Pretty significant local media story here.
KYW Newsradio, which just moved to 2400 Market Street as part of the Entercom headquarters relocation, is cutting ties with CBS 3 in order to team up with NBC 10 instead.
Jeff Blumenthal at the Philadelphia Business Journal:
KYW Newsradio (1060-AM) has cut ties with its longtime television partner CBS3 and signed what it terms a “multiplatform content distribution partnership” with NBC10 (WCAU-TV) and its sister station Telemundo62 (WWSI). The announcement comes just days after KYW moved out of CBS3’s offices and into parent company Entercom Communications Corp.’s new headquarters at 2400 Market St.
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KYW had a content partnership with CBS3 that included sharing reporting resources and newsroom resources while the two were both owned by CBS Corp. The radio station even relocated to CBS3’s studios at 1555 Hamilton St. in Center City in 2014 to combine newsrooms.
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Entercom said content from the partnership will also be shared across its five other Philadelphia radio stations: 96.5 TDY (WTDY-FM), 98.1 WOGL (WOGL-FM), B101.1 (WBEB-FM), SportsRadio 94WIP (WIP-FM) and Talk Radio 1210 WPHT (WPHT-AM), as well as station websites and social media channels.
I’m not surprised this happened. Actually surprised that it took this long, but I guess they had to move out entirely before the announcement was made.
Couple of random thoughts from somebody who spent seven years in the CBS 3 newsroom:
Long story short, it just makes sense that Newsradio, which is now owned by Entercom, would form a new partnership instead of continuing a relationship with a loser station owned by the same company that just sold the cluster a few years ago.
Blumenthal’s last segment there is interesting though, since I wonder how NBC 10 content would interface with WIP, or vice versa. 97.5 the Fanatic, for example, has the Mike Missanelli show simulcasting on NBC Sports Philadelphia, which is also Comcast-owned. So NBC has existing arrangements involving 97.5, plus this new content sharing plan that looks to involve WIP in some way.
There are, however, a number of folks who appear on both WIP and NBCSP, like Reuben Frank, and Ray Didinger, so I guess the whole thing really is a wash. WIP is a very strong brand that doesn’t really need anything from anybody, but maybe this opens the door for more collaboration with NBC 10 in the future.
We’ll see if WIP has a chunky part of this arrangement, or if this is mostly executed as a KYW/NBC 10 partnership.