People in northern South Carolina were a bit anxious as Hurricane Ian bore down on the region, but were relieved to see a minimal impact on Greenville, Spartanburg and other cities in the area. The Upstate region has been on a hot streak, popping up on several best-places-to-live lists. CNN Travel, for one, included Greenville on a best-places-to-go-in-fall list, along with Madrid, Mexico City and Cape Town, among other far-flung locales. 

“It’s a great place to be right now — I think the secret’s out,” WSPA VP and general manager Kenny Lawrence said. “The market is becoming more and more metropolitan.”

The market is Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson, with Asheville located in North Carolina. Northeastern Georgia is part of the DMA too. Nielsen has it as market No. 38. It has the coast to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the north. 

WYFF and WHNS are licensed to Greenville, WLOS to Asheville and WSPA, as its call letters suggest, to Spartanburg. WYFF, a Hearst Television-owned NBC affiliate, is the market leader. Gray Television holds Fox affiliate WHNS, which goes by Fox Carolina. Sinclair Broadcast Group has ABC outlet WLOS and MyNetworkTV station WMYA. Nexstar Media Group owns CBS affiliate WSPA and The CW outlet WYCW. 

Also: Check Out Our Local News Close-Up Profiles on Dozens of U.S. Markets. 

Neither Univision nor Telemundo have stations in the market, but WYFF recently launched a weekly Spanish-language digital newscast called Aqui Para Ti. 

Spectrum is Greenville-Spartanburg’s primary cable operator. 

WYFF ran the table in the September sweeps. The station won the 6-7 a.m. race, in both households and the 25-to-54 demo, and the 5 and 6 p.m. contest too. At 11 p.m, WYFF posted a 3.1 household rating and 1.0 demo score. WLOS had a 2.0 and 0.3 and WSPA did a 1.9 and 0.5. WHNS, which also does 10-11 p.m. news, had a 1.2 and 0.3 in households and 25-to-54 at 11 p.m. 

WYFF stays strong thanks to stability, president/general manager John Humphries said, noting the recent ownership changes for stations around the market, including WSPA and WHNS. He mentioned a “significant investment” from Hearst TV. “As a privately held company, they operate differently,” Humphries said. “There’s a longer view. We’re not guided or mandated by the next market call.”

That investment includes Doppler radar for weather and the market’s only station helicopter. 

Stability also includes the established “Live, Local, Breaking News” brand and “Circle 4” logo. Humphries called Carol Clarke “the dean of anchors.”

This month, WYFF claimed a National Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video. Employees see the phrase Commitment to Excellence when they walk into WYFF. “We don’t ever rest on our laurels — we’re constantly looking for ways to improve,” Humphries said. “We’re in everybody’s crosshairs. We’re the one everyone wants to take down.”

How to Take Down Top Dog

Indeed, the rivals are ramping up. Bryce Caldwell took over as WHNS VP/GM in December, when Gray acquired Fox Carolina. “It was very obvious there was a ton of unrealized potential for this station,” he said. 

Caldwell cited an investment of “hundreds of thousands of dollars right out of the gate,” including a head count increase of 10%. Fox Carolina boosted local programming by 35% this fall, according to the station. The 6 p.m. news went to an hour. The 10 a.m. lifestyle show Access Carolina debuted, as did Friday-night sports show Fox Carolina Tailgate. Marybeth Jacoby is news director at Fox Carolina. Looking ahead to January, an 11 a.m. news launches, with Hayley Spitler anchoring. When that happens, Fox Carolina will be local from 4:30 a.m. until noon. 

“That will give us the opportunity to have another hour of news where we are unopposed by the big three competitors,” Caldwell said of the midday program. 

Fox Carolina’s meteorological team has the new branding First Alert Weather. 

WSPA, known as 7News, has full-service newsrooms in Anderson, Greenville and Spartanburg. 7News has been in its location on the main drag in Greenville a little over a year. Lawrence described “a huge stage presence” for the studio, with walls of glass that give passers-by a peek at the newscast. 

Kyle Brinkman runs the newsroom and Susan Pascal is creative services director. Amy Wood is a well-established anchor at WSPA, with more than three decades at the station. 

WYCW has 7-9 a.m. news, and its 10 p.m. newscast went to an hour earlier this year.

Nexstar’s Big Bunch

WSPA’s Lawrence detailed the perks of being part of Nexstar, which has 200 stations in its portfolio. “We feed each other when relevant,” Lawrence said, mentioning Nexstar stations sharing hurricane coverage and planning to do so when Herschel Walker debates Sen. Raphael Warnock in Savannah October 14. 

WLOS debuted 30-minute Saturday Sports Night this fall, running after the ABC football game in prime and covering regional football. The station debuts a new set later this month. “This state-of-the-art set is impressive,” Courtney Youngblood, WLOS VP/general manager, said. “We simply can’t wait to share it with our loyal viewers.”

The market continues to grow. Nielsen had Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson picking up more than 150,000 homes from 2020 to 2021. Lawrence mentioned seeing four or five construction cranes out his office window.

Political spending has been disappointing but 2020 was “massive,” said Humphries, and 2024 “is gonna be historical,” said Lawrence. 

The market used to be a textile power, but has deftly shifted to high-tech and manufacturing, including major automotive outfits, such as a BMW Manufacturing facility in Spartanburg that employs 11,000. 

Residents describe the Upstate South Carolina market as a well-kept secret, but one that won’t remain a secret for much longer. “We just think we’ve got a real gem, a real jewel down here,” Humphries said. “It’s a great place to live and a great place to raise a family.” ■

The state of South Carolina has teamed up with educational broadcasters, 5G tech suppliers, and others to launch a residential wireless broadband pilot project using COVID-19 aid funding.

The completed project, which was announced Friday, uses $393,104 in CARES Act appropriations to create the Allendale Broadband Pilot Program, which provides broadband to families with school-age children—employing a private LTE fixed wireless network using citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) spectrum—as well as via multiple public Wi-Fi hubs.

The FCC made CBRS spectrum available for such purposes in January 2020.

The residential network provides internet access to approximately 1,000 homes in the Allendale area with wireless speeds of up to 78 Mbps downstream/6 Mbps upstream, according to the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff (ORS), South Carolina's non adjudicator utility regulator.

Also Read: FCC Votes to Make CBRS Band More 5G Friendly

Among the backers of the project are Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), House majority whip, whose daughter, former FCC acting chair Mignon Clyburn, was once a member of South Carolina's utility regulatory commission.

At a press conference launching the project, Clyburn said it would be great to have fiber everywhere (cable ops argue a hybrid fiber/coax approach is nothing to sneeze at, either), but that in the interim: "What we need to do is get what we can get done now. And when people tell me we gotta wait on 5G and we have no G, I don't want to talk to them."

The goal of the Allendale project was to see how fast wireless infrastructure could be deployed—ORS says it took only 61 days—using existing assets, to a community without internet access, in this case rural Allendale County. "If you can do it in rural Allendale County, you can do it anywhere," said Jim Stritzinger of ORS.

Among the existing assets were South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV) broadcast towers. The pilot project represents "a scalable model that communities around South Carolina and the nation could follow to bridge the enormous digital divide that so many rural communities face," SCETV said. SCETV President Anthony Padgett said SCETV had a unique set of resources that could be employed in that pursuit.

The South Carolina General Assembly authorized ORS to expend up to $50 million of CARES Act funding for broadband initiatives like the pilot project.

The project's partners, in alphabetical order, were: Allendale County School District, Allendale Hampton Jasper Regional Library, Dominion Energy South Carolina, Linksys, Ookla, Palmetto Rural Telephone Cooperative, Revolution D, Inc., Siklu, SC Department of Aging,  South Carolina Department of Education, South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV), South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff (ORS), SouthernCarolina Alliance, Town of Allendale, University of South Carolina-Salkehatchie, and Valet Technologies.

Broadcast network CBS’s coverage of the 52nd Academy of Country Music Awards drew the most social media interactions for a TV show on Sunday, outdistancing the seventh season finale of AMC’s The Walking Dead, according to Nielsen.

The Country Music Awards drew 2.2 million Twitter and Facebook interactions from more than 1.3 million unique social media accounts, besting The Walking Dead, which drew 1.8 million social media interactions from 967,000 unique accounts, according to Nielsen.

HBO’s drama series Big Little Lies, Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta and ABC’s Once Upon A Time rounded out the top five most social TV shows on Sunday.

ESPN’s Chicago Cubs-St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball opening day telecast, and its coverage of the Mississippi State-South Carolina NCAA Women’s college basketball tournament finals dominated social media traffic for live sports events, with each telecast averaging more than 1 million social media interactions, said network officials.

As Hurricane Matthew made its way out to sea Sunday night and Monday morning, Comcast said it has begun the process of restoring service to its customers in the affected areas.

Hurricane Matthew, which killed more than 1,000 people in Haiti when it ripped through that island nation Oct. 4, has been attributed to about 22 deaths in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia as it made its way through those states over the weekend.

The hurricane brought heavy rains and flooding due to storm surges as high as 11 feet in some areas. As of Monday afternoon, the storm moved out to the open sea, but areas of North Carolina were hit hard by flooding ad damage from high winds. A levee breach in Lumberton, N.C., left about 1,500 people stranded on the rooftops of their homes on Monday, as rescue workers moved in.

Comcast Central Division spokesman Brian Farley said most of the service issues in the cable company’s territories in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina were tied to commercial power outages and restricted access to facilities due to hazardous conditions and closures.  In an e-mail message, Farley said for most customers services should be restored after power comes back and access to damaged facilities and downed lines have been cleared.

“Once cleared and access is gained, we will continue to work around the clock until services are fully restored for every customer,” Farley said in the message.

Technical crews are well underway placing and refueling generators and are starting to assess damage and beginning repairs where it’s safe to do so.

“We thank our employees who have been preparing for days and are now working non-stop to best serve our customers,” Farley added. “We’re also working very closely with state and local governments and power companies to coordinate efforts during the restoration process. We hope our customers are safe and we appreciate their patience as we know how important our services are to them.”

On Saturday Comcast activated free XFinity WiFi hotspots in all three states, making the wireless high-speed data network available to all residents in the affected areas, including non-Comcast customers.

“During times like this, it is critical that we keep residents connected to family, friends and emergency resources,” Farley said in the mail message. “By creating WiFi access, we hope we’re able to provide some degree of support during this difficult time.

Comcast customers can get outage updates via their My Account app, online at www.comcast.com , or via phone at 1-800-COMCAST.

The FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has expanded the Hurricane Mathew-affected areas from which it wants status reports from communications networks.

The FCC activated the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) Friday (Oct. 7) in various counties in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. DIRS is a voluntary web-based reporting system.

Following reports of dangerous flooding in other areas that could extend into Monday or even Tuesday, the FCC has added new counties in North Carolina and South Carolina as well as a number of cities in Virgina to the list.

Cable operators, broadcasters and others in following areas were asked to start filing reports on the status of equipment, power, restoration efforts and access to fuel starting at 10 a.m. Monday (ct. 10) and each subsequent day by 10 a.m. until the DIRS is deactivated:

North Carolina: Brunswick, Carteret, Columbus, Craven, Cumberland, Currituck, Dare, Hoke, Hyde, Johnston, Moore, New Hanover, Onslow, Pender, Robeson, Tyrrell, Wake Counties

South Carolina: Horry County

Virginia: Cities of Chesapeake, Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach