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Last I saw on the socials was that Jim is out if the country. Besides, these interviews are frequently granted to those whose profiles are looking to be boosted...and not the guy retiring within a year.

At the end of the 6pm, I heard Bill saying that the press conference were going to be aired on their streaming channel. They should've still aired it anyway, even if it wasn't going to be long.

Ehh….honeycomb is worse. The WBTV graphics are the best hands down! It’s a Bruce evolution of the LIM4 graphics package. I wish that WOIO’s graphics would become available to all stations.

FWIW, this constant coverage when they don't know all the details, it's not a current situation and no new information is coming in doesn't seem warranted. I know that it's a big story and a terrible thing that happened, but having the anchors and reporters just talking about what happened is not a good use of air time when they could be showing regularly scheduled shows. They could easily have broken in when more information became available.

FWIW, the TV was on during the 9am hour and Ken Rosato did break in twice to update the story before going to full wall-to-wall coverage. Didn’t seem like there was much to report on at the beginning as WNBC’s coverage was mostly centered around train delays for the first 30 mins.

If you look at the graphics package on the monitor behind Liz or what’s on Sat 16 above the teleprompter, it’s the WMC Graphics package.

Forget the music… it looks like he’s spreading himself WAY too thin here. Again, I appreciate that he’s at least providing an alternative in a market where there’s really only one good station (KFSN), but when his main newscast alone is a bare bones show with limited local news on a low power station, he’d be better off doing one thing at a time. There comes a point where you can’t do it all yourself and expect the eyeballs to roll in. Also, naming your operation after yourself seems a bit off-putting imho, but I guess you could chalk that up to me being particular.

Yeah it just alludes to the direction Local TV News and WABC is going, from the complaints about Sam Champion not wearing a suit, to Bill's emotional rants, to not breaking in when warranted, it just goes to show that the standard that WABC has set is starting to decline or perhaps in alignment with the today's generation of viewers. They indeed seemed to be more relaxed as attitudes and expectations shift with new generation of viewers. It is 2022. I'm sure Sam's on air look is intentional. Maybe him not wearing a suit and tie is appealing to a certain audience. The requirement of needing to be polished, have a suit and tie seems to not be prioritized as much anymore. Lets not forget, that nowadays people dont even have TVs anymore they go online or stream online, so maybe they felt like the efficiency of being in air broadcasting a news story that was developing wasn't warranted at the time especially when most people have internet access and can go on the web and get more information much faster than the news can deliver it on TV.

My guy, your attitude about, and position on this topic is absolute trash.

WCBS had strong coverage today. Kudos to them. Nice to see experienced hands of Dana, Cindy and Maurice at the helm.

Doing your show from the nation's capital has some advantages... You main anchor stationed there when news breaks in America's largest city isn't one of them.

Or just log on to the station's website.

Good perspective. People get the impression that the station doesn't care when they see regualr programming running. Perhaps in a major event like this where no new details are immediately avalible, it might help to run a red ticker at the bottom of the screen with updates, or a message to say that the news team is following the situation.

That’s the worst of them all. I thought they’d get the wkyt package.

There's been a major subway shooting/explosion AND the Lieutenant Governor has been arrested. WNBC has dumped out of Today, WCBS has left Drew, and WABC is still with Live...tells you all you need to know of WABC's priorities here.

Really crazy lineup at Fox Weather today with Britta Merwin, Nick Kosir, and Marissa Torres all off. Katie Garner flew back to NYC to fill in for Britta this morning. Danielle Gersh flew in from LA to make her first appearance in forever, filling in for Marissa Torres. As for Nick's shift, they moved every other male OCM's shift down. John Marshall came in on his normal day off to fill in for Stephen Morgan on America's Weather Center. Stephen Morgan filled in for Ian Oliver on Across America, and then Ian Oliver filled in for Nick Kosir on America's Weather Now. When 10pm EDT rolled around, they continued special coverage with Ian and Danielle in a control-room-produced show for about 25 minutes. At around 10:25pm EDT, they went into automation, with Ian Oliver doing break-ins periodically to update on tornado warnings. As of this hour, Ian is still handling the break-ins, marking his 5th hour on the air. But they're not following their previous policy from a few weeks ago, which was to stay live with nonstop break-in coverage as long as there's tornado warnings active. The break-ins are rather infrequent tonight. On the other hand, TWC is staying fully live until 12am EDT. I guess TWC is edging out Fox Weather with their coverage tonight. But let's be honest, TWC would not have stayed live for a 10% hatched tornado risk a year ago at this time. It always would take a 15% hatched risk to keep TWC live for the past couple of years. So if there's one positive thing to make of this, it's that the competition from Fox Weather is forcing TWC to stay live and cover severe weather more than they've covered it in a long time.

For those of you unaware - both Jeff and Brittany work 5-day weeks. Jeff is in evenings 3 days with Lee and Brittany is in mornings with Sam 3 days a week (including Friday obviously). They work as backup and wx producers when not on-air. They also can be found reporting on human-interest stories on occasion. there is no such thing as a 2 day work week in television. As a matter of fact - there’s no such thing as a 5 day work week in local news either. You’re lucky if you have a couple of hours each day to sleep.

Aside from the need to update the aesthetics, the music is fine. Actually I'd opt to return to the late 80s/early 90s version of Cool Hand Luke. In terms of news product I think WABC has the most recognizable brand but WNBC is my prefrence. WNYW has the weakest news product outisde of it's feature specials like Street Soliders. WPIX isn't strong either outside of the "Morning News". Overall News 4 and Eyewitness News are the strongest news wise. Is no one behind the scenes speaking to Ritter about his editorializing or does he have leeway as the station's lead newsman?

I'm the first to lament WABC's lack of aesthetics but the reality is that it works. New York is a tabloid town (in the Daily News / NY Post sense, not the WSVN sense), and it kind of makes sense that WABC's look emulates those visuals more than any other station in the city. Editorially WABC is toned down from the caustic irreverence and outright conservatism of the NY Post, but it shares the huge typography, bombastic/eye searing color contrast, and fundamentally human interest led approach. As I've noted before, there has been a shift with Bill Ritter's editorializing "Gun Insanity" rhetoric at WABC. I don't think you'd ever catch David Ushery or Kristine Johnson leading with such a framing.

Simple: he was caught with his pants down and moved to quickly scrub the use of the stuff ripped from News Music Now once it was exposed to the right people that he was doing that. He probably made it private hoping nobody else would see that he was doing that. I am going to go out on a limb and say that he had probably hoped nobody would ever catch him doing this, and it worked, almost. Kind of an odd logic to have when you boast about being seen in over 115 million households. He also started to scrub the NMN stuff from his other show, "The Reed Report" and now uses some random YouTube music: It looks like he was doing this with his other show too, "Valley View with Austin Reed" (how many shows does this guy have?). That one is/was using the old TXCN music and Impact in a sponsor bump. Again, I think once Austin realized what he was doing was not cool, he corrected this. That said, he shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.

Considering where that station's headed, I guess he wanted to get out while the getting was good.

WABC was the only local station that did not cover the 7pm press conference where officials released photos of the "person of interest." Heck, even WNYW broke away from Extra. I guess they did not want to upset the seniors by cutting away from Jeopardy, and since they are so reluctant to use Localish 7.2, I guess people wouldn't have been smart enough to find it.

Wow!

I just checked at 9:47 am. WNBC is still with special coverage of the shooting and arrest. WCBS is with Drew. WABC still with twiddle dee and twiddle dumb live. As I typed this WABC finally has jumped in with a report (no one on the scene, unlike WNBC). Just the headline breaking in and a zoom interview.

Agreed, their talent is okay, but some of their tans look awful and dress like it's 1950's aka Lee Goldberg. Others can dress whatever way they want and doesn't have to wear a suit and tie aka Sam Champion. I don't get the hype about either of them, especially Sam. Their best team is the Weekend PM team.

Really WABC’s actual news product is not very good either. It’s overtly sensationalized and editorial from the graphics to the on-screen commentary. Horrible horrible. Channel 4 and channel 2 are in a different league compared to 7.

Because their days are so long, especially the morning shift. In at 3am and out by at least 1:30. No wonder why Amy Freeze left. Though, if they hated their schedules, they can always find another job that's more flexible. Also, by adding one, the network can pull from here instead of flying some from Chicago, Nashville, etc.

They are also cheap in terms of adding another meteorologist. They need it as Sam only works Monday through Thursday. I don't get why the biggest market and the strongest station can't have 5 meteorologists.

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.