Local TV News is Consolidating and Contracting – Local News Initiative

Local TV News is Consolidating and Contracting  Local News Initiative

For months, there was uncertainty. Then on March 31, there was shock. Employees at WRTV, the ABC affiliate local TV station in Indianapolis, gathered together for a meeting they’d found out about just an hour before. Their station, owned by E.W. Scripps Co., had just officially been sold to Circle City Broadcasting. But, they thought, they’d still keep their jobs for at least a period after the acquisition. “We’re all expecting answers, about health coverage and PTO time and just everybody has questions because we’ve never had any definitive answers,” Dave Franklin, a news photographer who’d worked for WRTV for over three decades, told Medill. “[A Circle City Broadcasting representative] tells us she’s not taking any general questions at the time.

They’re going to be meeting with individuals one at a time in a separate office. And at that point, they would let us know whether we are being offered employment or not. And so we’re just all looking at each other going, ‘What is happening here?’” One by one, while the station was producing its evening newscasts, employees were told they were being laid off. Franklin was among them. By 7 p.m. that night, Circle City Broadcasting had already taken control of the airwaves, and Franklin said just three people he knows out of the more than 60 who