Media Man
ABC 30 Adds an Afternoon News Show, Shuffles Anchor Lineup
ABC 30 will also be shuffling its news anchor lineup and add another 30 minutes of news.
Starting Sept. 11, the station will add a 3 p.m. newscast, with morning anchor Vanessa Vasconcelos taking the helm. A live airing of “ABC World News Tonight with David Muir” runs at 3:30 p.m. A second airing of the national news remains at 5:30 p.m.
The 3 p.m. news hour replaces “Rachel Ray” which ended 17 seasons of production this year.
The move is similar to when “The Oprah Winfrey Show” stopped production in 2011. ABC 30 added its 4 p.m. news hour.
The station also announced that Jessica Harrington will move to the morning anchor desk, working alongside Jason Oliveira. She starts July 10.
Brianna Willis Joins ABC 30
Brianna Willis (Twitter)
Brianna Willis has debuted as ABC 30’s new morning reporter. She didn’t have to travel far for her second professional TV job — she worked at Scripps-owned ABC 23 in Bakersfield, the nation’s 123rd largest media market. Fresno is ranked 53rd.
Willis grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Pepperdine with a journalism degree. She started in Bakersfield in June 2021.
As Willis enters the ABC 30 rotation, Brittany Jacob is leaving. The city of Fresno will honor Jacob at the city council meeting on Thursday. One friend of Jacob told the media it is hush-hush. Hope she doesn’t read the city council agenda (or this news item!).
Radio Ratings: B95 Still Number 1
Fresno’s B95 (KBOS-FM 94.9) is still at the hip-hop top of the local radio ratings. The Nielsen numbers show the station as the market leader for May, with a 7.3 rating, radio publication All Access reported.
It is at least the sixth month in a row B95 is Fresno’s top station. Fresno is the 66th largest radio market.
In the news/talk battle, KMJ (105.9 FM/580 AM) remains the leader. It garnered a May 5.1 rating, and third overall in the market. Power Talk 96.7 (KALZ-FM) pulled in a 1.6 number, 16th overall.
Each rating point is one percent of the total audience of 817,300.
Watters Lands Tucker Spot on Fox News
Jesse Watters (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
Jesse Watters will be the full-time replacement for the dismissed Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Watters’s show will air 5 p.m. Pacific; followed by Sean Hannity at 6 p.m.; and Greg Gutfield at 7 p.m. The new lineup starts July 17.
The announcement comes roughly two months after Fox News fired Carlson shortly after settling a defamation lawsuit with the voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems on the eve of trial. The case, which centered on the network’s airing of false claims following the 2020 presidential election, exposed a trove of private messages sent between Fox hosts, including Hannity and Carlson, in which they criticized peers at the network.
Carlson has since begun doing occasional monologues for Twitter, although Fox is attempting to get him to stop the broadcasts.
Fox has seen ratings tumble since Carlson exited. Carlson averaged 3.25 million viewers at 5 p.m. in the first three months of the year, and the string of guest hosts who replaced him the past two months usually reached under 2 million, making the network’s command more tenuous.
(Associated Press contributed to this item.)
