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Angry online comments ≠ accurate representation of anything, ever The viewers who don't give a damn about the changes make up the majority opinion, and they're not leaving comments to say that.

Yeah because in 2023 when stations can barely afford to keep staff on the payroll, they're wasting money buying decoy swag?

I can only speak for Pittsburgh, but I wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment. There would be no mass freak out or loss of viewers. It would blow over in a day.

Wendy McMahon basically said that the approach to the rebrand would be conducted on a market by market basis. There were some assertions made that WBZ and KDKA would drop their brands entirely because of the radio stations that share those call letters; as we know now, those assertions were inaccurate. Edit: I probably asserted something here or there too, so my apologies.

WBZ has debuted. They went the KCAL route.

Considering WLBT's Civil Rights Era history of being unapologetically racist to the point of FCC license revocation threats and an entire housecleaning of management...no sympathy for Barbie here. If this is some other station and an outlier incident, a warning would be fine, but she should know both her station's turbulent history and her own HR issues of the past.

You may think that iHeart doesn't care, but they do. They easily could defect to WCVB or WBTS for news and weather partnerships if they can make more money off of it just like KYW radio did with WCAU. There is nothing binding WBZ with WBZ-TV, especially if a better content sharing deal comes forward. And what does WBZ-TV do then? Continue to share the same branding as a competitor or get with the times and distinguish yourselves for once? And honestly, the biggest mistake Les Moonves made during the sale of the CBS Radio stations was making that brand licensing deal with the shared call signs which forced this rebranding effort among the O&Os in the first place.

Who knows why this interregnum is taking place, but tbh, the presence of two unrelated stations in the Boston market that both identify as "WBZ" is completely untenable. iHeart spent a lot of money to get WBZ radio and got an obscenely favorable brand licensing deal. You think they're happy about sharing the same brand as a TV station that is fighting for oxygen in the digital stratosphere?

Everything you read in this thread (and a majority of what’s discussed on this site) is pure speculation. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Absolutely, I’m not arguing with the rationale. It’s a much easier url to remember and type. The point I was trying to make is that it sort of contradicts some of the comments I’ve read here over the past month or two that local identities like WBZ News were going to be sidelined in favor of CBS (city name) either now or in the very near future. If they plan on rebranding to just CBS News Boston, they may as well have left it as cbsboston.com rather than reverting to WBZ.com.

I assume that given the newscasts are branded WBZ News, they wanted to keep wbz.com. Regardless of what you type, you're re-directed to the cbsnews.com/city, state or region website so, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

Oh yeah, the Romero/Mester mess was darn awful and shouldn't have happened, they should have properly given Lynette a nice farewell even is she was leaving for a competitor, it wouldn't have blown up amongst viewers and Mester would have kept his cool and would probably be there today. Then a few months later the favorable 5 Live gets cancelled... looks like one bad decision after another for KTLA, thank goodness at least one good thing happened in the past several months: the set redesign looks beautiful.

I can see it coming down to which URL requires the fewest taps on a mobile browser. "cbsboston.com": 13 characters "cbsnews.com/boston": 18 characters "wbz.com": 7 characters "cbslosangeles.com": 17 characters "cbsnews.com/losangeles": 22 characters "kcal.com": 8 characters

This; they already have Fox on WVII-DT2; wouldn't you just turn in the license rather than pointlessly pay for a redundant one and just keep the branding without the channel? Plus it's VHF; just try to get WVII on UHF instead, it's not like northern Maine/New Brunswick has a crowded UHF band.

What's the point?

I'd whack his transaction just because he's playing the race card. He's a bankster parasite that was pushing the limits of the law. It has nothing to do with his heritage.

The WBZ news at noon while showing a graphic promoting an upcoming interview with Robert Kraft that’s going to air during their 5pm news tonight was sporting the new o&o logo format. CBS News Boston with WBZ in a small box off to the left.

Or just breakfast mode. Someone there must really like morning news.

1980 behind the scenes special of action news at WSB

He knew it was the end.

it looks like KDKA is in breaking news mode 24/7 with the yellow bug/ticker

Dan Rather live from a Hurricane! (1995)

I do love when a company cites 'the numbers are up some certain percent from the programming that previously aired there'...and the comparison is literal infomercials, 'E/I' programming, outdoors shows that take 28 minutes to shoot a deer or catch and release a fish, and the 854 sports profile shows which have seemed to suddenly become endemic on weekend CW/MNTV schedules. There is nobody under 60 without a streaming service watching those stations on weekend afternoons.

I knew WBZ would follow the same route as KDKA and to a lesser extent, KPIX. Those are all legacy stations. Those traditionalists in the Boston, Pittsburgh, and Bay Area markets would all freak out if they completely went with CBS Boston/Pittsburgh/Bay Area. KPIX is used for general programming and CBS BA for newscasts. Question is, which route will KYW go? I feel it’s going to go with the CBS Philadelphia route but I could be wrong.

Welllllllll...you're kind of correct. This logo has been plastered over on the station's creative services channel. While it hasn't launched, and could theoretically still change, it appears that the '3' isn't going away, entirely.

Fox is basically a sports programming service with a forgettable primetime block of crappy reality shows—including 33 different shows that Gordon Ramsey can scream in and 9 different iterations of The Masked Singer (a fad that has long passed its expiration date)—and The Simpsons and Family Guy, two shows that will never die. That might be the goal Nexstar has for the CW, but they’ll never get anything close to the NFL or MLB. So why NOT turn the station into a O&O for a sports programming service that you own?