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Sinclair comes to the small market of Alpena, Michigan… well, sort of. After the lone commercial station in the market, WBKB 11, affiliated with all four Big Four networks, was sold by the Thunder Bay Broadcasting Corporation, from Maryland-born Stephen Marks, to the Madison-based Morgan Murphy Media, its news department has been restructured completely: although a very decent effort for a small-market station, they struggled to remain staffed full-time due to industry labor issues and Alpena's overall low market standing, an issue which left them in a state of constant turnover, with recent graduates working on-air on short 'starter' contracts, and it often had outdated production resources (they only switched to HD in March 2019!).

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The overall poor state of the news department led to Morgan Murphy to sign a news provision contract with Sinclair’s Traverse City station UpNorthLive News (WPBN/WTOM) to simulcast the news programming from Traverse City, albeit with local cut-ins. Weather and sports, long outsourced to contracted freelance personnel and even the infamous NewsNet network, has been wholly taken over by the Traverse City operation. The existing newsroom is being retained as a bureau, and content produced by them will air in the Traverse City stations.

Even though the scrutiny of Sinclair and its local news stations has caused strong reactions to the announcement, the thing is that Alpena viewers are already seeing a massive upgrade in production values, even with the provision of local news being reduced to daily cut-ins; they are expanding, from producing two daily newscasts (one on weekends) to simulcasting nearly all of 7&4’s 27 hours of news a week on the ABC, CBS and NBC subchannels; the Fox and MyTV subchannels will air no news for the time being; additionally, Morgan Murphy Media retains all of the non-news operations of the station.

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