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.

….

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.

…..

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:

  1. NBC 10 is owned by Comcast, which is headquartered in Philadelphia and therefore cares about this market. They’ve put a lot of money and resources into their product and are motivated in challenging Action News.
  2. Eyewitness News is owned by ViacomCBS, which is based in New York City. Philadelphia was always treated like a red-headed stepchild by a bunch of cheap and absentee decision makers who did not care about this market. They would not provide the proper resources to be competitive against Action News, NBC 10, and FOX 29.
  3. Part of the strength of Eyewitness News was the radio partnerships we enjoyed with 94 WIP and KYW Newsradio. We often featured WIP talent on television and used KYW reporters as well. That even extended into ancillary areas, like a meteorologist doing a segment on 1210 WPHT or one of the other stations in the cluster.
  4. When I produced Sunday night’s Sports Zone show on channel 3, I was not allowed to book 97.5 talent, since WIP was our sister station and we shared the same owner (that’s an example of how those relationships worked).
  5. CBS ownership spent a ton of money moving Newsradio into the Eyewitness News broadcast center, which is in Spring Garden. After doing all of the renovations, CBS sold the cluster and now the main floor sits half empty just six years later. It was a huge waste of time, money, and manpower.
  6. Since 2015, NBC 10 has come closer than FOX or CBS to winning the #1 spot from Action News.

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.