Before sweeps starts, struggling TV stations love to make big changes to their talent and think it will be the magic bullet.

The problem with doing that? While TV management might have grown sour on a talent, there are many viewers that like that person and have grown accustom to them on the newscasts. When you blow that anchor out, you piss off those people. The people that weren’t watching your newscasts to begin with, really have no clue that you made talent changes, so they are watching either.

The recipe for a struggling station to move up in the ratings is really simple, although never followed.

Pick the people to think our best to anchor your newscast and then leave it alone….for years! Also, you have to promote the talent, the newscasts and spend a lot of money. Putting on a 30 second spot during Judge Judy is not going to cut it. You have to spend big bucks outside your station and you have to make sure you are doing better Journalism than the competition.

So often, the last place station tries to just copy the first place station. Why would viewers switch for an imitation?

You need to do it different and do it better.

CBS O&O WBBM in Chicago blew up their anchor team again and guess where they are sitting in the ratings?

Yep, still in last place.

But maybe the station could care less about ratings?

Robert Feder writes that in April, WBBM’s 10 p.m. newscast averaged a 3.1 rating (100,790 households) and 6 percent share. That’s precisely the rating and share it had in February — the month before CBS 2 replaced 13-year veteran Rob Johnson with Brad Edwards alongside Irika Sargent.

In other words, while the station cut a hefty salary, it doesn’t appear to have won or lost viewers.

Perhaps that was management’s goal all along.

Maybe they don’t care if they’re in last place as long as they saved a few bucks?

But, is that the kind of station you want to work for? A station that is just trying to do news on the cheap and cares nothing about moving up in the ratings.

If this is how TV news is done in 2019, why not just fold up the news department, save that money and order up more episodes of Judge Judy?

If you don’t care about winning, how do you expect your news staff to feel?