Monthly Archive for March, 2008

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NBC 29 News Trouncing Competition

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 17, 2008 in Business and Meta News. 35 Comments

Somebody sent me the Nielsen numbers for the local news market for February 2008. I’ve got to provide the caveat up front that while I have no reason doubt these numbers, I’m not in a position to verify them, nor do I even know how I’d go about getting confirmation for them. (Stations like to keep these numbers close the vest.)

Morning News 6:00am-7:00am (Monday-Friday average total audience)
NBC29 – 16,282 viewers
CBS19 – 562 viewers
ABC16 – 193 viewers
 
Noon News 12:00pm-12:30pm (Monday-Friday average total audience)
NBC29 – 8,219 viewers
CBS19 – 956 viewers
 
Early Evening News 5:00pm-6:00pm (Monday-Friday average total audience)
NBC29 – 18,297 viewers
CBS19 – 1,028 viewers
 
Early Evening News 6:00pm-6:30pm (Monday-Friday average total audience)
NBC29 – 30,301 viewers
CBS19 – 1,468 viewers
ABC16 – 1,094 viewers (7:00pm-7:30pm)

10pm News 10:00pm-10:30pm (Monday-Friday average total audience)
FOX27 – 1,787 viewers
CW19 – 958 viewers

Late News 11:00pm-11:35pm (Monday-Friday average total audience)
NBC29 – 11,759 viewers
CBS19 – 1,661 viewers
ABC16 – 849 viewers

CBS-19 and ABC-16 have made some advances over 2005, the last time I saw any numbers, but it’s nothing to write home about. But Gray Television knew they had a hard row to hoe when they got started, so these figures may be well within reasonable expectations for the young stations.

Cav. Daily in Hot Water Over Comics…Again

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 16, 2008 in Meta News. 49 Comments

In what’s becoming an annual flap, the Cavalier Daily has earned the ire of Christian groups across the nation for a pair of comics that they ran on Thursday and Friday. Eric Kilanski and Kellen Eilerts’ “TCB,” which appears daily in the student paper, had one strip showing Jesus telling jokes on the cross, and another showing a post-coital conversation between God and Mary. (The comics have been removed from their website.) As Brian McNeill explains in the Progress, the paper put a comics policy into place a year ago after a similar incident, in which Grant Woolard ran a trio of comics, two mocking Christianity and one making light of Ethiopian starvation. Bill O’Reilly got involved in that kerfuffle. Then, as now, the real problem was that the comics just weren’t very funny, but that’s life at a student paper. The paper is going to review their comics policy,

BoS Approves South C’ville Shopping Center

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 13, 2008 in Development. 46 Comments

The Board of Supervisors has OKd a big retail development for 5th Street extended, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress. (Or, as most of us will think of it, the long-needed road connecting Avon and 5th.) It’s a standard suburban shopping center — a sea of asphalt with a few single-story big boxes — with a LEED fig leaf. We discussed it here when it was first proposed in 2006. Charlottesville Tomorrow had the details.

How Reservoir Mistakes Happened

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 12, 2008 in Politics and Taxes. 39 Comments

Continuing their series of exposés about the reservoir, The Hook this week features an article about all of the opportunities that our government had to get things right, but missed or ignored. Both the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and the Board of Supervisors got close to getting things right — and apparently had the necessary information to do so — but failed to manage it. Now it looks pretty clear that it would be cheap to fix the Ragged Mountain dams, and that simply dredging would take care of the area’s water needs for decades to come.

Corner Parking Lot Documentary Planned

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 11, 2008 in Entertainment. 3 Comments

I’d wondered if the town had collectively forgotten that the Corner parking lot is the cradle of the local music scene. Brendan Fitzgerald brings the happy news in this week’s C-Ville that, no, people remember: local filmmaker Meghan Eckman is making a documentary about it. She’s spent a year learning about the lot’s history, and is in the process of turning 125 hours of footage into a single work.

It’s noteworthy that the lot’s manager, Chris Farina, is the creator of “West Main Street,” a gem of a documentary made back in 1995. I’ve seen it a half dozen times (I own a copy), and the more time passes, the more valuable it becomes as an artifact of the town’s history.

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