How are these news stations making money?
 

They never break for commercials, so where is the revenue coming from?

During times of crisis, news organizations normally forego running commercials, at least in the beginning. If it's an ongoing crisis, they may begin running some ads later on. But the fact is, most advertisers yank their ads during times like these, anyway...so there really isn't much to run. And they can't really run promos of their own network shows, because those shows may be preempted by news.

Here's the dirty little secret about it, though...after one of these crisis periods, where news operations have been not only a huge financial drain (costs CBS News about a million dollars a day to send Dan Rather into a hotspot so he can fumble the news live from on location) and the loss of revenue due to no advertising...the news operations tend to cut back by laying off staff.

That's the real irony, just after these news teams do their most important work, a bunch of them get fired. Watch and see, right after this is all wrapped up, there will be reports about how much they lost and then, a little time later, you'll see how they are closing down some overseas bureaus and laying off producers, reporters and videographers.

Brutal

What BrutalMaster said. All they can do is try to keep viewers on their station with their logo in the corner so they can brand them as much as possible. Same thing happend for days after Sept. 11.