Studio 31 Media Archive's video: WABG WXVT The Delta News Morning Open and Promos 1 29 2021

News open, franchise opens and promos taken from the Friday, January 29, 2021 6am edition of The Delta News Morning. Requested by NoFilter. The Delta News is the newscast that airs on, quite literally, every single television station serving the Mississippi Delta (centered on Greenville, Greenwood, and Cleveland). That's because Cox Media Group legally owns all the commercial network affiliated TV stations covering the market. How did this come to be? Prior to 2007, this was a pretty typical high-hundreds small market, with a dominant VHF station (in this case ABC affiliate WABG channel 6), a UHF station that came on considerably later carrying another network (in this case CBS affiliate WXVT channel 15), and other networks had to be piped in on cable (Fox and NBC in this case). In 2007, Bahakel Communications made a rare sale, by selling this station to local owner Commonwealth Communications. Everything was fine until 2010, when Commonwealth signed on low-power NBC affiliate WNBD channel 33, bringing full network service to this market for the first time (in 2006, WABG added Fox to its DT2 subchannel). In 2012, Commonwealth, through sidecar company H3 Communications, took over WXVT, bringing all of the major network stations under the control of one company. WXVT had been owned by Saga Communications who had been selling off their small TV portfolio to focus exclusively on radio. WXVT and WABG did continue to maintain separate news operations and facilities during this period, however. In 2015, Commonwealth decided to exit the business and sold out to Northwest Broadcasting, a joint venture of longtime small market broadcasters Brian Brady and Jason Wolff. With the sale completed in 2016, Northwest quickly moved to consolidate the operations and staff at WABG's longtime facility under the new "The Delta News" branding. The staff includes a mix of talent from both stations (I believe Woodrow Wilkins and Stephen Robinson are both originally from WXVT pre-merger). Ben Blankenship, the voiceover for The Delta News, was originally the longtime voice of WXVT. Graphics are VideoHive package "Broadcast Design - Complete News Package 3" which is also used by sister stations KPVI and KIEM. The slogan "News That Works For You" is a favorite of Wolff's and has been used at all stations he's been involved with. Under Commonwealth ownership, WABG/WXVT were most famous for appearing on the short-lived TBS show "Breaking Greenville". Most of the talent in that show quickly left shortly thereafter. In 2019, Apollo Global Management took over both Cox Media Group and Northwest Broadcasting, using the more well-known Cox name for the combined entities. This unorthodox merger came about because while Apollo was interested in Cox (who wanted to bulk up but didn't have the financial resources under private family ownership), they wanted Northwest for their lucrative retrans deals, and to apply those to the Cox group. Northwest was always under some type of dispute with a provider (I recall one lasting five months, as Brady was a tough negotiator), and that has now carried over to the new Cox as they attempt to renegotiate the legacy Cox stations over to the more expensive Northwest contracts as those come up for renewal. Other than that, Cox has done almost no integration of the Northwest stations with their legacy ones, and the two are run very separately. The Northwest group including WABG DO air reports from Cox's Washington news bureau and stories from the larger market stations, as well as National News Tonight, but that's the extent of the sharing going on. I found this newscast very hard to watch; the production values were extremely poor and stories were mostly national news from Cox's DC bureau. I considered doing a full newscast to fulfill this user's request but after watching this I've seen enough. I try to cut small markets some slack but when stations in San Angelo and Victoria put on a better product, it's kind of hard for me to. Music is Momentum News from Non-Stop Music. Anchored by Woodrow Wilkins, meteorologist Clay Smith, and sports anchor Stephen Robinson (pre-taped). ©2021 Cox Media Group and WABG-TV/WXVT-TV, no copyright infringement intended. For educational and historical purposes only. We do not profit off of this video.