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Aesthetically, it's the nicest set they've had since...well, the last Washington set. I wish it didn't give such a CNN / FOX O&O feel, but that's sort of to be expected with the new EP coming from the Situation Room. I hope they find good use for those floor panels. Visually, it's the most polished look since the Couric era. They really could have put their money where their mouth is and led with politics tonight if that's the whole reason to set up shop there. A little disappointed it was weather instead.

Finally. They usually had garbage and 12:30 so I am happy they finally fixed it.

Who decorated that WKYC cake? A 3 year old?

KMTV In 1979 with the “Dream Team”:

https://changingnewscasts.wordpress.com/2019/11/ WFMY is actually airing CBS This Morning in pattern now as of today! Never thought I’d see the day! The Good Morning Show now ends at 7am. Thought they would move 7-10am to 2.2. They also add a 4pm newscast. Sad part is, no more Andy Griffith. Ellen moves to 9 am. And 2 Wants to Know just becomes a regular 5:30 newscast.

This is 2019. If it takes THAT long to render out a single animation, they're doing it wrong. Scripps really needs to reinvest in the back end of their stations, both equipment and people to make a graphic package that actually works for a group their size.

I like Jeff but felt he was a bit weak and bland as a lead network anchor. I preferred Scott Pelley. His writing was solid and I felt the broadcast chose the right stories to lead with. Once Pelley left, it felt like the broadcast became less serious and it stopped becoming required viewing for me.

Found where they got their new graphics from...

My thoughts exactly. I figured that WTXL was a test that they would improve upon, but I guess Scripps is fine with that.

Looks like Scripps didn't learn their lessons for how to improve upon the graphics package. And if they did this wouldn't be rolled out right now so that tells me that they're sticking to their graphics package in it's current forum

Well it's official. I now completely dislike this graphics package. If this is what 2D "modern" graphics are supposed to look like, then I guess news graphics have passed their peak in quality. I've said it before, but Scripps deserve better gfx than this. Not only that, they, as a matter of necessity, need better graphics than this.

Well, whenever this mess hits Cleveland, at least it will look better than the garbage WKYC is putting out. They desperately need a Tegna-vention.....

I agree. I would guess, going forward, Norah will be doing more political reporting (in-studio interviews with lawmakers, etc..) on a regular basis. If not, moving the show to DC would serve no purpose. She definitely is going to have to take on a 'leading role' in their overall political coverage.

Which is why I think that the bug needs to have a background that matches the L3, instead of no background at all...

The studio looks nice. The graphics are a nice update from the super plain look that debuted a few months ago, though it still feels a bit on the cartoonish side to me. Strange that the old lower-third banners appeared sometimes, including for the top story. (That has to be a mistake, right?) I still hate the show's logo taking up a bar on the bottom of the screen. They had this for Jeff Glor but then switched to a box on the left. But why is this necessary at all? Neither ABC nor NBC has anything like this in the evening. The opening theme still feels lost to me. Sounds almost like a weak close, not an open. But overall, an upgrade from a visual perspective. Let's see if they can take advantage of being in D.C., put on a solid broadcast, and earn the trust of new viewers. I'm interested to see if the special report graphics are updated. I imagine we'll see that on Wednesday.

Here's the open.

Never have understood why they thought making it a 30 minute newscast was a good idea. It should've been an hour long this whole time. Glad to see it back to one hour though.

Thank goodness I don’t live in the Triad. How dare WFMY move Ellen to mornings. I hope it returns to afternoons soon. I wish they’d considered moving it to WXII if WFMY didn’t want it in the afternoons. Not to be heartless, but this is the holiday season, and unless Ellen was losing in the afternoons in Greensboro, or she opened her mouth to something, that is horrible.

Apparently WSOC-TV's noon newscast is back to a full hour now starting earlier today.

I like that they are differentiating themselves from the pack. I think Norah is the right person and I hope the move to D.C. will generate a return on their investment. I will definitely give CBS a try although I think NBC has a might tighter newscast. I think the time might be right for a primetime network newscast.

A couple of WABC news promos from 1968: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_1wUTeglPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myA2fDjMy0E

Shirleen returned today as expected. David presented her with flowers and a coffee card.

And here are some bits and pieces from the very first edition of NBC Overnight, a quirky newscast with great writing that truly set the standard for overnight news programming back in 1982:

Scripps' hub was stronger when it was just the original stations. They've spread themselves too thin with all the acquisitions, and it shows. I'm sure one reason they chose to go with a basic design was the long render times they had with the Renderon package. It would take them hours to render one 5 second animation. That might work when you have 12 stations, but when you have 60 of them, that doesn't scale well. If they were sticking with the Renderon package, it might literally take weeks of nonstop rendering to do all the station-specific graphics (opens, weather opens, etc) for the 8 Tribune stations they just picked up. This package was designed to scale quickly. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this package (such as the interstitial graphics) is built in Viz (and/or Chyron because apparently that's sticking around now) and deploying it only involves swapping out a few layers in After Effects for opens. These opens would take a few minutes to render on a low-end PC. That's really another reason 3D is falling out of favor. It's tens of thousands of dollars of additional expenses when you factor in the need for expensive software licenses and render clusters, for what? Some shiny graphics that have fallen out of favor?

KGUN is in the biggest need of a graphics revamp. They're still using Journal-era L3's

She’s more like heading home. Her husband has moderately high end restaurants (which are great) around DC and Maryland along with two restaurants at Regan National and Dulles. She was based there before she got the CTM job and she was flying herself & and kids back to DC on one of the shuttles every weekend.

Can we cut out the overtly political conversations. Save it for a different board. One or two sentences maybe okay but not what’s going on here.

It could also be that party affiliations are germane to Republicans because they tend to abuse their offices more. Democrats get more sex scandals and other out of office criminal stuff... party affiliation doesn’t amount to a hill of beans regarding who’s wife you are boning. It does matter if you gave sweetheart deals to 5 of your best buddies in exchange for campaign contributions. This bias against conservatives canard is all in your head. Katie Hill just resigned for a sex scandal and her Democratic affiliation was the first thing or nearly the first thing mentioned. Next thing will be that they only mentioned her party to save face for not mentioning it all those other times. If Conservatives feel like making things work better then they can come to the table and have a voice. Constantly whining and playing the victim and wanting nothing to happen and reading the same junk over and over about how bad they have it is really getting old. Being dragged into oblivion because 40% of the country is a supposedly persecuted conservative isn’t very much fun and as their lives continue to deteriorate for lack of investment or progress I hope they’ll use their last pennies on a mirror when they ask why it’s this way.

My personal opinion is that graphics design peaked about when HD become commonplace on local stations around America. Now, it's quickly becoming an overload of blandness and uninspired hoopla. And specifically in regards to ABC, I think WNT has decent graphics. It strongly reminds me of the early to mid 2000s when Peter Jennings was still anchoring. But their L3s aren't very impressive, I will say.

Venezuela? Yes, especially in Doral. Haiti? Yes, especially in Little Haiti. South Florida is really really diverse as there's sprinkles of everyone in each city.

The 1990s version of the WSVN Newsplex -- in Germany:

I kind of don't see CBS wanting to repeat the mistake of filling 10PM hour Monday-Friday with CBS Evening News much like a decade ago how NBC filled 10PM hour Monday-Friday with Jay Leno's failed prime-time talk show. Plus, I don't think CBS would want to cancel its news show anytime soon. Things to remember is: (1) Many TV viewers have lost faith in local and national news organizations for a multitude of reasons. (2) CBS has never fully recovered from the mid 90s affiliation switch, where CBS lost affiliates (in Atlanta, Austin, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Tampa Bay) to Fox, as well as additional switches that took place in Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Philly, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City about that same time. (3) And whether it's Scott Pelley, or Jeff Glor, or Norah O'Donnell anchoring, or if CBS were to pick a name like Shephard Smith or Ann Curry, ratings aren't going to improve overnight. This will take time.