News

Denise Nakano Out at NBC 10, Buyouts Offered to Other Employees

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jun 1st, 2020 · 9:36 AM EDT

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One week after CBS 3 Eyewitness News shed 14 employees, another Philadelphia TV veteran is moving on:

I accept there is no playbook in 2020.

Thank you Philadelphia for the love you’ve shown me all these years. Saturday night’s newscast was my last.
Thankful for my 17 years at NBC10.

— Denise Nakano (@NakanoDenise) June 1, 2020

Nakano was an Emmy and Murrow winner who had been anchoring weekends at WCAU for quite a long time.

Not sure whether this is a buyout, layoff, or expiring contract, but I was told last week that NBC 10 had begun the process of offering buyouts to employees who were interested.

A source described the situation to me as “informational meetings with those interested,” explaining that employees were asked to contact human resources if they were thinking about voluntary separation. This is similar to what MediaNews Group did with their local cluster of newspapers, though it sounds like specific details were only provided to those who asked, instead of the paperwork being sent out en masse via company email.

NBC 10 is owned by Comcast, which put a lot of money into their product over the past 6-7 years. They have a significant amount of resources at their disposal, much more than Eyewitness News, for sure. That’s a big reason why they were able to push Action News for the #1 overall spot in Philadelphia while CBS and FOX 29 typically battle for 3rd and 4th place in our market, though those stations do better in some specific time slots.

(If you’ve got any details about the NBC buyouts, you can hit me up anonymously at kevin@crossingbroad.com)