Weeters

The website and live stream has been shut down, with the website displaying the following message:

The WGTA one is still on the station's schedule, unless someone else is producing it now.

The Coastal Alaska agreement seems to have ended some time in 2023. They were also producing "Georgia News at Nine" on WGTA and I'd be curious to know what happened there last night.

A TwitterX post from a former freelancer has some ideas about why this happened.

The "OG" WMNN stream is currently stuck on a loop of a few seconds of a sports report (something something HLS) with a 9:22AM CT/10:22 ET/etc. timestamp. Also, Remington Hernandez has also confirmed the closure on his Instagram. I've said quite a bit about NewsNet/MI News 26 over the years... It's unfortunate it ended this way. I thought the original MI News 26 idea was decent, I just don't think Cadillac had enough going on to really necessitate it. I had a bad feeling about the change to NewsNet and thought it was unfortunate so many resources got dumped into it vs. the localized version. I don't remember seeing much localized content on the other "O&O" stations, which was a little sad to see. I think they lost their way with the national concept, and it unfortunately caused the whole thing to crash down. Like the launch of the SportsNews Highlights channel just made zero sense to me. They seemed to be going after a market that no longer exists. All of their content was available from 1000 different sources, why would I bother with finding their channel on some odd low-power station that I probably can't even receive anyways? Hopefully, there's a chance for Eric Wotila to reclaim the Cadillac stations and pick up at least some of the pieces, and get some of those who lost their jobs today back to work.

Sean O'Flaherty, WTMJ (and Scripps') longest-tenured employee, passed away on Friday, at the age of 74. He had been with the station for 53 years, holding the position of Newsroom Operations Manager for the last several decades. https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/longtime-tmj4-news-employee-sean-oflaherty-dies-at-74 Sean had started out as a reporter at the station, some of his packages are available online on UW Milwaukee's digital archives of WTMJ's film collection. One package that's not on there is coverage of a failed hot air balloon race in 1975, the crew of which coincidentally included the balloon pilot from WITI's "Look up to TV6" promo from a few years prior. A sad loss not only for WTMJ, but the entire Milwaukee market. Sean also moonlit (literally) as the station's weekend overnight photographer, and was well known at the other stations in town, even by those who never worked at WTMJ.

Kind of crazy that they've kept the "bones" of the old "newsroom" set all this time, and that this new set is entirely within what was the "newsroom"... I wonder what they'll do with the rest of the studio.

WTMJ has updated the set yet again. Not sure when it happened, but sometime in the past 3 weeks, replacing the vertical monitor array behind the anchor desk with a much larger wraparound LED wall that follows the contour of the set. Not surprising, this now gives the same "look" as WITI on a lot of the desk shots. WITI also uses a very lightly effected skyline shot behind their anchors (especially in the mornings on the Studio B set) and the result of this change on WTMJ makes them almost identical. But the changes don't stop there, the Morning Blend set was refreshed as well. The wood textures were all replaced, and some other textures were covered over with the new wood. The strange part is, they didn't change the wood texture on everything, so the rolling monitor carts have the old redder wood on them. I'm pretty sure those skyline panels are still the original ones that went in with the set.

The discussion for the new WPLG set has been moved here.

I was looking at the DDG website, and realized WAGA is also using the same general design, just with more plexiglass: Kind of just seems to be a stock design for them. From the top, it kind of looks like a shard of broken glass, so if we're going to give it a name, I propose "the shard"

WTMJ got the "KDKA desk" brand new a few years ago, so perhaps it's just popular within the company. I wouldn't be surprised if that set order was paired back with the "neighborhood news" initiative. The studio looks huge. I will hold my judgement until we see more, but at the end of the day, so what if the set is more "minimalist"? The whole "neighborhood news" initiative is supposed to get talent out of the studio, invalidating the need for the massive sets with 1000 video screens (that consultants, set designers, and bloggers love to claim are for "storytelling", but how much "storytelling" is happening when a reporter is standing in place, fronting a package with a "BODY IN A BOX" graphic behind them?)

This might just be production music (or different music pack entirely) with a EWN cut laid over it. The weird "signature" at 1:12 would point to this.

No, what I'm saying is that the megagroups have resources that the smaller ones do not, and the megagroups are better situated to rapidly deal with stuff like disaster recovery as a result. Stations that don't have the same resources (i.e. WINK) get stuck pointing a camera at a laptop while their transmitter wails in the background. Even when WVUE flooded during Katrina, they had WALA to fall back on. They briefly used the KUHT control room before WFAA brought in their production truck, and eventually they rented fiber to run their shows entirely out of a secondary production control room at WFAA. Master Control was rapidly moved to WFAA as well. KUSA also did some stuff for them as the WFAA setup was patched together. The only thing they did with the KUHT equipment was switch cameras in the first few days, everything else was done from Dallas or Denver. They only used the KUHT cameras until the WFAA truck showed up, and they only used the WFAA cameras until they pulled their studio cameras (which were moved to the second floor as the building started to flood) out of the old building. The Dallas arrangement continued for many months until they got a trailer built out to "Tegna specifications" and brought production back locally. Save for the first day or so when they used the KUHT control room, all KUHT did was provide studio space.

I don't have to like what Lougee is saying, but I don't disagree with it. I am quite concerned that some of these smaller groups and/or solo owners will start to go under, simply because they do not have the resources the big ones have. Resources that range from disaster recovery (look at how Tegna propped up KHOU when their facility flooded, then look at what happened with WINK under the same scenario) to engineering resources to shared services like graphics or Traffic or Master Control. Like I have said before, I believe this is precisely the argument that's going to make things start to change, and whether that change is good or bad is up for debate.

For what it's worth, I don't necessarily think it's the solution as much as I think it is the likely outcome. We, and the FCC, can continue to dream that all these local investors are going to come out of the woodwork to buy up these stations, but we continue to see the opposite of that happening as the small, local owners continue to sell out (i.e. WBBH). Some of these stations have already sold off their towers, and I really wonder how long it will be until you start seeing companies wanting to sell off the transmitter itself... Setting up something similar to the UK's broadcasting system where the transmission is contracted out to Arqiva. Especially as the bean counters at these groups love not owning things, and nobody seems particularly interested in doing anything useful with ATSC 3.0... It might be more "economical" to go through another round of spectrum auctions with the caveat that some will remain for television, and Crown Castle or whoever can buy that up and rent out the space to everyone else. We're already kind of seeing this with the post-repack channel shares out there, and ATSC 3 is primed to consolidate much of a market into a handful of frequencies.

The race is usually blacked out live locally.

I'm just gonna put this in the most blunt way possible: I do not expect "the cap" to survive under any political regime for much longer. It is a dinosaur. You can make a convincing case to either "side" as to why it needs to go away. It's been 20 years since Congress last meddled with it, it's just going to take one of the not-Sinclair groups to make a stink about it to the right people. It's a dated method of calculating "reach" in a world where everyone is connected to everything. I've theorized before that this isn't going to start from a company wanting to buy more stations, but a company trying to sell stations and not finding a buyer. Sinclair begging to raise the cap so they can buy more hits a lot differently than, say, Disney saying they can't sell the O&O group because nobody who wants to buy it can because of the cap. The ownership cap on television stations is the least of Biden's worries. I really don't think the general public cares all that much.

Things are getting a little off track here... Hearst rarely buys stations, and just blew $220 million on a station in a market where $220 million is a... questionable amount to pay for a TV station. I'm not so sure they'd still be in a buying mood, and I'm also not sure why people see this as the golden opportunity for Hearst to enter the market... This company has had operations in New York City since long before anyone even thought of the concept of television. I feel like they have had numerous better opportunities in much better market conditions to make that happen. In all likelihood, a forced sale of WPIX would probably result in Nexstar dumping some underperforming stations (I'm sure they have a few) to get them back under the cap to own WPIX outright. They've invested far too much in WPIX to let it go elsewhere.

This is probably a tough one to answer because a lot of stations would do some kind of "news" broadcast (definitely nothing like what we'd call a "newscast") shortly after signing on. WFMY claims the "oldest and longest running morning show" so it's not necessarily the first. That credit probably goes to whoever decided to sign on at 7am or earlier first. I know a lot of stations wanted to try and duplicate Today locally after it debut in 1952, so WFMY in 1957 also seems quite late in that regard. I imagine other stations tried something, it didn't work out very well, and they just focused on other things and the attempt was forgotten. On that note, a lot of stations have this internal lore that they did something "first", and it's almost always inaccurate or with an asterisk. I feel like there's a good half dozen "first television studio"s out there because they're simplifying a more precise claim like "first building with a room converted for television use" or "first building built from the ground up with a television studio" (I think WTMJ claims this) or "first building built exclusively for television use".

Must just not be listening close enough. They're on some of the stinger transition animations.

If stations have these "fans" who are concerned about their branding, music, and graphics, then it stands to reason that the less popular (at least around here) newscast formats we've seen lately also have fans. Somebody's watching Scrippscasts, somebody is watching Tegna stations. Maybe that's because they like what they see. If viewers "cared about tradition" the way some of us like to think, we wouldn't be seeing 45% of the news audience disappearing into thin air.

I think the hyper-fixation on brand and music changes being some kind of driver for viewers to "get upset" and stop watching the station is kind of absurd, when you consider all the other things that can change in a TV news broadcast that the station really doesn't have much control over. Talent is a more important draw for viewers than music and brands, and retirements don't often move the ratings needle much. WPVI didn't see a massive ratings drop after Jim Gardner left, despite his status in the market. The same is looking true at WGN after Tom Skilling left, and I can't imagine a music change or branding would actually lead people to change the channel permanently. It's not 1996 anymore. I'd also like to point out that a lot of these old 90's era "people were MAD!!!" claims come from newspaper columnists at the time. We cannot know for certain what they embellished on to make their column more interesting. "People were upset" that a station changed their branding the same way people get upset that Judge Judy was interrupted for severe weather. This doesn't mean the whole market was "rioting in the streets" like people around these parts like to think would happen if WPVI modernized MCTYW. On that subject, the 1996 orchestral MCTYW was arguably just bad and was an abrupt, noticeable change. WPVI has been using new cuts of MCTYW from different composers for years at this point (there have been some new ones since the graphics debut!) and I have a hunch nobody but people involved with this community have noticed, largely because they don't sound as wildly different as the orchestral package did.

Even though this was kind of an "emergency" rebranding, that was a purposeful little nod to the site's history. That, and the fact that the media we talk about is growing beyond "TV" in the traditional sense. I think there's something wonky going on with the caching (we're behind Cloudflare now, something else I've wanted to do for a while) that is causing this, I'm going to look into it further.

General reminder that the "Action News" trademark is owned by Cox (and "Eyewitness News" is owned by CBS!) and stations have to pay to use them. Why should Scripps keep paying for a brand name for a format that hasn't been properly used in decades? I know folks have a weird affinity for these two brands, but come on. This is, by far, a better logo than some of the other Scripps rebrands over the past few years. Why should they pay Cox for this name? Why should they pay Nexstar for The CW? These are all competitors. People love to think talent at these stations treat each other like this is Anchorman, and while that's not true, there's no good reason to give your competition money for a tired old brand or a second-rate network affiliation.

Hello everyone, I'm sure many of you are wondering what's been going on with the site for the last couple weeks. While I don't even have all the answers, I figured it'd be useful to explain a bit about what happened and where we're going from here. First, a little history. I have never been in control of the tvnewstalk.net domain. Many years ago (we're talking like, at least 10 years back,) I ultimately inherited the responsibility of operating the site while a former administrator owned the domain. This, generally, was uneventful, except for a few instances where the domain registration lapsed and I had to poke them to get it renewed. This just kind of became the way things were, ownership of the domain never really came up, and slowly they stopped coming around the community. Fast forward to 2024, when in late February/early March, anyone trying to visit the site via tvnewstalk.net was greeted with a page reading "Account Suspended". As far as I know, this was the "old" server (that was still operational, serving only to redirect visits to tvnewstalk.net to forums.tvnewstalk.net) going unpaid. Since the DNS for the domain still pointed forums.tvnewstalk.net to the server I control, the site stayed online and accessible. This issue had happened before, and to my recollection, resolved itself without me having to alert anybody. I was also getting quite busy with work, so I chose to just let it go. Since everything had forever been at forums.tvnewstalk.net, impacts on traffic from the redirect not working were extremely minor. At the end of March, another problem arose. TVNewsTalk.net dropped off the Domain Name System. My assumption is this is related to the earlier "Account Suspended" issue, I guess the domain was registered through the host, and they removed it from their DNS when the bill (presumably) went unpaid. For most users, access to TVNT was cut off. This, however, happened slowly, as DNS servers took some time to update to process the removal. At least until a few days ago, we were still seeing people using the site via T-Mobile. When the domain dropped off DNS, I reached out to another one of our former administrators, who I had gone through the last time I had to contact the domain owner. They attempted to make contact, and got no response. There was beginning to be a lot of noise in the community wondering what happened to the site, and there was even some sort of unauthorized crowdfunding campaign spun up. It was at this point I decided to take matters into my own hands, registered LocalNewsTalk.net, and began the process of moving the forum over. That's where we're at now. The site has been transferred over. There are still a few loose ends to tie up, but otherwise we're back in action. I do not know what will become of the TVNewsTalk.net domain that we've called home for almost 20 years. Perhaps it will return, some day, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be here at localnewstalk.net. Things still being worked on: Email (Registration, Password Resets): Email has been changed over to the localnewstalk.net domain and should be working as intended. Check spam folder if you don't see an expected message. Google Login: Changes submitted for review by Google Trust and Safety. Might be working. Facebook Login: In Progress. Need to complete extra steps to re-enable this. Discord Login: Should be working. Forum Theme: There are a small handful of broken things due to an update I ran while the site was unavailable. Please feel free to leave any questions or concerns you may have below. -Weeters