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When Jerry Martin took over as general manager of WXIN-TV Channel 59 in 2004, the Fox affiliate was airing a three-hour local news and entertainment show on weekday mornings and a half-hour news show at 10 every night.
Eighteen and a half hours of news a week.
This January, after Channel 59 expands its weekend morning news shows by an hour, the station will be airing 54-1/2 hours of live local news each week. And if everything goes as planned, by the end of 2012 it will add a 6-7 p.m. newscast weekdays, bringing the total to an astonishing 59-1/2 hours. That means more than a third of its airtime will be devoted to local news about twice as much as its three competitors and maybe more than any other network affiliate in the country.
"We're really trying to change the way people look at Fox59," Martin said. "We want them to think of us primarily as a news station with Fox prime-time programming. I think that will happen because of the number of hours we produce. And as the marketplace changes, we believe that the one with the most resources devoted to news, the one that's on the most, is going to be seen as the premier news place in the market."
If nothing else, it's certainly generating gasps in the industry.
"Wow - 59 [hours]," marveled Mark Kraham, chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association and news director of a station in Hagerstown, Md., that does 29 hours of local news each week. "That's an incredible amount."
As Martin sees it, Channel 59 is doing what it has to do to be able to control its own destiny. For decades, stations like his typically existed on a heavy diet of syndicated programming - daytime talk, court shows, game shows and sitcom reruns. But now there's less of that programming available, what is...