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I hate this package. The way the theme music has been chopped up and abrubtly cut off on some or quickly turned off. It doesnt even feel like COX anymore. They were always still the best at news opens and the correct timings and flow of the opens with the music and graphics. There were never rushed and they always had proper opens. Not these rushed anchor introduced 2 second opens most stations use today. These are just awful. IMO complete downgrade.

EDIT 1/16/24: WAFB has moved to GrayONE as of Noon on 1/16/24. Put WAFB/Baton Rouge on the clock for GreyONE - this new logo just popped up on their website: Previous logo, in place for decades with the CBS eye logo added along the way:

Any market that has to deal with a significant amount of severe weather/tornadoes/hurricanes, I can see at most 6. Have 2 in-studio, and instead of using reporters/mmjs, use the other 4 out in the field for reports, so they can give first-hand meteorological reports of damages, etc and fill-ins... I don't know why stations all of a sudden had a need to have a different meteorologist for each damn newscast of the day... No wonder they are starting mets at $15k a year.. there's no work

I think five is sufficient. Four main on-air ones plus a fifth as a behind-the-scenes producer/fill-in.

I didn't realize that Blake Burman took over as moderator of The Hill on Sept. 5th last year. At first I was thinking this move was going to have an impact on Leland's ability to host the show, but here it turns out he's been gone from the show for a while. As for weekday Morning in America, man that show just keeps going through so many changes. I guess ending at 9am ET brings them in line with a typical cable news morning show schedule. Weird seeing them shift back to a solo-host format. I figured that they were going to keep two anchors as multiple anchors are pretty standard for mornings.

Or at least moving Michelle or Toni to weekend evenings to be with Joe.

I'm surprised they're not keeping Toni Yates with Michelle. I thought they were a great pair. Yes I've been wondering this as well. Hasn't been on since Nov 28th.

It looks like the new WNJU studio is being using by MSNBC this week.

Working at WABC as an intern helps. Congrats to Sandra. We've certainly had old late 90s weekends with Bill and Sandra working so much on weekdays.

From this press release, It's official. After 25 years on the weekends, Sandra Bookman is moving to the Noon show. Also announced, former KTLA reporter/anchor Pedro Rivera will anchor Weekend Mornings, beginning February 3rd.

I wonder if Ken Rosato’s return to tv was supposed to be for Good Day New York, since we still haven’t seen him pop up anywhere. If so, FOX 5 missed a huge marketing opportunity to have Scotto & Rosato!

KOLD has the GrayOne graphics and went with red.

Especially since the Baltimore stations thoroughly cover this part of Maryland in the local news… Whatever happened to “significantly viewed” status?

A courtesy…to who? It’s not a courtesy to anyone.

MLB has arranged carriage of games on regular cable TV (usually on the spare channel on cable systems carrying news or filler content), and it's only a gametime broadcast rather than wrapped around wobbly Jenga content to create a 24/7 'regional sports network' that's anything but (if that was true, legend's tennis and poker would not have a home). You're paying the same cost for Bally anyways, so it might as well go to a quality game broadcast than countless fishing and poker shows.

Not a good move from a fan prospective. The MLB does better than Bally's when it comes to producing the broadcasts, but their pay to watch structure has been a pain for DBacks and Padres fans. Rockies fans will experience the same thing. It's just as bad as Bally Sports. But with Baseball, TV deals have to become more expensive so teams can build up a higher player salary. The Dodgers are able to build a super team because of their TV deal with Spectrum. The MLB at some point needs to enforce a salary cap if they don't want to lose fans. That way, teams can cut an easier deal with local TV stations so games will be a more available to watch on TV. And it will be more competitive across the league so teams like the Dodgers don't reach the World Series every year.

That's odd. I just watched NBC broadcast the All-American Bowl which used the new College Football/Basketball graphics so that look is definitely not tied to the Big Ten or Notre Dame exclusively. Makes no sense why they would do this with the Atlantic 10. Basically shows that NBC Sports views that conference as lower production value.

With the Comics Unleashed reruns on CBS set to end later this month with the premiere of After Midnight, I have to think the owners and managers of some affiliates must be quietly relieved -- specifically, anyone who owns or runs a CBS affiliate in a market where Allen Media owns a competing station. Sure, the episodes are all over a decade old and yes, we're talking about the 12:30am ET time slot, but the show was hosted by the guy who now owns a station that directly competes with them. At the very least, it must have been a bit weird.

Comcast should have pushed harder for some of those zombies to be dropped, especially the ones that only show music videos. We have YouTube for that. But, then, someone at Comcast seems to think MusicChoice is worth keeping around, so...

WKBT has had them for over a year. They debuted them when they debuted Ross Overdrive in 2022. It was a test to see if their VP of news actually liked this vision or if he wanted to switch back to the old look. (I worked there during this transition.)

I'm sorry, all I can hear is the sound of a tongues scraping across the soles of boots. All joking aside, how is allowing far off corporations to control the country supposed to promote localism? For that matter, how the hell is any of the consolidation that's happened over the past several years done anything but screw over the little guy? I'm no fan of big government myself, but this recent change is one of the few I've completely agreed with, and before you point to "market realities" (I don't think you know what that word means), let's not kid ourselves; a lot of the wounds the broadcast industry has suffered over the years have been entirely their own fault (iHeartMedia and Sinclair say hi), and things like retransmission consent and reverse compensation have served little purpose than to further alienate the consumers they supposedly speak for.

I disagree with him.

Because after being taxed to death by the NFL and college football (well, sort of through rising TV rates and such) all America needs is another football league after the season is over, right?

Maybe the 432nd time will be the charm.

FOX 12 Oregon I'm pretty sure would keep their branding with FOX if they could. They do not see it as a liability. Yes, people repulsed by FOX probably don't watch just due to the name, but the local content is not skewed conservative, though they do run FOX News packages to fill time. FOX 12 gets high ratings as-is, so I think they are content with their audience. As for the logistics of changing their branding, it would be a big change to drop FOX. Like you said they could go back to the old branding of Oregon's 12, which I like but I'm not sure if it sounds fresh and modern or old timey. I'm also not sure if any instance of using their call letters as branding would be on the table. The only time they mention them is referring to their website, KPTV.com. I think it would be too clunky in opens and whatnot along with their slogan (First. Live. Local.) and show titles. Then again, I thought it was clunky when KGW dropped NewsChannel 8 from their branding and just went with KGW News, but I got used to it, but it works for them as they have no slogan or separate show names.....just KGW News at 5, etc, etc. The duopoly station (KPDX) currently is FOX 12 Plus, but was previously branded as PDX TV which they could go back to. Maybe use some form of that on KPTV???

They'll probably switch in the new year. Additionally I think we'll see alot of stations getting GrayONEd once fresh content enters the primetime schedule. (Late January into February with the super bowl (CBS Affiliates))

I'd be very, very surprised to see if Gray drops the "Fox" branding from their stations. I don't think Fox would stand for it, and the way that most Fox stations are branded, anything else would be very disorienting to a lot of viewers.

Gray likely saw what happened to Nexstar when they caved in to CBS in their last deal, so they didn't take any chances should NBC have pulled their affiliation from a station or two, or 53. We're probably at the point where existing piecemeal deals are about to be all entire group deals that line up to the point that affiliation switches could be done much easier.

And here comes the crybabying defense squad. Hilarious that they think that allowing local monopolies would make them "compete better", rather than, y'know, just making the situation worse. How's iHeartMedia doing right now?

They've used a production cut for pre-recorded headlines for a while (I was there in the mid and late 2010's). They were using it when I was there. The previous news director thought Inergy wasn't urgent enough, so they added The Rock. Apparently, they've added the production track to it. It sounds like they've taken that cut and put it into their music computer. It was literally a computer they opened the track on and played through VLC or Windows Media Player.

The alternate graphics in question are just a reskin of an already existing pre-GreyOne template, so maybe there's a technical issue unique to those stations (i.e., incompatible equipment with GreyOne) and this is a band-aid until Grey decides to pony up the cash to fix it.

My only issue with the "stripping" of affiliate logos from these stations is that these affiliations lend a form of credibility to them. Bad actors have been lifting and creating fake logos for use on illegitimate "news" sites for the sole purpose of spreading disinformation. Even with FOX affiliates, despite any link to their affiliates and "news" channel. The link between them is minimal and any well-educated person should know that. Being a heritage station and Raycom's idea to use their highly visible longtime neon sign as their main brand is a brilliant branding move. Same with WAVE in Louisville resurrecting their "WAVE" logo from years past.

WBRC's news dominance isn't built around their affiliation to FOX. They don't need to emphasis it.

Bialik and Jennings were pretty good. Found it strange that they opted for alternating dual hosts, but it worked. Bialik aside, Jeopardy had a gargantuan task in filling Trebek's shoes, unfortunately it seems any successor candidate has come under intense public scrutiny. It's just a gameshow hosting job, not the presidency, give the new host a chance.

Mayim Bialik is out on syndicated J!

The guidelines made clear it has to be added anytime the station does a logo refresh; as all three haven't done that in decades, they get to keep their logos plain (though there are wedged-in added logos for use on Hulu and ABC's live streaming portal). Hearst's stations could have also done technically with their stations like WISN and WCVB but they complied voluntarily to add it in.

With the runaway costs of programming, much of the blame lies with the content providers (station owners).

Given that Fox has historically had more rigid branding conventions than the other major networks (the only ones to deviate from using network-centric branding including WSVN, KHON, WDRB and KVRR), I think culling network references from Gray’s Fox affiliates would be much harder to implement. ABC has apparently been requiring affiliates to include the “circle” logo into their station logos, making it also unclear whether they can pull network branding.

I heard this from a colleague who works at an NBC Gray affiliate. It's not an NBC thing. It's a "Gray" thing. Eventually all stations will be removing their affliliation from their logos. The reasoning is to distance the stations from the affiliates and to separate itself from the fake news movement that the national media gets. Basically it's so people trust the LOCAL news and to take on their own branding and identity.

This is confirmation enough for everyone. We don't need a station-by-station report on a peacock removal. From here on, said posts will be hidden. Let us know if a station hasn't changed, at all.

Breaking news! Binghamton’s WBNG has officially launched GrayONE. And this one was way needed. A small market like that really deserves recognition. You can watch the official confirming video on (what else?) Studio 31 Media Archive on YouTube.

WCBS actually had The People's Court at 4pm before Judy's return to Channel 2 in 2006 (after 7 years on WNBC). Before that newscast ended completely in 2003, it was truncated to a half-hour at 4:30pm. Filling that first half hour in Jan. 2002 was the Weakest Link. And that got replaced the following fall by Millionaire.

It aired at 4pm for a long time on some stations, including WBBM; like Inside Edition they push out editions every half hour with updates if needed up to a certain time.

I'm glad to see Dr Phil reruns dipping into the archives and not just playing episodes from the last 4 to 5 years. They were even doing so when the show was making new episodes. Similarly, I also like that Judge Mathis had a flashback case segment within newly released episodes. l know long running sydicated shows have an aversion to "dated" episodes but they are cool to see.

Technically, Sox Entertainment (don’t know how new to the distribution game it is) is the one distributing it. Seems odd that Amazon didn’t assert syndication rights to Judy Justice through MGM.

Judy Justice is headed for syndication next fall.

Feels like a mix of elements of the SNF look with the aesthetic of the old graphics (particularly the gloss and the blue-grey color from before).

New graphics for NBC's Notre Dame (and I assume B1G) broadcasts. Looks like an evolution of the SNF look. Same font used.

And, in the case of ratings, has failed and backfired IMO on WPLG tremendously.

Well, the one thing people watch local news for more than anything these days is for the weather. Even with that in mind, 7 or 8 mets on staff seems like overkill; but then again I'm not the one hunkered down in the weather center during a EF5.