Weeters

It looks like it took about 2 minutes to throw that graphic together.

Probably a bit of that, and a bit of maneuvering for more political ad bucks. We are getting close to another election cycle.

This. @24994J is illustrating a point here that the 10pm anchor lineups are a revolving door (chair?) of talent. But a thread like "10PM Anchors in Your Market" is a no-go. Also, I should add, hijacking a normal thread to insert irrelevant lists is also not good. We don't need a list of other station's 10pm anchor history.

I'm with Eat on this one. Companies have gotten away with some fines for much, much worse than "lying to the FCC." PG&E has blown up neighborhoods and burned down cities in California (killing people in the process) because of their negligence, and all they've gotten are some (big) fines and had to go through bankruptcy. Sinclair is going to get their knuckles slapped with a ruler, have to pay some fines, and maybe say "we're deeply sorry." This isn't going to be some Enron-level scandal.

That wouldn't be fair to KGUN. The Journal package turns ten years old in a few weeks... I know they haven't had it that long, but still. It needs to go.

Yes. Literally any of those are an improvement from United. Any of them. Even Sinclair.

United is actually getting out of everything. It sold its last newspaper (The Kenosha News) a few weeks ago. They've slowly been selling off their other newspaper properties over the past few years. What a terrible position they were in. Small town newspapers and TV stations with pretty much no digital properties and lackluster digital for the stuff they did own.

There were rumors of a few years ago of a chopper share between WTMJ and WISN that would have gotten them both (and possibly WITI and WDJT if they wanted to buy in) a HD chopper... Hopefully that avenue is explored again.

Probably not even going to bother going up against the Super Bowl.

I believe CNN Newsource is the source of much of that video, too. Services like that are basically the only way stations can get "out of market" sports feeds.

At least this station actually has a translator to fill in the city it claims to be in.

KMAX/Good Day Sacramento anchor Marianne McClary has announced her retirement, and the announcement video features some old KCPQ, KTNV, and KPWB/KMAX clips. Most interesting to me is the revelation that KTNV used the angled bars graphics package that WTMJ used in the late 80's and early 90's.

That list at the bottom is the one that's been on their website for months. The line "According to Wotila, NewsNet has signed up 25 affiliates so far since it launched 28 days ago." is questionable since it seems to say "NewsNet added 25 affiliates in 28 days" when it really seems to mean "NewsNet signed on 28 days ago with 25 affiliates." And they're still insisting KAAP is in San Francisco. Quite a lot of fake news coming from the "facts" network.

Filling large chunks of time with "Around our Area" was extremely common early on with MI News 26. I remember watching and realizing the bulk of the programming was not news, but the same 4-6 "area" segments airing every two hours on a loop all day for weeks on end. It was especially concerning when they'd be referencing an event "coming up" that happened in the past. It might work locally, I don't think it's going to work nationally.

I think the industry's collective obsession with having some sort of interchangeable branding on the screen at all times (Scripps, Hearst, CBS, etc.) means these 16:9/4:3 hybrid packages will stick around for the time being. There's no real reason to make the text go all the way to the edge of the screen, and moving it into the old 4:3 area opens up space to jam some branding graphic next to it.

That corner of the newsroom has been an open "studio" since the building was built. The current set just enclosed the space and forced the newsroom employees to look at the back of a set all day. It's extremely tiny and oddly shaped, and if I recall correctly some of the weird curved plasterwork from the original newsroom design still exists above it. They've been pretty hard set on keeping the two actual studios free for outside production. If they DID build a new set, they'd probably have to build a temp set in one of them while the newsroom "studio" was replaced. Also, you can totally rent monitors like the ones behind the desk, so those replacements from last year could totally be getting replaced by a LED wall.

Renderon has a history of reusing previous packages. The old Journal package was recycled from an older WDIV package. It was just kind of simplified so Journal could rebuild it for VizRT.

In this case, I was told they made up an internal document outlining the kind of stuff they were looking for, with a couple of examples (surprise, it was all the flat, Tegna-style graphics packages in the industry right now.) That goes out to companies that respond with some proposals. They then pick whatever proposal works best. That's how we end up with all those set design proposals people like to come on here with and post about, saying how they found what's totally going to be WXXX's next set, posted three years ago on some random guy's website.

We're barely a week into the year. If there will be new graphics this year, they've got plenty of time. Rumor is they didn't even start the preliminary process of getting new graphics until late fall. So it probably wouldn't happen until summer or fall 2019 at the earliest.

You should just be able to link them. I linked mine and didn’t have to leave the Discord. Could you show me a screenshot of what’s going on?

The power service entry points are actually on the opposite side, which would be a perfect place for something like one of these. They could probably work out a deal with a local electrician to install it in exchange for advertising. The MI News 26 Storm Centered (literally) powered by Irv's Electrical Service. It's an, uh, interesting cramped setup, from what I have seen. The "studio" is just in a large office and production control and master control look like they could have been closets at some point. Almost everything in the "studio" is touching some other part of the set. The lighting is just a bunch of clamp-on construction lights jammed into the drop ceiling grid Again, I feel that the Newsnet money could have probably been better invested in building up WMNN before trying to be Ted Turner 2.0. Turner grew WTCG/WTBS for 10 years before launching CNN, and he got there while basically giving the FCC a middle finger over how much "news" he had to air on the station. WMNN has been on for six years and hasn't changed much. Everything about this seems rushed.

The graphics are fine. It's the content and delivery that screams low budget (and has since the start.) Newsnet (along with WMNN) is exactly what I would expect from "news nerds" starting their own channel. There seems to be more attention (and money) spent on presentation (graphics, music, image campaigns, live trucks, etc.) than anything else. The number of stories I've seen on WMNN that are lengthy VOs over maps or a single still image is too high to count. WMNN has switched news music packages so frequently in the few years it's existed that I imagine Eric has his Stephen Arnold rep on speed dial. Weather is still being done with Apple Keynote, but at least they have 3 ENG trucks. A few months ago, WMNN published a Facebook Live stream for severe weather coverage where midway through they lose power and end up off-air. They have to run extension cords out to one of their several completely unnecessary live trucks to use its generator, when they could have probably bought a small, permanently installed natural gas/propane generator for less than one of those trucks. All the money spent on Newsnet could have probably expanded WMNN into a more serious news operation, but instead now we just have a national version of it. I have checked in on this operation since the day they signed on, and all I can say is they have at least started focusing more on the little amount of news in their area. At least they have reigned in filling the wheel with "around our area" interviews with the local Goodwill store manager. I really hope Newsnet isn't the point where they jumped the shark.

Not much on the live stream unless you like watching the same two promos repeatedly between spots for medical equipment (covered by Medicare, at no cost to you!) and tax debt resolution. The live stream also keeps cutting out for me every few minutes. It apparently uses an in-band DTMF tone based control system (judging by the four tones that aired over an ID just now) presumably to trigger things at affiliates, which I didn't know was still a thing in the year 2018.

DSLRs really cannot be used in live production. Due to tax regulations they actually cannot run for more than 30 minutes continuously. Video cameras and still photo cameras have different regulations on them that kick in when they can record more than 30 minutes continuously. That kind of robot is more often found in film than in television, though I know these are more common in TV overseas. Scripps is probably looking into them because they're really good with virtual sets.

If affiliates wanted to program an extra hour in the morning that badly, the 4th hour of Today wouldn't exist or it would be optional. I'm not sure why people on here think the affiliates want an extra hour of time to fill in the mornings. They don't. That hour has always belonged to the network. Before the 4th hour of Today, it was the Soap Opera "Passions". Believe me, the network wouldn't have decided on this without input from the Affiliates. Input that went "No, please fill that for us, we don't want to fill it ourselves."