Comcast in Talks to be NECN's Sole Owner

[dotcomeditor]

I'm not sure what Comcast is, but here in the 'burbs west of Framingham, our illustrious cable company, Charter Communications, has carried NECN for years. Of course, I've never watched it...

[rbreton]

Jun 18, 2009 22:29:03 GMT -5 dotcomeditor said:

I'm not sure what Comcast is, but here in the 'burbs west of Framingham, our illustrious cable company, Charter Communications, has carried NECN for years. Of course, I've never watched it...

Then you're missing out.

[bigtime]

BrightonBoris is dead on.

Assuming NECN and CSN share resources, the most obviously thing to cut is the NECN sports department.

That would be a shame because they all work very hard - but it's completely redundant when you have a unit that consists of much bigger names and does a much better job covering the teams (simply by nature of ONLY having to cover sports and having much more access to the Celtics than everyone else).

This is already happening in similar fashion in Chicago, where the NBC (I believe) station is paying the CSN affiliate there to do its sports reports each day. It's only costing them something in the neighborhood of 200-300,000 dollars... which is pretty much what the sports anchor alone was making.

Here - no money has to change hands at all because both operations are now under the same roof.

You would think though, since CSN has been talking about expanding its "news" operation for a couple of years now, that they would simply absorb the NECN guys to help with that.

BTW, the notion put forth that NECN will cease sharing video (not that they did or could because of union rules) with Channel 5 is nonsense, at least for now (it was mentioned on Beat the Press that employees were told they would now be competing against CVB, not sharing). As long as there is a contract in which NECN pays for access to Sky 5, the video sharing will continue.

[cambridge]

who else at NECN will go?