Pa. stations switch to new shared domain

Two stations in Northeastern Pennsylvania have rebranded their shared website.

WBRE, a NBC affiliate owned by Nexstar Media Group, and WYOU, a CBS affiliate owned by Mission Broadcasting but operated by Nexstar, began the process of switching to “2822news.com” in June 2025.

Those numbers represent the stations’ virtual over-the-air channel numbers, 28 and 22. 

The stations have operated a shared website for years at the domain pahomepage.com, with the name “PAHomepage” being the site’s official branding.

The switch to the “2822” banner isn’t surprisingly. The stations, which share a newsroom, talent and production space, had been branding under the name “28/22 News” on-air after dropping the “Eyewitness News,” which was used in a few different iterations.

Field reports feature mic flags with both “28” and “22” inside similar red boxes topped with the station call and network logo and a combined logo, as shown above, is also used.

Before officially implementing the domain change, the website’s logo was updated to feature the “2822” numerical approach, which, in retrospect, was likely done as a way to help ease viewers into the change in a more subtle way. The stations were using the “2822news” name on social media before the domain switch.

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According the group, there is a variety of naming schemes used for domains, including simply the station call letters or other variations that use broader names describing the region, much like PAHomepage.

Not all Nexstar stations use channel number branding, but it’s not clear if this update may eventually grow wider across the group.

The stations, which serve the Wilkes-Barre–Scranton, Pennsylvania, DMA, were an early example of the model of owning one station in a market and then partnering with another owner to run another under arrangements known as local marketing agreements, joint sales agreements and shared services agreements. It has since spread across Nexstar as well as other station owners.

The ultimate goal of this model was to cut costs by eliminating duplicative operations such as sales, administration and other human resources, though the exact arrangements can vary. The arrangement is more common in smaller markets, which owners may be more likely to see a benefit from creating single departments to conduct certain functions. 

While effectively creating a duopoly, especially when the second station is owned by Mission, which has ties back to key figures within Nexstar, the are not considered as such from the FCC’s standpoint. 

Nexstar, along with other broadcasters, has been pushing the FCC to further loosen ownership rules with licensed OTA stations, which could potentially lead to more widespread use of the practice or creating more true duopolies without the fancy corporate structuring. 

Alternative domain name structures have had several cycles of popularity. Hearst was previously known for using “The(CityName)Channel.com” as well as a schema that took a channel number and added three zeroes to end, making it read as “(number)-thousand.”