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Ad agencies drink too much of their own kool aid.

Watching some of the stuff on that page makes my head hurt. It would probably alienate their viewers with epilepsy too. "See beyond the surface" reminds me of this classic from Boston.... https://youtu.be/WP1YbGLdXKM?t=90 And reading about what they did for WXIA......they though about this WAAAAAAAAY tooo much! "Hey, let's make the angles 11 degrees because it's channel 11!" As The Simpsons said in the Poochie episode it's just another example of a "...soul-less byproduct of committee thinking." But the agency wanted a brand that didn't get "busy.....it gets BIZ-ZAY!" I have to go now. My home planet needs me.

Solid pick. Also, good to now know the reason behind Tom Negovan's departure. Both him and Nancy will no doubt be great in their new roles.

https://www.robertfeder.com/2020/06/01/adam-amin-replacing-neil-funk-tv-voice-chicago-bulls/#more-25712 Adam Amin has joined the Bulls and NBC Sports Chicago as lead Bulls play-by-play, replacing the retiring Neil Funk. Quite honestly, I had no idea that on a national level, he had left ESPN and joined Fox Sports a few weeks ago amidst the coronavirus shutdown. Apparently we're going to see him on Fox's national NFL and MLB telecasts going forward as well. Congrats to him on his new position with both companies.

I think this new role will be a better fit for Donlon. Hopefully they go with “homegrown” talent to replace him on the evening newscasts moving forward... I’d really like to see Ben and Lourdes at the helm at 9pm. With all these departures, WGN should pick up some of the recently laid off CBS2 staffers.

For those wondering where Rob Nelson is headed: https://www.robertfeder.com/2020/06/02/wgns-joe-donlon-named-weeknight-anchor-nexstars-news-nation/ He’ll be weeknight breaking news anchor alongside former KCPQ anchor Marni Hughes, current WGN9 anchor Joe Donlon & former KVUE meteorologist Albert Ramon.

Joe Donlon is moving to News Nation to be its weeknight anchor.

I mean, this is another repositioning of a half hour they've been filling for over 4 months, so it would take at least another 20 years of expansion before they hit 4am. The morning news would surely meet it in the middle at 1:30 before then. But really, the Dina Bair corona series was also on the program guides (at least mine, anyway), so I'm not sure this means much. Honestly, filling the 10:30-45 portion with news is likely less about adding news than it is about GN Sports not being able to fill 30 minutes, at this time.

Boooo! The Dispatch website is superior.

Whenever I watch cbs46 (which isn't that often) I have to ask myself: "who are these people"? The turnover at the station is ridiculous. Meredith never gives the station management or talent time to implement a new strategy and let it grow. It's a constant cycle of rebrands and talent/management turnover. After years of Gannett/Tegna mismanaging WXIA, WGCL should be in a place to compete. But instead Meredith's impatience has led to no real significant gains in the ratings.

I thought the same thing. Honest to god, I'd love to see some ice cream consumption data for this DMA in two or three years. Might be a bit of a rush on Mint because, ya'know, subliminal messaging.

That mint color only has me thinking of mint ice cream. A subtle feature I noticed that was surely was intentional is there are 5 black lines that comprise the '1' and '0' adding up to 10.

Also, on the subject of WRAL, I don't think it's JAM. I'm also not sure it's the same singer on both those videos - they sound similar, but quite a few female vocalists from the South do. And that KSN thing doesn't sound like the usual Dallas vocal group we'd hear on JAM stuff, either. My current thoughts about WRAL 1982's possible place of origin go to a city that produced a lot of broadcast advertising music, but which nobody ever really talks about: Nashville. The reason I am thinking this is not even because of the music (though the vocalist on that WRAL promo vaguely reminds me of Janie Fricke, of all people), but because of the animation. Allow me to introduce you to a Nashville-based production company called Cascom. For those who have never heard of them, but know about the stock animations you see in a ton of old news opens and promos and stuff, especially for smaller stations - think of the laser outline cameraman with the mustache, the four spotlights, the rotating globe in the shiny ring, the city in the distance with the searchlights, all the stuff in that WLIG open - that was them.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpjjYyCIg64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpjjYyCIg64 (I keep getting an error that YT doesn't allow embedding of this video, so just click on the link.) (And apparently, they were also involved in the distribution of those even more ubiquitous Cranston-Csuri CGI graphic templates that showed up everywhere in the mid/late 80s; they never owned nor were under common ownership with Cranston-Csuri, so it must have been some kind of licensing agreement, or maybe they contracted Cranston-Csuri to do them for lack of their own CGI production. I'm really not sure.) Cascom produced those generic animations (well, excepting the Cranston-Csuri stuff, of course) and syndicated them as a generic package, but they also did custom stuff (some of which was repurposed into the generic effects package - for example, the really long demo has a package of elements you can see in promos online for a couple Australian stations like SAS-10 Adelaide, and you can also spot starburst effects from United Artists Theaters trailers and camera shutter effects from General Cinema policy trailers, which they animated under contract for an Atlanta-based outfit called Cinema Concepts, which later merged with Cascom around 1987 or so, but evidently split back off from them later). The WRAL animations really look like the Cascom stuff I've seen - even knowing that so much of these backlit animation graphics looked similar and used similar tricks, no matter who made them - so if the animation was done in Nashville, might the music have also been done there? The fact that WRAL 1982 also showed up on KTXL, a station who definitely used Cascom's generic graphics, and had custom animations that looked very similar, also makes me wonder. So does the presence of a vaguely familiar voice in the "Take Off With Forty" song (and also possibly in "Go for the Stars"), who reminds me of the female vocalists in old Pepper-Tanner/William B. Tanner jingles. Those were done in Memphis, and I believe that some Memphis session singers (like Janie Fricke) eventually moved to Nashville, they're close enough that there could have been back and forth. I'm not that sure of the extent of Cascom's involvement in broadcast music, but it is food for thought.

During a late-night deep dive into TV news history (I've got all the time in the world during this quarantine) I found some interesting information on the WAGA 1977/Outlet News Theme. @Samantha found some information back in 2014 that Hayes Productions helped produce the image with Anderson Advertising, and a 1977 article from the San Antonio News-Express talks about how the promotion and theme were developed. KSAT was the original client for this package, and it was introduced with the debut of Don Colson as news anchor in June 1976. It spread to other stations in the Outlet Company, including WDBO in Orlando (not in the NMSA, and the article shows a sample of their opening). The composer of the theme was Mike Byrn, and I couldn't find much information about him.

Courtesy of the Tegna website, here's what appars to be the WOI Tegna logo.