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Thank you, @ABC 7 Denver. One thing I noticed is how absolutely hyper-critical this fandom tends to be without actually taking a step back and trying to understand the "How"s & "Why"s behind changes in news products. Are some graphics actually bad? Yes. Some are. Is EVERY SINGLE aspect of a graphics package bad simply because you personally don't like one aspect of it? No. That's absolutely not the case. These absolute statements and severe judgements based on a few minutes of witnessing something new just leads to drama, and I'm personally getting kind of sick of it. It's not everybody, but I just find the irony kind of amazing that the whole thing behind news is being objective, yet we let our personal feelings dictate definitively that something is "bad". Not everything is 100% "Bad" MY53's news department is a one-man-band with the budget of $12 and a ham sandwich. The product will get better over time. There will be a lot of testing & figuring it out, and he deserves our support for taking on a project like this. Bottom line is, Austin is one of us. He's a total news nerd just like we are, and he's a damn good journalist. He has a challenge ahead of him that he willingly took on. We really should, as a community, be in his corner to support him, and not completely rip apart his product on the first night. In fact, we really need to learn how to sit back and observe things for a few nights before we draw our conclusions, weighing all pros & cons of certain things instead of just crapping on something the first time we see it just because it's different. TLDR: Guys, we really need to step it up and do better, instead of turning everything into a bitch-fest.

In the interest of fairness, as the person responsible for posting the video that went "viral".... Austin Reed did post tonight's newscast and he did take everyone's concerns to heart. He has replaced all of the various music lifted off of News Music Now with proper News One tracks that he is authorized to use, downloaded directly from WCPM, and only that package. I think he did read the FTVLIve piece that was published this morning and got rid of the podcaster-hosted sports segment in favor of an extended interview. He also put a disclaimer at the end that it was recorded at CentralValleyTalk.com studios (an obvious swipe at FTVLive for claiming that it was shot in his basement). He actually did license it — he sent my friend the contract he has with WCPM, so it is legal. Mark Agent is a legitimate person, the licensing director for WCPM. Apparently he had difficulties downloading the audio tracks and resorted to NMN for the first show. Should he have done that? No, but give him credit for getting that rectified quickly. News Music Now is very much aware. He commented on my video: They are licensed, so nothing is going to come of this. At the end of the day, I do feel kind of bad that Austin has received some of the hate he's gotten. Some of it is rightfully so and well deserved: lifting others' news video (even if he gave a YouTube credit) is not acceptable, and is not fair use if he's profiting off of it (which he is, there's advertising, it's all direct response ads, but there's ads) and he does seem to be making some strides to getting things right. There was a fair amount of lifted video this evening so I think it'll take him a while, but nowhere near the amount that there was Friday. The presentation could use a lot of work, and he knows that. He is actively shopping around for a graphics package and has had interest from a couple of designers. Given the fact that is a one person operation, I will give him credit and I think this product is only going to improve over time. He had a week to launch (they were airing NewsNet in the timeslot the past three months after they declined to renew their outsourcing arrangement with KFSN at the end of 2021) and I guess they had to have NewsNet gone by the end of March. So I will give him a lot of props for stringing together what he could on such short notice.

Yes. Prime example, most accounts posting clips of The Young & The Restless eventually get taken down.

With all due respect to the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” here’s two more salient phrases that more appropriately apply here, and they run hand-in-hand: 1. You will never get a second chance to make a great first impression. 2. Perception is reality. If you live in Fresno, and you stumbled upon that debut newscast and saw it looked no-budget with stories lifted from other stations, a Podcaster doing sports, and a setup that sure as hell lent credence to Scott Jones’s slam (which, considering Scott’s irrationally absurd hatred of Dave Lougee, sure doesn’t mean much), you’re likely not going to tune back to that newscast ever again. If the perception is that it’s an cheap newscast with no effort or care put into it whatsoever, then good luck changing that. Other options exist in the Fresno market, including a freaking O&O. Watch them instead. The fact this debut newscast already went viral is a testament to both sayings. Few will watch that second newscast in comparison to the debut. It’s how things work.

Not saying I agree with that comment to begin with, but in the interest of fairness: csreedabc is Chris Reed, owner of Newsmusic Central and also a copyright lawyer in his day job. So I can see why he said what he said.

Royalty-free production music CDs and digital downloads exist. Many of them are actually very good. There is no reason why this had to happen.

I feel like... 10% bad for him. News seems to be his passion and I wish the guy luck, but he's been in the biz for decades now. He started in his teens with public access "news" programs. Which for being a teen, was impressive. He even got his show posted on NMSA under "Rose City News". But...he's not a teen anymore and he's since had multiple stints at professional stations in various positions. So he's more than had enough time to bring his skills up to snuff. If this is what he's putting out, the criticism is deserved.

This really makes Ed Agre's work at KXGN all the more impressive. He was a literal one-man band with no computers and barely any internet access and yet he put out a damn good product, good enough to get that Real Sports shout-out. It's also easy to mock WSVI over their No Budget News but in those videos I linked above, it's also evident that Jerome Agean and Wes Small made an effort. I can absolutely respect them for that. This debut newscast should never have gone over the air. It should have been one of many audition tapes so technical issues could be ironed out prior to the debut. In this case I absolutely fault the station over Austin.

Speaking of WVUE, very quickly during the morning news (7:50 local time) Fox8 had a weather graphic that could have been a sign of a coming change. I unfortunately couldn’t screen grab it, but here’s a pic of it. Any thoughts?

Not sure who first replied to NMN’s comment, but if we’re going to be honest, I don’t think they are “well positioned to be commenting…” They clearly don’t understand how big of a risk this could’ve been to the future of News Music Now and even NMSA. I wouldn’t say NMN has unauthorized use. I know the news music publishers know about News Music Now. Some publishers I’ve spoke with have mentioned the site, other publishers have been tagged in his posts and they’ve reacted to and even commented his posts. He has taken steps to prevent copyright violations and this exact situation from happening. Luckily, this was all a VERY BIG misunderstanding and he actually has a license for News One. But if cuts start getting ripped from the site by tv stations to use, they could view News Music Now and even the NMSA as a threat and ask for the sites to be shut down, then what would we all do? With all that being said, let this be a lesson to all of us, myself included… “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”. Austin is taking a chance and following a dream and that’s more than a lot of people can say. I hope these people criticizing him and critiquing him are reaching out to him and offering to help in any way possible; and if not, sit back down. I know I hope to see it grow and this newscast be successful.

Bad news: One of Michael Pannoni's YouTube channels, pannoni10 in question, was taken down due to community guidelines violations and may have been hacked.

VERY WELL SAID

Three days in and you want to say that? This is what bootstrapping a newscast looks like. Ctmajka shared this great video from '98 for Floyd Kalber's retirement from WLS. He launched KMTV's news department. What Austin is doing is similar. It's even more impressive and gutsy in a market like Fresno.

Compare to WSVI in their Jerome Agean/Wes Small era and their newscasts become infinitely more watchable: It’s not that Austin Reed made an attempt. The technical effort is simply nonexistent, it plays like a no-budget parody of a WatchMojo countdown video that somehow got played on OTA TV.

it's KMSG-LP not KSMG, That is a Radio station in Seguin, TX.

It’s better than that honeycomb look Gray has been putting out there!

It doesn’t have the warm feel the show used to have. Feels stiff and looks low budget. Wish they had kept the studio.

Does anyone know what happened to btm0815ma's YouTube channel? I noticed that his videos of the CBS, ABC, NBC and PBS newscasts had disappeared.

Yes.

The Gray looks are so bad that WVUE looks good in comparison. I watched them again recently when tornados came through NOLA. Those ancient Raycom graphics still look better than WBTV does after having been “Gray-ified.”

He stopped posting soap operas after he went down the first time, right? The bad luck just continues...sorry to hear about this!