Demotions at Fox47

[sinklair]

The Scrippscast experiment that started at Fox47 is going so well that that continue to expand it at other stations across the country.

Now it could be a matter of days before the hammer drops at other Scripps stations like WXMI and WXYZ?

That real possibility should scare the hell out of workers at those stations as the corporate office continues its wack a mole approach to cutting costs.

They’ve now demoted Fox47’s longtime General Manager Gary Baxter to a “station manager” department head overseeing sales.

https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/ ... l-managers

The guy who not just drank the Scrippscast kool-ade, but forced everyone else on the staff to drink it as well became another casualty in Scripps decent to the bottom.

I hope he’s happy with himself and his efforts to provide a model where Scripps is now cheapening its newscasts across the country.

It appears that Scripps indeed is the new Sinclair… complete with its own top-down management structure and inferior national The National Desk newscast labeled as “Scripps News”.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Workers at Fox47, FOX17, and WXYZ should polish up their resumes… starting with good ole Gary.

[Colonel Flagg]

No amount of money could get me to work in Lansing again. The workers at Fox47 should look at this as an exit strategy.

[sinklair]

Lansing used to be a great place to start off. Granted you worked your *ss off and got paid Pennies, but you were pretty much guaranteed that if you had two brain cells that you could move on to a bigger market after a couple of years.

[Colonel Flagg]

Lansing used to be a great place to start off. Granted you worked your *ss off and got paid Pennies, but you were pretty much guaranteed that if you had two brain cells that you could move on to a bigger market after a couple of years.

That is absolutely correct.

[sinklair]

Fox47 employees are spilling the beans about how bad the Scrippscast experience is going:
https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/ ... experience

“I was hired at WSYM and they rolled out this new way of doing newscasts where they wanted to focus on MMJ's "owning" beat areas across the DMA. They were going to be anchorless. They were going to brag about having the most MMJ's bringing the audience the best in-depth reporting that will actually make an impact in their communities. I was hired in with the understanding that things wouldn't be like a traditional local TV broadcast. We would have extra time to put together our packages and it would be placed into a "wheel." That lasted all but two weeks. The original crew felt lied to from the beginning.


The entire rollout was botched from the start. It took too long to get the small newsroom up and running as we continued to grow our staff. Then the complaints started coming in. The public hated the fact we didn't have anchors. Several months in our ND caved and started having a rotation of MMJ's host the newscasts, first in front of a terrible green screen and then they decided to build an actual studio. Once we built the studio it looked much better but the problem was they were asking us to also be anchors too. They thought they could get away with it because our newscasts aren't live. The newscasts never really looked the best because of that. There were no logical transitions, it didn't seem natural. We would just randomly go to commercial break or the newscast would abruptly end.

We outsourced our weather to our sister station WXMI in Grand Rapids from day 1. They can't stand us. Can't say I blame them. It took months for us to decide to hire our own meteorologist but because we don't have the set up for that he is also based out of our sister station but at least we had a forecast that looked like what you would normally see. After a while they decided to make him cut weather hits (and host two shows) for all of our newscasts. Since I'm no longer there and watch rarely, I can't fully confirm if that ever came to fruition.

For a moment it felt like we were finding our groove. The complaints stopped. The newsroom had grown. We had solid MMJ's. We won awards. Then the GM and ND picked a group of MMJ's they wanted to extend a second contract to. After they got most of us to sign an extension the ND abruptly took the same position elsewhere and the "executive producer" but was really the Assistant ND quit and went back to print journalism. During this whole time producers would quit because they would either get burned out or move on to different stations. We never had continuity. That includes journalists too. Several of them broke their first contracts or moved on to another market.


Oh and in our second contracts those of foolishly signed had a gigantic buyout clause where Scripps would come after 40 percent of our annual base pay if we broke it within a year of re-signing and then subsequently go down the closer you were to the end of the respective contracts. They were trying to trap us and we FELL FOR IT! My buyout in market #114 was $20,000. 20 grand! are you joking?

But it didn't work. MMJ's still left because we were all one god awful day away from just saying fuck it we're done with the bullshit. Two went to bigger markets albeit one of them didn't sign the dreaded second contract. Two left the business entirely. One flat out quit because it was too hard on her mental health.

This is all because...

Content...omg there was never enough content for them. We needed to turn pkg's, "beat hits" but really were just extra VO's or VOSOT's and find an additional 2 articles that would be web only every week and anchor from the field which was a total joke. Let's stand in front of a building for no good reason and do about 5 minutes worth of reads on our own! Doing the most they can squeeze out of your soul with less resources to the absolute extreme. We had a single photog position that we could never keep filled. Then the last person to be a photog they decided to eliminate that position and moved him to MMJ lol.

They gave three MMJ's permanent anchor roles. But they also had to turn pkg's. Explain how they thought that was possible. And then they went back on that after about a year and got rid of the branded shows but still kept the time slots on air.

I feel bad for the ND and Assistant ND that ended up replacing the original people in those roles. The second assistant ND who replaced the first one was there for maybe a year before taking a lateral move to another market outside of Scripps. They uprooted their lives to come here under the assumption we were a growing but a successful well oiled machine. They walked into a ticking time bomb. It just goes with the theme of their entire operation since the switch: deception.

Most of the MMJ's still there are newer. New hires don't even really have a journalism or tv background. The content they put out is mostly fluff. The rest is from our other sister station WXYZ or from national.

Just a total clusterfuck through and through. People hired in important positions that probably shouldn't have been where they were. I keep trying to think of a good metaphor of what Fox 47 was like under Scripps. It was like someone's idea of what a newscast should look like in the future but without putting in any of the work to actually make it happen properly. Pull the plug already and put the operation and the rest of the employees out of their misery! The sales department seems to love it though or they did until the general sales manager position was eliminated.

I was only there for just a smidge over two years but it felt like 22 with the amount of changes, stress and chaos.”

[MWmetalhead]

The news product on 47 is awful. Time to throw in the towel.

[sinklair]

47 should go back to having WILX produce the news for them (but they won’t and/or WILX wouldn’t want to take on the additional shows since they just added a bunch of newscasts).

It more likely that they would just have Scripps sister station WXYZ simulcasted on 47 — kinda like what happened in the 90’s with WLAJ under Joel Ferguson.

[high fidelity]

47 should go back to having WILX produce the news for them (but they won’t and/or WILX wouldn’t want to take on the additional shows since they just added a bunch of newscasts).

It more likely that they would just have Scripps sister station WXYZ simulcasted on 47 — kinda like what happened in the 90’s with WLAJ under Joel Ferguson.

They already air some WXYZ morning news, but I don't know if Scripps would be ok with them not producing any of their own news.

[sinklair]

Scripps would be OK with it if it saved $0.04. It’s all about the bottom line.

[jmeltonwx]

We outsourced our weather to our sister station WXMI in Grand Rapids from day 1. They can't stand us. Can't say I blame them. It took months for us to decide to hire our own meteorologist but because we don't have the set up for that he is also based out of our sister station but at least we had a forecast that looked like what you would normally see. After a while they decided to make him cut weather hits (and host two shows) for all of our newscasts. Since I'm no longer there and watch rarely, I can't fully confirm if that ever came to fruition.

Brad's latest post on Facebook suggests the outsourcing may be coming to an end.

Installing and training on the new FOX47 weather system through Wednesday! You know that means Horrocks to kick off a Monday. Where in Lansing should I eat tomorrow and Wednesday??

[TheWayItIs]

47 should go back to having WILX produce the news for them (but they won’t and/or WILX wouldn’t want to take on the additional shows since they just added a bunch of newscasts).

It was 47 that terminated that partnership. Not the other way around. I’m sure 10 would happily take back the thousands they were making to put their scraps on the air under a different logo.

[Editorcj]

Simulcast WXYZ for all day parts except 6 and 10 which would be local Lansing and have local WX cut ins in the simulcasts. Then they can have a small staff that can focus on those 2 newscasts and do a proper job of it.

[sinklair]

I agree with the simulcast. But personally don’t believe 46 should do a 6pm. Too much competition from 6 and 10. They should just focus on a hyper local 10pm newscast and call it a day. They would get 100% of the audience who just doesn’t want to wait until 11pm to get their news.

[wsummers]

I watched the 10pm news last night for the first time in months….I wasn’t impressed. The first 20 minutes were stories from the neighborhoods that few people even those living in the neighborhood would care about. The second half-hour were news features from various news services. The weather, while prerecorded, was the best part. I was surprised there was a sports report on the MSU basketball game from earlier that evening. While the reporting was not polished, at least it showed some highlights and game reaction and was probably the only local piece that had interest from more than a handful of the handful of viewers.

[sinklair]

They are jumping off the ship and FAST! Morning anchor Mikayla Temple just announced that she was leaving her “dream” job for… you guessed it… a PR job at Okemos public schools. While that’s an interesting enough development what also caught my eye was current and past coworkers posting messages like “FREEEEEE” and congrats for making it to the other side. There is something bad in the water at FOX 47.