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Last set of clips until the weekend... Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Georgia / Alabama / Louisiana - September 1994 [MEDIA=vimeo]244040736[/MEDIA] Atlanta, Macon, Columbus (GA), Birmingham, Anniston, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Lake Chuck.

I also noticed the similarity with Fox News' look having the show title on the lower line of the lower-third. I'm really not a fan of the new lower-thirds. Before today, for the last few years, lower-thirds were pretty much only used to identify CBS News correspondents and no one else. Now they're a permanent fixture on the screen, like the other two evening newscasts. And CBS's are huge. They have two different banners for one-line headlines and one us a big red one. I don't understand why they're using two. The red one matches the one used to identify people (which spells out "Senator" for the first time I can remember instead of abbreviating it). It's just really ugly and lacks any design. I'm expecting them to make modifications in the coming days... perhaps either to remove the show title completely or to have it be replaced by the L3 for people when that pops up. We'll see. That "Evening Newsfeed" segment right before the first tease felt gimmicky and reminded me of World News Tonight. Then the first tease was correspondent-driven with no VO from Glor. The open is similar to what it had been but they rearranged the way it looks... the and changing of the pictures no longer seems to "match" the music. The studio has been darkened and Glor sits for most of the broadcast, unlike Pelley, who stood for most of it.

Any notice the lower thirds look like Fox’s.

A clip from a North Carolina cable channel called NorthLand Cable News: Some clips of the six o'clock newscasts from Atlanta's big 4 stations on October 6, 1997:

Those are some fantastic clips, especially the smaller markets... One thing immediately leapt to mind - WRBL's look is downright unimpressive compared to (which seems to have preceded it).

And the networks have been doing this for about 90 years. Why would a newscast based in NYC be any different than one based in Fresno? There is no longer any need for being based in a particular city now we have the wonderful information super highway. No more MOS...just twitter quotes.

JFK 54 years on. WSVN 1985 JFK collector. WPLG 1987 JFK collector.

Avant seems like it would have been very non-traditional and potentially difficult to maintain. It also was one of the few virtual set newscast concepts of the 90s. Sometimes I wonder if what we have never actually went out on air, even though it looks to be a fully-formed newscast from one date. I can easily see a turnover at ND and someone junking Avant as just too much. That's occurred to me, too. Yet how, then, did they get an entire WRBL newscast or newscast demo to be made, with their anchors, news stories, and even (at the end) a shot of the anchors in front of the virtual set with a real desk?

Those clips of Albany in 1994 are like gold given how that year was one where the market hit a turning point of sorts in it's history. WNYT and later WTEN refreshed their logos and image and later you had an arms race of news expansion to the point where stations were moving launch dates up to be first. All three stations announced their expansions to 6:00 AM within a day of each other and were set to do it on the same day until WTEN jumped the gun, for example. Not seen in the debacle of WRGB's 5:00 PM newscast, the return from commercial bumpers in which vocal effects looped Charlie Van Dyke several times. In contrast, WNYT played it safe with it's newcast being only two extra-long (13 minute!) segments.