Leaderboard

No matter how many people beat this long-dead horse, Morning Express is not coming back. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not six months from now.

This looks nice.. They needed a huge upgrade after Gray dumped them!

Time to just bring Morning Express and Robin and be done with it, instead of trying to throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. She was probably the most likeable person CNN had on-air. In today's divided and chaotic times, a lighter and more fun show might work in the morning. Might as well call her back if the next change fails.

"NewsNation: Where One Of These Retreads Will Get Us Eyeballs, Right?"

Well it seems like someone has been reading this forum (or sick of the copyright strikes on YouTube) as they've replaced the bumper music for the weather with long cuts of NewsOne. Just doing a quick check-in of MyTV53 News post Austin Reed, he is still apparently occasionally contributing an evergreen segment, or it is a repeat from the archives. In addition to Emma Ott leaving, all the other reporters, Sheila Gaytan, Valentina Saldana, and Eric Walker, have left and so it is a two person group, and Geovonna looks like she is phoning it in with "tonight's big story" as a tease (literally) and lots of Democracy Now and government propaganda content (Voice of America and PR videos from school district and local government YouTubes). I'm honestly not sure why they even bother, Austin really was industrious at getting stories and reworking press releases from police departments and small businesses into content somewhat worthy of a newscast. Neither of the two remaining staff seem to want to exert the same level of effort. We know that Chocola is cheap but at some point, you have to wonder whether the fuzzy feelings of running a local newscast is worth putting out a product that makes high school newscasts look good.

The new KPRC set is lit horribly. Awful actually. It doesnt even look modern with the weird early '00s curved "iPhone-esque" elements. Not good. Downgrade.

NBC Sports California has hired Jenny Cavnar as their new Athletics play-by-play announcer. She becomes the first female lead play-by-play announcer in MLB history, and only the third in the four major leagues.

Here is KAKE’s new graphics package

https://tvnewscheck.com/business/article/tvnewscheck-presses-pause/ Here's hoping this is a temporary thing. The industry is such a mess, that even this stalwart is feeling the pain. Now that i'm "retired" from TV, I still read their updates twice daily, along with FTVLive, and any other update from this site. Even TVSpy and their related operations are largely paywalled, so the news about TV is going to be harder to find now.

KAKE-TV in Wichita Kansas has debuted a new set as of this morning at 11am as well as a new graphics package.

Here’s a couple of more pictures from KAKE First Alert Meteorologist Brittney Foster.

Amen to that whenever I go up to Wichita to see family I always watched KAKE and absolutely hated the previous set I’m also glad that the weatherplex is semi back with two weather pods and the big monitors.

KNDO 9/21/1988, NewsCenter during the Olympics PS - Those KIRO clips from the 1970s are amazing!! There's tons of JP Patches clips on that YT channel too!

“The Cube” (angled video wall) and the 9-monitor array next to it are both recycled from the last set. This was done on the cheap.

Very underwhelming, especially for Graham which has some good looking stations. They should have taken a page from sister station WJXT whose set looks way better. IMO, stations need to tone down the video walls, quit the furniture minimalism and get some physical set pieces.

According to Houston blogger Mike McGuff a desk will be featured on all newscasts but 6 and 10pm.

I assure you the competition doesn't care a singular bit about KPRC's new studio.

WCAU Channel 10 News 1980 KOMU Newscenter 8 1997 KMIZ ABC 17 News promos 1997 WNYW FOX News at 7 1987

I had a similar thought this morning that Morning Express would have been perfect for the 7-9/10 show on CNN Max and HLN. It was already an Atlanta based morning show and would have brought more consistency to Max over of the Walker/Whitfield/Acosta shared block. The schedule changes aren’t that dramatic. In the early 2000s Daybreak ran 5-7 and American Morning ran 7-10. It’s only an hour later than the 4-6 and 6-9 schedule from the mid-late 2010s. While it feels weird to get rid of Early Start and have News Central at 7, I can see the logic. 5-7 is for the workers who are getting ready to be in the office by 8. 7-10 is for the late starters, families, and folks already at work. You aren’t going to win the family crowd watching Today or GMA or win back the partisan politics crowd watching Morning Joe or F&F. That leaves you with doing just the news. The only thing I don’t like is that the News Central graphics are a bit cold for 7am.

The best thing CNN could do is bring back Morning Express with Robin Meade and make it their morning show. Sure, it was originally on HLN, but it was incredibly successful - probably more so than a lot of the shows on CNN, and had in many occurrences rated much better than New Day. To this day I still cannot understand why it got the cut. These latest changes are not going to pan out well for CNN.

Yeah pretty damn bad. No desk?

WEEK made the switch at 5pm today

Bill Ritter doing the Sunday 11pm news tonight. He wasn't on at 6. Can't be because of high viewership, since ABC didn't have the Super Bowl. I'm assuming that WCBS will have their regular weekday crew when their news finally comes on (update - they are).

Trying to justify the purchase of what was an HD-era experimental channel otherwise bound for HC2 irrelevancy. The entire WHDT purchase made no sense from the start at all; sure, you get an overflow station, but what else can you do with that station outside guaranteeing full coverage for your subnets? The CW isn't moving, you've got WFLX and Fox already via sidecar, and the Ion flagship is just as sidecarred. I wouldn't be surprised if the purchase came with a Mar-a-Lago membership a la WLNY.

There is considerably more leeway for some of the shows. Not a complete free-for-all, but the timing of some of the shows absolutely varies market to market, and that doesn't take into consideration how things are adapted for western time zones when sports coverage is factored in. But as to zeroing in on use of "the first...." - that may be overthinking it a smidge.

I believe that started after Dabl switched from lifestyle shows to Black sitcoms. I noticed StartTV had started airing Drew while late-night channel surfing a couple of weeks after the Dabl format change.

Same energy:

Could CNN just admit they made a huge mistake & bring back Robin Meade

With all of the issues, it may have just come down to that there literally isn't much advertising revenue to support the station even in a part-time bureau state and they were completely under water with the station (over the years the transmitter alone was a money sink which kept breaking down in the core of winter). Some of these smaller markets are down to a state where they're stalled out to the point of ripping and reading from Nixle and Facebook for much of the show (because police and municipal authorities don't want them to go deeper than that and openly obstruct them from doing so) and the only original content left is weather (which can be outsourced) and sports (outside the high school football and basketball regular seasons just a vacuum of time).

Honestly, I won't be surprised and will laugh hysterically when this has consistently better ratings than News Nation.

How does this clown continue to scam viewers?

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.

I'm just amused Warner licensed the package in the same market KFSN used it for 20 years. I guess exclusivity formally ends when the license isn't renewed. Clever choice - it's familiar music to a lot of Fresno residents.

There were at one point standards for production that the industry was somewhat holding themselves to, but those have long since been thrown out the window. A one man band with a YouTube account, iPhone and a ring light pulls in millions more viewers than most local newscasts ever will. And good for them. Here's an unpopular opinion: local news doesn't have to be exclusively delivered to an audience via over-the-air television broadcasts. Fresno seems like a journalism desert, a great place for a digital local news startup. It would be much easier to churn out a few local stories daily for a digital presence than trying to figure out how to make 60 minutes of engaging television. There are fully-staffed newsrooms across the country that can't even pull this off. Honestly... it would probably be easier to find too. Meet your audience where they are. I don't think it's 8pm on MyNetworkTV. But if this is about rebuilding a personal brand, getting one's face out there and building a reel, or having a sandbox to play in - why not? No reason to be jealous about it.

My problem isn't with potentially ripping off the news music, which seems to be the main gripe here, though a superficial one. The problem is with the content. There wasn't a single original story and not a frame of newsworthy video he or anyone else shot outside of a studio. If he tried to shoot and put together his own story (or two) like a proper reporter and then put in a few "pacer" stories from police, press releases and other material that don't require too many resources, then he'd probably be able to come up with a decent 15-minute newscast. Throw in a longer interview or two and you might be able to stretch it to 30. That would be a better use of his time and his viewers' time than an hour of old content ripped from other news outlets from YouTube. Go out into the world, talk to people, and do your own story instead of repackaging everyone else's.

Completely agree. I will probably post a follow-up video on Friday to show my audience the improvements he has made, and to be fair. I don't want people to just see the first show, think I was there just to post it because it was bad, and move on. If he's making a true effort, which he is, I will spotlight that. For a one-person operation he is trying. I believe in being fair and equitable in my uploads (as the person who brought attention to this - I doubt we'd all be here talking about this if I didn't make that upload, and to be honest I almost passed on it, so I'm glad I did end up going for it). Not every station is going to be WPVI or WRC — conversely not every station is going to be WBKB or The Delta News. It's important to provide as wide of a variety as possible. Is this product better than what KFSN was providing them? No, but nobody is claiming that either (I don't even like KFSN's product to begin with - too tabloidy for me). This is the same market who has bestowed the world with TikTok/IG stars Caroline Collins and Liv Johnson (KSEE/KGPE), remember. Fresno is not exactly the mecca of quality storytelling. I think Austin is making a legitimate effort to provide a serious newscast. Like I said, he is looking around for a graphics package and so it will start to look more polished with time. If you want to blame anybody here, blame Cocola. They are a notoriously cheap company and have been since day one (they are still using outdated EAS equipment in 2022). I'm surprised they even picked up the KAIL lineup to begin with. I'm not surprised they didn't renew the KFSN agreement. I will give them credit for at least wanting to keep some type of 8pm newscast going when they could've just plugged in syndicated or paid programming (and the Cocola stations air a lot of that). I have seen much, much worse, and I will defend Austin because he is at least taking people's concerns to heart and trying to improve. He is more than aware that his product doesn't look like the O&O in town, but I'm sure if he had the money, he would. I don't think he is doing this for ratings or to make money, but doing it because he is truly passionate about it. And in this day and age when many people are exiting the industry and not missing it one bit, Austin should be commended for continuing to truly have a burning passion for journalism and local news.

I'm telling you guys, it's only going to continue to improve. It's not about ratings right now, it's about establishing a product, and allowing the audience to grow with that product. Hopefully this will continue to grow into competative news operation. In a time where big companies are shutting down newsrooms and outsourcing the newscasts to be produced from stations in neighboring markets (sometimes markets from all the way on the other side of the country), it's extremely rare to see a start up news operation, especially from a small broadcaster that doesn't have the resources that a big corporation does. Once again, there really should be nothing but support here. I think it's easy to forget that local news at its core is a public service, and that';s exactly what's being provided here; a public service.

VERY WELL SAID

Thank you, @ABC 7 Denver. One thing I noticed is how absolutely hyper-critical this fandom tends to be without actually taking a step back and trying to understand the "How"s & "Why"s behind changes in news products. Are some graphics actually bad? Yes. Some are. Is EVERY SINGLE aspect of a graphics package bad simply because you personally don't like one aspect of it? No. That's absolutely not the case. These absolute statements and severe judgements based on a few minutes of witnessing something new just leads to drama, and I'm personally getting kind of sick of it. It's not everybody, but I just find the irony kind of amazing that the whole thing behind news is being objective, yet we let our personal feelings dictate definitively that something is "bad". Not everything is 100% "Bad" MY53's news department is a one-man-band with the budget of $12 and a ham sandwich. The product will get better over time. There will be a lot of testing & figuring it out, and he deserves our support for taking on a project like this. Bottom line is, Austin is one of us. He's a total news nerd just like we are, and he's a damn good journalist. He has a challenge ahead of him that he willingly took on. We really should, as a community, be in his corner to support him, and not completely rip apart his product on the first night. In fact, we really need to learn how to sit back and observe things for a few nights before we draw our conclusions, weighing all pros & cons of certain things instead of just crapping on something the first time we see it just because it's different. TLDR: Guys, we really need to step it up and do better, instead of turning everything into a bitch-fest.

Was not sure whether to post this here or on our radio page of the forum… a broadcaster regardless… but one of the victims in the KC Super Bowl Parade shooting was a local radio host on KKFI-FM.

COMPLETELY underwhelmed. This took 2.5 months? Did Graham do this in house? The 10a show has a unique format and is heavy on in-studio interviews so I assume we will see an interview set in the morning.