Farmington Hills-based "NewsNet" shuts down

[SolarMax]

Reported in the BuzzBoard "Northern Lower Michigan/Eastern U.P." Forum but pertinent to this Region.
Farmington Hills-Based NewsNet Shuts down.
From
Crain's Detroit Business (paywall)
5-Hour Energy founder shuts down news network he bought 2 years ago, laying off 80

Metro Detroit businessman Manoj Bhargava has shut down the television news network for which he once had big plans after just two years of ownership.
[...]
The company announced Friday that both networks (news & sports) would shut down permanently, resulting in the layoffs of 80 employees.
[...]
A lack of dedicated audience was the reason for the ceasing of operations, according to Bhargava.
_______
NewsNet was not carried on local cable, was available OTA on WHNE ch. 3 which is not able to be received by most viewers in this market. Article says he had 150 diginet station affiliation, was on 35 streaming services, and had an App.
Never ever saw any promotion of any kind, so seems like building a "dedicated audience" wasn't happening.

[MWmetalhead]

I've never heard of the vast majority of these:

https://www.newsnetmedia.com/where-to-watch

It was unavailable on Pluto TV or Tubi, the two biggies. Also unavailable on Samsung TV Plus.

WHNE 3.1 now shows the same programming as 3.3 (ShopHQ). 3.2 appears to be showing travel-based programming of some kind.

NewsNET is still active (website is still showing a Livestream), so the layoffs evidently are not immediate in some instances.

https://www.newsnetmedia.com/

For most of its lifespan, NewsNET had terrible standard def picture quality on WHNE. It was only within the past few months the network began airing there in HD. The audio codec failed to work properly after the video upgrade, for some reason.

[Editorcj]

Dude always seemed a little shady to me, anyway that's 80 people locally that now need to find a new gig, some I know.

[NoozDude]

I just checked the NEWSnet website and FB page and, yes, they are still streaming but all the newscasts (Morning, Midday, Continuing Coverage and Evening) are the ones that aired on Thursday. Word is while they haven’t technically “pulled the plug”, operations have ceased.

[MWmetalhead]

Thanks for the info.

I wonder what will become of the various Class A / low power digital TV stations owned by Bridge Media? They already dumped most of the good programming from WHNE channel 3 months ago.

[Tman]

Hopefully Jill Washburn comes back to local stations .

[48125er]

Is the Southfield based Trinity channel still carried as a sub channel to TCT? Aka ABN

[MWmetalhead]

I think you mean The Word Network? They and TCT are completely unrelated to one another. TCT stopped being carried locally on WDWO quite a while ago.

The Word Network is carried on 38.8.

[mr v]

A little background on NewsNet:
https://www.michiganmedia.com/2022/04/2 ... -director/

https://michigan.newsnetmedia.com/meet-the-team