DuJuan McCoy’s Circle City Broadcasting has taken an aggressive offense against detractors of broadcast television industry consolidation and its reduction of newsroom staff and independent voices by bringing back a weekend newscast to Indianapolis’ ABC affiliate — now his — after several years.
Starting July 5, the first weekend morning newscast to air on WRTV-6 in eight years will be seen. That Sunday morning local news program will be joined by a Saturday morning newscast on WRTV that will debut July 11. Both newscasts will air in the 7am Eastern hour, leading into Good Morning America Weekend.
“This relaunch of weekend morning news on WRTV-ABC comes eight years to the weekend that the previous owner canceled all weekend morning news,” McCoy said of The E.W. Scripps Co., which agreed to sell the station as part a larger corporate effort to assess its non-essential assets and generate cash for its investments in Scripps Sports and the Ion Network, in addition to its digitally delivered Scripps News and multicast channels. “To be a viable news station, you must be in the local news business seven days a week and in all traditional news viewing time periods to serve our community.”
With the new weekend hourlong newscasts, Circle City will have added 10 hours of live local news, political and sports programming to the WRTV schedule each week, McCoy says, noting that the newscast expansion “reflects CCB’s continued commitment to providing more local news and journalistic content for the Indianapolis community.”
