This post was originally published on this site
“It’s the most thoughtful approach to journalism that I’ve seen in a really long time,” says Meagan O’Halloran. “It seems like the perfect hybrid: national news with a local feel.”
O’Halloran has just moved into a new office in Washington, D.C. This is her first week on the job as anchor of an innovative news program that Sinclair is launching on September 27 — a nightly version of its nationwide morning show The National Desk (TND), which premiered in January. O’Halloran left a successful five-year run as morning anchor at Nexstar’s KDVR (Fox31) in Denver to join Sinclair and a fast-growing trend: local station groups creating national programs and even whole channels to amortize resources, populate new platforms, and replace generic syndicated fare with original content.
Meagan O’Halloran
Sinclair pumps out the morning version of The National Desk from its Washington station, WJLA, for five hours, from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Stations can take as much or little of it as they like. The main broadcast outlet is Sinclair’s CW and MY stations, many of which don’t have robust news departments. “We think that being able to create original programming, especially news programming, is a real opportunity for us on a lot of these stations,” says Scott Livingston, the group’s SVP of news.
The new evening edition will air from 10 p.m. to midnight Eastern — one feed for all time zones — and it (or chunks of it — again, the stations get to decide) will
