Leaderboard

It was inevitable, another one of WGN’s old guard is calling it quits… and this time it’s the king of Chicago weather. Tom Skilling has announced that he will retire as WGN’s chief meteorologist next year, after 45 years with the station. His last day will be February 28, 2024.

Indeed the God of Weather in a market that has been more or less blessed with a number of strong meteorologists (Jerry Taft, Steve Baskerville, and Jim Ramsey are honorable mentions)

Speculating here, but it seems his heart wasn’t really into the “news anchor” role. He’s very active on social media, and pretty much every post is Philly sports. Not every sports anchor can seamlessly transition to news.

They could revamp evenings. I liked (younger) Amyre Makupson WAY more. She and a dynamic male anchor would work very well for evenings.

Heard Jeff was difficult to deal with. He and Shaina didn’t seem to mesh well on the air and it showed. Unsure of the details but I think the station made the right move.

Every generation seems to lament what those newfangled whippersnappers like. Bring back Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan. What the heck are music videos? Who wants to watch kids dance for an hour? What hasn’t changed is the audience dictates the content. What people reject goes away. And while sequels/reboots/rehashes of existing IP are by no means anything new in TV, they seem to get a disproportionate share of “there are no original ideas” when in fact there are many. Of course audiences familiar with whatever brand may gravitate toward checking it out; we’re human and like positive memories. If people stick around and enjoy the show on its own merits, great. But there’s plenty of original ideas and creative twists on older ones (Stranger Things and Wednesday from Netflix come to mind as one example of each). And all kinds of content from music to movies to TV has borrowed, some more blatantly than others, from what came before. Much of the original content from basic cable migrated to streaming as the audience did. Makes sense; follow the money. And it also follows that we’d see a big push early on for original content to give each platform an identity and a reason to pay up. That dust will settle and the investments will become more targeted into what proves to be working. The broadcast model is dying. It’s not dead and won’t be for a while, but it’s on the way. It’s going to need to rely on a changing mix of programs to wring some remaining life out of it, and rely on streaming to pick up some of the lost audience. For now, it’s sustainable with adjustments.

The audience chooses what it chooses, and whether any one of us likes or detests it, that’s where we are. There is still plenty of original syndicated fare that’s not Springer or courtroom shows, but when you’re the fifth or sixth place broadcaster in a world where your audience is also watching streaming, recordings, on-demand and the like, lower cost options are what you need to not take a loss. The advertising market has splintered and continues to splinter. There’s no going back. Spending money you don’t have and will never recoup isn’t going to work.

There’s a lot of wistful, rose-colored-glasses nostalgia in this thread. And perhaps a bit of “get off my lawn” as well. Trying to apply the model of broadcasting from decades ago into today’s world isn’t going to work. The audience has changed. Technology has changed. Yet the broadcasters should operate like it’s 1982? How does that work? The ecosystem is much larger, and people do not—and will not—watch content the way they once did. That’s not a bad thing; it’s the nature of the world. If you try to cling to the old ways, you’re hastening your demise.

Not to derail this thread but a lot of broadcast design has trended digital-first in the last few years. Heavy 3D and gradients look horrible on highly compressed video formats and contribute to visual clutter. Had smartphones not taken off I think design trends would have gone in a completely different direction.

Good.

Outside of Atlanta, they already have.