How Often Is WNT Updating For West?

Following up on yesterday’s report that WNT Western Edition has been “all but abandoned:”

“We are committed to the West Coast edition of ‘World News Tonight,’ but we are having trouble at this point fulfilling it as fully as we would have wished or as fully as we had expected,” Paul Slavin, ABC News senior vice president for worldwide news-gathering tells the Los Angeles Times. “There’s no question that the ambitious plans that we laid out … we have not been able to fulfill those, not through any deceit, but because we lost one of our anchormen.”

Matea Gold writes: “ABC spokeswoman Cathie Levine cited several recent examples of late-breaking stories the program has done recently for the West Coast, including a March 8 piece about a kidnapping suspect who caused a four-hour traffic jam on the Long Beach Freeway. But it remains unclear how frequently such updates are occurring. According to a tally kept by another network, ‘World News Tonight’ updated its West Coast feeds just twice in all of February.

Levine said the network has not tracked the exact number of updates, but disputed that figure. ‘That’s not true and I’m not going to engage in a game of gotcha with our competitors,’ she said.” More…