Weeters

This. It's also not wildly technically complex. It's a bunch of big TVs, and that's perhaps one area where everything is not truly "more expensive"... Both consumer and commercial displays have come way down in price. A 75' Samsung 4K UHD HDR smart TV is slightly cheaper than it's commercial counterpart. The fabrication of the set probably cost much more than those displays did total. They also have like, a whopping total of 20 lighting fixtures, which is why it's lit so flat, and why it look underwhelming. Again, this is a trend, because good lights are still expensive (The new WABC set is lit with a lot of Skypanel S30s and S60s (linking the new version because the old version is on clearance sale), with the money WABC spent on just lighting their set, they could have probably bought the KHQ set 10 times over.) and KHQ doesn't have the money to do that. They seem to have dumped their conventional lighting fixtures (non-LED and non-Fluorescent) visible in that last broadcast from the old set, because those are also expensive to operate. Yeah, it doesn't look as good as it could if they had a massive big-market budget. But this isn't a big market, it's Spokane, and it's still a nice modern look.

This is a fine set for Spokane and market 73. Folks, I think we need to collectively come to the terms with the fact that the money is gone, everything is more expensive, and design trends are different than they were 20 years ago.

If you're wondering the "why" for this project... Mainly why it took this long... The exact thing I expected they were waiting for happened. Early last year, plans were released for a major redevelopment of the area surrounding the current building. Of course, they were released before the move was announced, and the current building is notched out of the development, but that means their property suddenly became a lot more valuable. WFAA will likely be next, the city of Dallas just bought the old Dallas Morning News building (after the proposed redevelopment fell apart) to secure more land for a $3.7 billion redevelopment of the convention center, which is heavily focused on redeveloping the exact area that WFAA occupies.

So, I actually think there might be something here. Maybe. It's a hunch. Maybe I'm wrong! But, allow me to speculate for a moment. WSVN is in a very unique situation right now. They have plans to build a brand new facility, and their current owners are developing the real estate for both the current facility and the future one. They own the land at both sites, in fact, the future facility is on empty land they've held for years, and the current facility is on land they want to develop into expensive condos. The condo development wouldn't be planned if they didn't think it would make money, and it will probably make enough to pay for the new WSVN facility several times over. This whole new facility project has always had the underlying motive of Sunbeam wanting the station off the current land because they see the value in it, and they have a lot of empty land in Miramar that they can plop it on, to get it out of the way. The common saying is "Disney doesn't buy stations", but there should be an asterisk there. Disney doesn't buy stations because Bob Iger is convinced most are overpriced. Sunbeam has a very interesting position here. Their primary business is, at this point, property development. Building a building just to lease it out is what they do. It seems to me, like they could be in a position to sell WSVN at a "discount", with the remainder being more or less made up via a long-term lease on the new facility. This would be a huge win for Sunbeam. They can develop land that has sat idle for years, and have it immediately start making money, from a tenant that you really wouldn't have to worry about going bankrupt. They'd still make money off the station for years to come, and best of all, it'd be a predictable amount. It is notable that, despite the project being announced some time ago, the parcel the new facility will sit on was untouched as late as October of last year, over a year after it was announced and approved by the city. What's the delay? The fact we're hearing about this now means there's probably been talks about this for months. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Sunbeam put the brakes on the project in order to provide the ability to any possible future owner (I think FOX is also in play here) to make changes before the construction begins. I'm not sure we're done hearing about this "deal"... I don't think Disney would settle for a .2, if there weren't other things in the works. I've been saying since the new facility was announced that this seems ripe for them to sell the station and make money off the lease, and this seems to be the perfect opportunity to do so.

The whole point of streaming/digital outlets is to reach people who are not watching traditional, OTA TV.

I skimmed the thread too fast! There wasn't any discussion so I suppose it was still overlooked... That said I've updated the post. It sure does seem like that. I believe the big studios where Springer and them taped were also on the second floor? The third floor listing shows that part of the building as "Open to Below".

An update to the previous report that NBC was downsizing their space in NBC Tower... Not sure when it went up, but the landlord for NBC Tower has begun to advertise what seem to be the spaces WMAQ will be leaving. Curiously, is the Loopnet listing description for Suite 100. Additionally, space on the third floor and fifth floor is being advertised. A number of building permits were issued last summer/fall for the 2nd-4th floors as well. Universal has ceased advertising the production studios within the tower. I'm pretty certain it is, but Is someone more familiar with WMAQ's space able to explain if the space being advertised is the current newsroom?

It probably will. It's mostly just all the Morning Blend people, and they'd still be in the building at that time anyways. Same goes for staffing. They had a 3PM news before because the PM production crew is already in the building by that point (and god forbid they have any time during their workday where they're not producing live television). It's a sunk cost on the production side, in the studio at least. The added costs to produce What's Brewing Wisconsin will probably be another producer and the additional host, and maybe paying for part of a photographer's day. The real question is whether or not "Morning Blend but in the afternoon" is a viable product. Morning Blend prints money, but I'm not sure if you can have lightning strike twice four hours later.

Similar to the WABC set, it might be best to hold judgement until we see it with the lights on!!! N4 was also partially recycled from a set that existed before the fire. Most of the current set is video wall, including the main background.

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Those are part of the LED wall.

Something I realized reading this is that this is really kind of the first complete building in NYC built for television (at this scale at least.) ABC's current facility is a mishmash of buildings, including one over 100 years old and formerly used as a horse riding facility (similar to WBBM's old facility.) NBC is in old radio studios, CBS is in an old dairy, WNYW is in an old opera house. WPIX is in an office tower. ABC had no real constraints designing the studio spaces here. This is about as good as it can get in NYC.

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.