manager was responsible for driving revenue, not the branch manager. The branch manager is there to oversee operations and not get his or her hands dirty with the money part so to speak.
Then about 7-8 years ago, BofA came out with a new job, relationship banker, which was basically a teller/salesperson hybrid which then meant you didn’t have to pay a separate teller to do one job. BofA eventually pivoted most roles beneath manager to this.
Right when I left, assistant managers were usually told to run a teller drawer because tellers were now almost exclusively part time, and if and when they were there, they were an “RB” they were told to be on the sales floor and not do teller stuff.
Cross-training. That’s what Sinclair is going through and for many years after getting rid of high-priced (for El Paso) talent because they WERE high-priced talent, the miscegenation of both channels started happening.
Someone leaves the KFOX sales team… “Hey Joe, from KDBC, can you fill in until we hire someone?”
Three months later, the powers that be say, “You know we haven’t really lost a beat when so and so quit the sales team. Joe has been killing it for both stations. Maybe we should just eliminate the open position by attrition. Joe looks like he can handle it!”
Then a year later, Fucking Joe… Joe couldn’t handle it.
He thought it was bullshit that he has to work the equivalent of two jobs for one pay so he leaves and Sinclair now has to hire someone to replace him, knowing that because how awesome Joe was basically doing the work for two that the next person may not be as adept at the workload…
So then that’s how you get a revolving door of people, which impacts how things are done, which can impact sales, which impacts WHAT? Class? The viability of two stations.
The news director overseeing both newsrooms is a hard one too, because at first when Sinclair debuted their new El Paso studios and rebranded KDBC as “CBS4 El Paso” or “CBS4 Local”, they tried really hard to make sure both had distinctive looks and vibes.
KDBC hired Shelton Dotson, a NM Native who worked at KFOX for a time as well as KOB in Albuquerque, Patty Maese, who was in local news here in El Paso for years, and Lou Romano for Sports who worked at KVIA in the late 1990s, was an El Paso Legend already and people just loved his demeanor and passion for sports, not to mention his banter with his co-anchors.
KFOX ran with John Purvis, longtime anchor in El Paso, Erica Castillo, who was at KTSM years before, with a stop in Albuquerque in the late 1990s (where I remembered her) and a journey at various jobs, leaving for various reasons (not the time or place to talk about that) and meteorologist Sandra Diaz with weather.
KFOX didn’t really have a sports department until the late 2010s, so there was no true sports report on their newscasts. So both stations had different feels, for sure.
The promos leading into the rebranding of KDBC to “CBS4” were pretty honest, with Dotson mentioning that KDBC once did great things but lost their way in the late 1980s.
Ironically, the late 1980s KDBC had Estela Casas, then in her late 20s at the helm with Al Hinojos among others. This weekend, I watched 2 hours of 1988-1989 KDBC newscasts.
It was good for its time. It felt a little busy, but I have never seen KDBC ever act like that. It was like something I never saw from that station before, nor did I really see in the “CBS4” rebranding, despite the insistence that KDBC would have a new image and lease on life with their news department.
The trippiest thing on the newscast I posted above was the sports segment led off with a Cubs/Mets trade rumor that never materialized and didn’t involve any local interest team. That would never fly in today’s newscast as sports segments are almost always less than 3 minutes long.
But it felt at least organically something different that what we see now.
But the idea pre-launch looked promising
It actually was good for a while. A couple years. Then Patty Maese mysteriously vanished, whether on her own or forced out with no fanfare.
KDBC replaced her with Concetta Callahan. Kira Miner was on Weather.
It didn’t last very long. Both departed after a couple of years. Callahan was not replaced, and Dotson would be solo primetime anchor.
Miner, the meteorologist, who would occasionally do weather on the KFOX side was replaced by Sandra Diaz doing double duty at 9pm and 10pm on different channels, something all weather folks in prime time seem to do every day now. I am assuming one part of her duties, likely the KDBC side were taped to allow that to happen seamlessly, as KFOX is not off the air until 10:05pm, and KDBC 10pm news starts promptly at 10.
Soon, Dotson would leave with little to no warning for viewers in 2022 and not say anything, and John Purvis, formerly the prime-time KFOX anchor busted down to mornings with the hiring of high-priced Robert Guillen (well-deserved, might I add) would take his place on KDBC in weekday prime-time, the only exclusive prime-time on-air person at KDBC, much like the olden days when they just were in a corner in KTSM’s studio.
Also departing abruptly? Sandra Diaz who was a fixture at KFOX for many many years, and was doing ironwoman work as the chief meteorologist at KDBC as well to fill the hole there.
She announced she was leaving and her last day was New Years Eve, 2022. There wasn’t any really big fanfare when she left. It was just “Hey, I’m leaving…bye.”
She has not resurfaced elsewhere. Brad Montgomery moved from KFOX Mornings to Prime Time to take her spot at KFOX and do the double at KDBC as well.
Lou Romano, beloved sports anchor? Also randomly announced one day that today would be his last day. Not a lot of fanfare. Amanda Guillen, another “Exclusive” KDBC talent who also left around this time in 2022 announced it.
Note the astute FB Fan who noticed it too.
One of the 5 likes… Lou Romano himself. Something was up.
What Sinclair was doing with KDBC especially was that it seemed to have been a very calculated subtraction. With Lou Romano gone, who will do sports? Newly Hired James King, so very young and eager, having to do the 5:30pm newscast on KDBC, 9pm Sports cast at about 9:45-9:50pm on KFOX, and then back to KDBC for a sports segment at about 10:20pm. Work 2x as hard for 1 paycheck…just like the others, and just like how my bank started treating employees before I left.
So, of course, my heart breaks for people who are going to lose their job. Will it be the local morning and noon anchors, all of whom are very young and from what I have seen of them do a great job? Will it be John Purvis, who has been in local media for over 30 years? Probably, unfortunately, and that’s sad, because we have seen Dotson, Romano, Diaz cast aside recently.
And… aside from the behind the scenes people, that’s pretty much it. As I will mention in the next column, the reporters on KDBC also do the same content on KFOX.
Every story I looked up in research for this column references that KDBC has been through the wringer many many times.
Take a look at these El Paso times Articles from 2009, 1 year after I moved to town.
KDBC ended a newscast. 6pm eliminated, and the 5pm moved to 5:30pm. I literally don’t remember this!
Then also in 2009:
Got rid of their weekend sports person, and all sports content on the weekend was pre-packaged from out of town. The lack of focus on local, which is my rallying cry for my other column. Also mentioned in this article, they got rid of their morning and noon newscasts.
Again, if they were good, I sure as hell didn’t see them. Then there’s this AP story:
EL PASO (AP) — About half of the staff at El Paso’s CBS-affiliated television station has been laid off.
Margaret Carrillo, the station’s accounting and personnel supervisor, said Friday that about half of KDBC 4 News’ nearly 50 employees were let go as part of a new joint sales agreement with the local NBC affiliate, KTSM.
Carrillo said about two-thirds of the layoffs were of editorial staff. The remaining employees were offered “the same or very similar” jobs.
The two stations announced the agreement, which includes sharing some administrative duties, in October.
Their shotgun marriage with KTSM in 2009 was very eerily similar to what Sinclair is doing, which is consolidate redundancies (again, I will talk about that more next time.)
But you know what also I got from all this? That for decades, no one seemed to know what to do with KDBC, the CBS affiliate. It was never getting good ratings, or had a quality product or investment. Then when Sinclair came in, bought it and invested, it learned like any other company there are opportunities to cut costs and realize that some things don’t work.
Why do you think there is only 1 checkout cashier at Walmart at times? Because you CAN hire 10, and get people out faster…but why would you want them to leave faster? If they stay, maybe they will buy more?
What are they going to do…STOP COMING IN TO WALMART?!?!!? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Nope. When businesses know they have that power, they exploit it!
Now don’t get me wrong, my whole schtick was always “Fight against huge companies,” and I did do that all the time with banks. But at the same time, you can’t fault a lion for being a lion. He’s going to roar, he’s going to attack, and he’s going to bite. I can’t feel bad for people saying Sinclair is ruining the station, because it seems like many other companies didn’t know what to do with this same station except shitcan a lot of their stuff every 15 years or so. They also showed you who they were by getting rid of those established anchors in-studio!
Big companies buy companies and then sell off pieces to make them more streamlined. That’s the problem with local newspapers now too. The only difference here is that KDBC was always the second banana in a two company newsroom. Despite attempts to rebrand, it always was going to be what it was.
But I bet Sinclair is STRUGGLING to make decent ad revenue on that newscast from commercials between segments of the newscast.
That’s bad because my goodness, they know how to get promotional consideration on all their products, from sponsored cameras in the city, a interstitial commercial in the middle of a newscast, a corporate branded sportscast and weather bug on the screen, and so much more.
They know how to make money, and much like any big business, they know how to trim to cut costs, often at the expense of people who don’t deserve to lose their job.
Quick aside, I bet how they will get out of paying severance for any of the employees in jeopardy. They tell those employees that they are going to be let go on x date with severance totaling $x. Then about a week before they lose their job, Sinclair is going to give them a ring and mention, hey, we got a job for you. It’s for (insert lower tier job here in a lower market), so if you are willing to transfer and start by September 1st, we’d love to have you.
Most people have already made plans to work elsewhere or are actively looking in town, so then when they decline, Sinclair can say that they “quit” on their own and avoid paying severance.
That’s exactly what happened to us in banking! They toy with you, and then it just pisses you off to not want anything to do with them so you just leave. I was a sucker who took the job offered to me, and then they fired me, lol.
Because social media is so much more prominent in 2024 than in 2009 when KDBC was going through some major shit… worse shit in my opinion, because they weren’t owned by a company as massive as Sinclair and their newscasts were on a card table in the corner of someone else’s studio, we look at it a lot differently.
We are seeing this announcement as “The sky is falling on journalism,” when to be honest the young people they are using as examples of those left behind with a move like this are actually going to still do what they do, except doing it for just 1 station, not 2 going forward for similar, if not the exact same pay. They will have to work less.
It’s really not bad, unless Sinclair scales back local news on KFOX, then I would say, panic. But there is literally nothing that tells me that this doesn’t make sense considering what their original vision was a decade ago, and a promise that KDBC was not going to be a carbon copy of KFOX, and it ended up being anyway, so now their next move is to just simulcast the newscast or just brand KDBC’s news content as KFOX14 on CBS4, much like ABC brands their sports as ESPN on ABC, and now TruTv, who will show a lot of sports going forward is rebranded as TNT Sports on TruTv.
That’s all it is, but worrywarts and doomsday prognosticators are seeing this as something more? Nah, it’s not. It’s what they always did to this poor station and if you didn’t see how similar everything was from the beginning, you knew that it couldn’t be sustainable.
This is not going to be a slamming big business Sinclair column, because they are who we thought they were, and again, if you didn’t realize as a journalist that you were producing homogenized content to be fed through their massive pipelines nationwide, and were never a separate entity covering local stuff, despite the shiny new studio, desks, and new trucks supposedly bought for KDBC.
If people were watching, would they be doing this? Yes, because even that viral video from years ago, which includes KDBC in it, despite some people using it for political purposes showed that Sinclair’s message, much like the message of any normal company is to be streamlined, whether we liked it, agree with it, or not. They are who we thought they were, and again, You can’t blame a lion for being a lion wanting to do lion things.
KDBC will still have news, and when they air local stuff from the sister station KFOX, it should look almost EXACTLY the same, I promise.
Does that mean some people will lose their job? Yes, but in this world of AI and automation, jobs are going away other places too. Why? Because businesses decide to adapt.
That ends this part. Part 2 will be about the redundancy of KFOX and KDBC news, particularly on the weekends, when the content is almost 100% identical and leads one to question, “Why are we pretending anything is being lost?”
But I want to make one thing clear: I do think the KFOX/KDBC crew do awesome on weekends with such a bare bones product. I will share more of that love in that article, and then we will talk about a Fitfam post that had some newsies in the comments saying things even me, an impassioned viewer and defender of local media, would say was unethical, offensive, and hypocritical. And I will explain FitFam’s important and meaningful role (yes, I’m saying it) in the media these days.
James