Super Bowl Update

I've never been completely sold on "syndicating from within," as companies like Raycom have done with America Now and others, especially when there are so many good syndicated programs out there (including one that hasn't managed to make its way into the Evansville market despite being perhaps the one that was most-talked-about this year ... hmmm ...).

But in numbers newly released, it's clear that America Now is working - and drawing more eyes to the stations where it's broadcast.

Hosted by Bill Rancic and Leeza Gibbons, the joint venture between Raycom and ITV Studios America, which is now in its third season, has improved its position in 14 metered TV markets - including Louisville - by an average of 20% over last year.  It's bringing in some 137,000 viewers a day (good for a 1.2 rating and 3 share versus a 1.0/3 last year) in just those 14 out of the 45 markets where the show can be seen.

In fact, Louisville's ratings for the show have shown the most improvement of all.  On WAVE 3, where the show is on at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. ET each weekday, it's grown its audience by a whopping 74% compared to last year.

It's not publicly known how the show is doing in Evansville at WFIE or in Cape at KFVS, but both have positioned the show with popular programs both before, during and after, which certainly put it before a solid viewer base.  At 14, the show bookends Jeopardy and leads into Dr. Oz, while at KFVS, it airs between Let's Make a Deal and Dr. Oz.

Right This Minute, the video joint venture show produced by Cox Media, Raycom and Scripps, will begin its second season on Sept. 10 with a handful of new stations added to those which carried it last year.

Six of the seven new stations carrying the program are Scripps-owned stations, including WRTV 6 in Indianapolis and the other stations the company purchased from McGraw-Hill last year.

The program airs locally each weekday on 14Xtra (WFIE 14.2 / 5 and 8 p.m.), The Heartland's CW (KFVS 12.2, WQWQ 9 and WQTV 24 / 4 and 4:30 p.m.) and This TV Louisville (WAVE 3.2 / 3 and 3:30 a.m.).

“We’re still endeavoring to sell the show beyond our partner markets,” says Phil Alvidrez, general manager of MagicDust Television, which partners with Cox, Raycom and Scripps to produce RTM. “But Scripps is totally on board. We are in all their markets. And we’re in half of the Raycom and Cox markets.”

In its original form, RTM was a one-hour program in which they showed clips and then talked about them into two half-hours where they track down videos before they go viral, like a recent clip of a woman in her military uniform breastfeeding her baby.

“You see a pop in the ratings with a great video that people haven’t seen in a lot of places,” says Lisa Hudson, who is RTM’s co-executive producer with Dennis O’Neill. “The website gets a lot more traffic and our name gets out there. People talk about us more.”

The show is moving from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to a bigger production facility with a more intimate set. Instead of looking like a newsroom as before, the set now looks like a coffee shop, where the hosts sit on barstools around a tall table while watching videos on a computer.