Raycom Station to Ditch sports From Newscast
Raycom's KHNL/KGMB duop in Hawaii is dumping the sportscast from their newscasts.
General Manager Rick Blangiardi spins the sports cut by saying the station instead will focus on expanding its sports coverage on digital platforms, such as its web site and social media.
“We’re not backing off of sports,” Blangiardi said as his pants caught on fire, “We’re going to deliver sports differently in what makes more sense.”
The past several weeks, the stations changed its sports presentation on newscasts, going with more feature stories and fewer highlights. Some sports segments had only one story. On some nights, the sports segment would run only in the 10 p.m. newscasts.
Blangiardi said the new approach will be to put the sports reports on digital platforms immediately while allowing the bigger stories to be included in the newscasts.
“We’ll treat sports stories as we do other stories, and they’ll be woven into the fabric of our newscasts,” Blangiardi said. “Whether or not they’re in the A block or the B block, that remains to be seen on the importance of the story. Meanwile, we’ll be very fresh, very covered, very current in serving up our digital platform in building up the whole sports thing.”
“Let’s face it, at 10 o’clock at night, nobody’s waiting around for 10:25 to learn about scores that happened hours and hours ago,” Blangiardi said.
Of course they will still be delivering news that happened hours ago and doing live shots in the dark at the scene of a story that happened earlier in the day.