“We are a very small company,” said Michael Palmer, WVII and WFXV’s general manager. “We are unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy. So we came up with this idea and we made it happen. I think we came up with a winning formula.”
In Bangor, Maine (DMA 159), Rockfleet Broadcasting’s WVII and WFVX, the ABC and Fox affiliates there, have come up with a new and different idea for local TV news that no one else is doing.
“We are a very small company,” said Michael Palmer, WVII and WFXV’s general manager. “We are unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy. The only thing we are challenged by is the limits of our imagination. The owner encourages us to think out of the box. What can we do differently? What can we do that nobody else is doing? So we came up with this idea and we made it happen. I think we came up with a winning formula.”
The winning formula is based on the idea that good stories are timeless, like The Illiad, said Palmer. “If it is a good story, it doesn’t matter how old it is.”
So what the stations launched this week is the option for news viewers to binge watch the news on the stations’ website by clicking on a Binge Watch News icon.
“You can watch 100 consecutive news stories in a row, not entire newscasts,” said Palmer.
No anchors, no cross-talk, no bumps, no dated weather forecasts, no old sports scores, no news open, just the edited news packages. Palmer said as the stories are created, they’re added to the scroll, so the newsest stories are first.
“You get 100 right now. That might change some day, but we had to pick a number to start with and it seemed like a good round number. And you see the menu on the side that scrolls up as stories come and go so you can tell what you are watching.”
Palmer said an ad runs every five or six stories, and the stations are promoting the service on their broadcasts.
“I don’t think this is going to be an earth-changing event. But it is something different, something new. It gives people a reason to watch and a reason to buy and we are all looking for that, right?”
Click here to binge watch the news.
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