Leaderboard

Winter Olympics this year is A HORRIBLE PLACE TO REPORT!!!! I'm sorry but it's not safe for reporters

Starting tonight, the Friday 9pm newscast has been shortened to 30 minutes, and a new show "Flannery Fired Up" featuring Mike Flannery airs from 9:30-10pm. http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/111117/wfld-chicago-debuts-flannery-fired-up-tonight

More WMAQ coverage of the winter of '79 -- a special, one-hour edition of NewsCenter 5 covering the weather emergency: (This is Part 1; follow the links for the rest.)

I believe the Friday night show has been 30 minutes since the Bears show restarted for this season. That's about the time Rafer and Sylvia became Friday night anchors, and Corey and Dawn took Sundays. With that show over, they either reinstated a 2nd half hour of news, or figure out another option. Now we know that they chose the latter.

Okay, this basically confirms TODAY is getting a new set. After the Olympics would be the perfect time to get one considering their current set design is about 5 years old, they are going to have a big ratings boost from BOTH the Super Bowl AND Olympics, and they have a new anchor team everybody loves. They're doing the 9 and 10am hours from Megyn Kelly's studio. Yes, I know the 9am hour is always in that studio. But the 10am isn't. NBC claims it's for simplifying things on the production side, but I think they're hiding something.

WSET open from December 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id=M1hIhRGUvqg;m=2;s=15 WSLS open from November 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id=4W8RRKk7TbY;m=2;s=50 Hogstuff's channel has a boatload of commercial breaks from WSET, WSLS, and WFXR.

WGN is using the hashtag #WGNSnow for this event. It keeps confusing me because my eyes read it as #WGNnow - like some sort of instant-access news service or something.

KVIA material in 1993:

Bostick was an owner that was notoriously cheap on his station music (we even have a quote about that from him — they wanted to buy, which is why they were still using The News Image in 1997) but the follow-up package is among my all-time favorites. They basically sent the market quality soaring with that music and graphics set. "Buy the music... Buy it just like you buy your cameras and like you buy your transmitters. When you buy it, you own it and you use it until it is no good and you can throw it away."

It's weird to actually see this look and sound when it was relatively new (minus the last few moments, which were definitely not from 1997). I think I have a tape of 10's morning news from around '02 or '03 and thinking how nice but dated the very same update graphics looked. The Lower-thirds had been modernized a bit but still looked pretty close to fitting the character of the overall graphics package. Bostick was a quality owner based on everything I have seen, and they really invested in KWTX prior to their sale to Gray. The look, sound and direction of the newscasts even into the early years of Gray's ownership were very well executed. Not what you'd expect of of #90 or so market.

Vintage KWTX in 1997.

Some quick snippets of WLKY’s Combined-Gannett era appear in this tribute to KUSA anchor Mark Koebrich. And is it just me or did WTEN’s Doug Myers sound suspiciously similar to a certain male voiceover guy we haven’t identified yet...

This isn't a big deal in my mind. Many companies have PACs and just because Sinclair leans right it becomes a big deal. I guarantee if any of you work for any large corporation like Sinclair (broadcasting or not), they will have a PAC of their own that they will want you to donate to. I'm not a huge fan of Sinclair but nobody can seem to give them a break. I guarantee if any left-leaning broadcaster did this nobody would give a da*n.

...as well as the same amount of time for Clear Channel / iHeart to finally be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy...

TIL Sinclair has a PAC. They asked their executive staff — including, as a result, their local NDs — to contribute to it. Woof. Sinclair Broadcast Group PAC broke for Republicans 2-to-1 in the 2016 cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets. Its funding primarily comes from the Smith family and other Sinclair executives and their families. The contributions are to congressional candidates — no presidential donations.

WGN’s news hashtags have always been “#WGN_______”

Okay. It could also be a bit more difficult now / complicated with it all being hubbed.

Wouldn't be surprised if this led to her heading to NBC Sports in the near future, with her being married to Craig Melvin and all.

KAMC from 1994, do i smell some TVbyDesign influence?

Great observation! The final three years of ownership represent a sea-change of sorts in that line of thinking across the Bostick stations. Within this period, each of the stations in what became Gray's initial Texas-trio (KWTX,KBTX & KXII) received or were in the process of receiving on-air updates. KXII actually gained a news set that had a set of windows onto the newsroom and a fully-functional on-air weather center, all the work of Devlin Design Group. The graphics and music took some time to improve, however. That actually launched before the KWTX look that we are talking about now. Early to Mid 1996 maybe for KXII. There isn't a ton of content available online for them from that period. This one clip below represents the bulk of it, actually. KWTX made the updates at some point in 1997 as mentioned. While there were some tweaks here and there, it more or less remained intact until 2005 when they picked up one of Gray's standardized sets. KBTX, which there seems to be even less of online, was midstream in those changes when the sale to Gray was announced. I believe it was May of 2000, when they began using updated graphics, a new studio, whose floorplan is basically still in place to this day (Open studio with working newsroom in the background). They also started using a greater variety of cuts of "This is Your News". One of my big regrets as a news/media junkie actually came about a month prior as I was in town for an extended class field-trip and stayed overnight in a hotel in College Station. KBTX actually was running the full-length image commercial of "This is Your News" during just about every commercial break in the late evening/early morning hours from what I saw and that had to be the ONE time I didn't take my VCR along. It was also interesting as I recall they were running what would've been the "new" logo and graphics during those spots, but nowhere else on-air so it was a sneak-peek at the look that would've been debuting soon. Those graphics remained until 2004 or 05. The set remained until some point this decade, if I'm not mistaken. I've gone into my archives and found some photos of the KXII & KWTX sets. They are from 2002 when I was still in high school, but should give a better look at what we're talking about!

I’ve heard rumblings some of the TV stations are going on the block too... so if more folks are retired it could be to slim down those stations before a sale.

That information has been in the NMSA's database for over 15 years, but I've never seen a single thing to back it up. I for one think the '86-'88 dating actually applies to the electronic theme...