KHOU gets hour weekend 10pm news too

KTRK abc13 won't be the only station with hour-long 10pm news on the weekend

Post by KHOU 11 News.

I posted last week about KTRK abc13 getting an hour 10pm weekend newscast and then I get word from my readers that KHOU 11 also went to an hour 10pm news format Saturday. What a coincidence!

There wasn't much of a mention before KHOU's hour news debut, not even on my Comcast cable guide (KTRK's change was there), but you can see the station did post on Facebook about it after the fact (embedded above).

It appears the hour long show will only happen Saturday nights on KHOU since Bob Allen's KHOU 11 Sports Extra airs Sundays at 10:25pm.

We can figure that KPRC 2 will not debut an hour long 10pm news on Saturday at least - because of Saturday Night Live. Although the station has pre-empted NBC programming before. Most famously delaying Late Night with Conan O'Brien in the 1990s and Conan loved to make fun of that fact.

I got questions last week as to why a station would put on an hour long newscast at times when people are most likely doing fun weekend stuff. Well, the trend in TV news across the nation has been to add hours of local news all throughout the day. Why? Well, think of it this way. You already have the staff in place, just make them work a little harder. By filling time with your local news, the station does not have to pay for syndicated programming, which can get expensive. Plus, local news probably will rate better than some of what syndicators are polluting the airwaves with anyway. And above all, all commercial time is the station's to make money on - no sharing with a syndication company.

UPDATE
KHOU 11 weekend anchor Rekha Muddaraj tells me on Facebook, "The hour-long show was in the works for several months before we debuted Saturday."