Verizon just e-mailed its cable customers today that negotiations between it and Cox, which owns WFXT, on how much its cable service will pay to carry the station have reached a standstill and so there's a chance that when the current contract ends Dec. 15, customers will no longer be able to watch the station. Read more.
Cox, which bought WFXT from Fox, is selling the station to no, not Lox, but hedge fund Standard General, which says it will make the station "a foundation" of its new broadcast group. Read more.
NBC Boston showed its reporting fury at noon today, putting 15 reporters and weather people on air all at once, easily topping Channel 7's 12-box: Read more.
Fans of Fox programs and other WFXT offerings who subscribe to Verizon Fios have to find another way to get their fix - the cable provider dropped the channel today as Verizon and 'FXT's parent company, Cox Media, wrangle over licensing. WFXT reports people can still watch the station over the air or via an app.
All Access reports that Cox, which bought Channel 25 from Fox, is looking to sell the Dedham-based station - along with the 13 other TV stations it owns. If there's any justice in the world, somebody will form a company called Lox and buy it.
H/t Dan Seitz.
— Bill Sheerin (@AssignGuy) January 4, 2018
The National Weather Service was not quite as enamored: Read more.
As the snow tally goes up, so will the tallies of the number of reporters and weather people the local TV stations will cram onto a single screen. Peter Wilson at Channel 25 provides this screen capture of an "11-box" today. But it's early. Last March, during a completely mundane storm, Channel 5 put 16 people on screen at once - and we've since heard Channel 7 at one point got up to 17.
New England One reports that the news crew at Channel 25, now owned by Cox, not Fox, is ditching the "Fox" part of its name, and will likely go by just "25 News" or maybe "Action News 25," in part because of angry people who keep confusing it with the national Fox News, in part because, what the heck, maybe that'll help stop a ratings slide that's been going on since Cox took over in 2014 and Maria Stephanos left. A motivational speaker seems not to have done the trick. Read more.
Channel 25 reports: Mouse reportedly caught in Mass. Governor's office, released outside.
Now, glass houses and all that here at UHub Action News, where we've never met an "allegedly," we didn't like, but then Channel 25 goes on to make sure we know there could be another side to this story:
BOSTON - A mouse was allegedly caught and released in Governor Charlie Baker's office Tuesday morning.
Leaked footage from WFXT meeting?
New England One reports newsroom staffers were strongly encouraged to rearrange their schedules to for a motivational session yesterday.
New England One reports conditions and ratings at WFXT are so dire its new corporate overlords are bringing in non-stop consulting to figure out what else to do besides changing the colors of the news studio.
Just one day after WCVB announced the over-caffeinated Ed Harding and 10 o'clock doyenne Maria Stephanos would anchor a new 10 o'clock newscast, 10 o'clock pioneer WFXT dropped a news bomb and announced it was going to launch a newscast at 4 p.m., with Elizabeth Hopkins and Blair Miller at the anchor desk and Kevin Lemanowicz on weather.
So who's going to be first with a 3 p.m. newscast?
Reporting live from a salt pile in Weston.
Channels 7 and 25 began exclusive reporting from a MassDOT salt pile in Weston yesterday evening, more than 30 hours before the anticipated arrival of what Channel 25 tells us "won't be a winter wallop."
Exhausted evening reporters who reassured us the state had plenty of salt were replaced this morning by fresh reporters, who reassured us the salt pile had not disappeared overnight and was ready to be put to use in the first winter storm of the season. Read more.
New England One reports Fox 25 is the first Boston TV station to get FAA approval for a news drone.
Verizon dropped the local Fox affiliate from its Boston-area system today in some sort of contract dispute, meaning lots of people outside Boston didn't get to watch football. Except for a tiny sliver of Dorchester, Verizon never cabled up Boston, in part due to a long-running dispute with Tom Menino and now the company has stopped expanding its service anyway.
An irate citizen complains:
Fox 25 regularly has vehicles parked on sidewalk in front of the State House. Why is this gross violation tolerated? 1) it's a no parking zone 2) they block the sidewalk 3) security risk 4) terrible foreground for tourist pictures of our historic capital building.
No doubt there's a really good reason why a Fox news van was parked in front of a hydrant on Broadway outside the five-alarm fire that destroyed St. John the Baptist Church this morning. And DGUMZ, who took the photo, and other folks would love to hear it.
UPDATE: I originally thought, hey, maybe the hydrant was broken. Then George MacFarlane sent in this picture, from the height of the fire:
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