Parkersburg should have never been a market. The original intension was that the two stations in Clarksburg (5 & 12) would combine with Parkersburg's lone station (15) to form a market, just as the Charleston and Huntington stations do. However its 70 miles of bad terrain and it just never worked. Leaving Parkersburg with a single UHF station covering a single city that, no offense, is just not big enough to support a TV station or its news operation.
Now that Grey Television has control of both Huntington's NBC (WSAZ) and the single Parkersburg station (WTAP, also NBC), the smart thing to do, IMHO, would be to make WTAP into a repeater of WSAZ. Adding the 3 counties of the Parkersburg DMA moves H-C up 6 spots in the list of DMAs. On the ground cable has always carried the H-C stations anyway. Really its a shame that all of the WV stations are not under common ownership and repeaters of the H-C market (the situation that exists in New Mexico for example). Making the DMA more significant and bringing news with a production value above zero to the rest of the state.
On a side note, the few people in WV that can get OTA can now, via digital, actually get all the networks for the first time. In the Wheeling market (7-CBS, 9-NBC) 7 now has Fox and ABC on "sideband" channels. In Clarksburg (12-NBC, 5-CBS, Fox-46), 12 has ABC as a sideband, and 46 has the CW). In Beckley (4-ABC, 6-NBC, 59-CBS) 6 has CW on the side and 59 has Fox.