Sports gets tackled at Fox-5 News

  It’s game over for weeknight sports on KVVU-TV, Channel 5, at least as stand-alone segments. The one-minute sports report has been bagged at 10 p.m., the two- to three-minute sportscast excised at 11 p.m. Sports stories still will be covered as warranted in the regular news content, says Fox-5 news director Adam Bradshaw.
  “Frankly, the scheduled sportscast is not something the viewers come to us for, that’s what research has been telling us for years,” Bradshaw says. “The ratings numbers when we hit a sportscast fall off. With ESPN, people can get scores and highlights there much quicker than they can get it from us.”
  The station still will cover local sports such as UNLV games and NASCAR, “but we weren’t big into covering high-school football or basketball anyway,” he says. “I have to put our resources where they’ll benefit us the most. And we’ll just have more local news content on the nights we don’t have anything sports-worthy.”
  Sportscasts remain untouched on the weekends, “when there’s a little more appetite for it,” Bradshaw says. Jon Castagnino’s “Sports Plus” will continue Sundays from 10:45 to 11 p.m. Sports director Kevin Bolinger still will cover major sporting events and be a reporter and backup anchor. “He was a news guy before I made him a sports guy,” Bradshaw says, adding that “the economics of broadcasting dictate that we really examine our resources and put them in the places where we’re going to get ratings.”