Weeters

Tomorrow! Really though, most of the time the debut date for new sets is on or right before the start of the next sweeps period. Late April is a good early guess for ALL the new sets that are under construction right now.

Raise up what? Just because Scripps does poorly overall doesn't mean it can't have ABC stations that do well... I'm sure not every one of Hearst's ABC stations is a market leader either, and Scripps and Hearst own nearly the same amount of ABC stations...

WFTS is hiring a "Local Program Producer" and "Local Talk Show Host". It's a "non-news" show with the "primary purpose to generate sales revenue". My prediction from August 2014 may be coming true.

The strangely colored lower-third top bar has appeared on another station, signifying that WPTV is now using VizRT:

Nitrogen is the gas usually used to provide the pressure needed in camera pedestals. You can use compressed air, but nitrogen works better I guess.

It's extremely unlikely they would use this design. Again, designers generally don't release stuff like this unless the project is finished or cancelled.

More renders are on the designer's site, where it's listed as "Concept - Unbuilt" http://www.provost-studio.com/wgn Notice the date on one of them: March 15, 2015. This was probably part of the pitch for the Chicago Magazine/Red Eye Magazine webcast set the same designer delivered to Tribune a few months later. If you look closely, the giant street map on the WGN renderings appears to be similar to the one on the webcast set.

Y'know... There's probably a greater chance that the current ABC O&O's get sold to Scripps than it is that the Scripps ABC affiliates become O&O's. Just sayin'.

There's a room that could be a studio, but last I heard it isn't fully built it out. There was no lighting grid installed and it was mostly used for storage at first before they found out that Tribeca Flashpoint College was willing to rent it out. Here's a music concert being preformed in it in 2011. AFAIK it's the only other television studio space they have, which would mean moving the news set into it would come at the loss of a studio for production/commercial work. The indoor studio was included in the new facility because they intended on leasing that studio out. In the storage photo above you can see whoever uploaded the picture was told during their tour that Dr. Oz might have started up there before they decided to house that show in New York. At this point in time I think it's a good idea to dismiss the 2009-era rumors that they were desperately trying to get out of the streetside space. A lot of "cost cutting" ideas were being floated by all the major players in local TV around that time. In most cases you got centralization like graphics and/or master control. I feel like the whole "leasing the streetside studio space" was probably people at WBBM trying to impress corporate with "innovative ideas to cut costs". At the very least, their agreement with the city to have "entertainment space" or whatever in the streetside space won't expire until 2018 or 2019. They're pretty much stuck there until then no matter how badly they want to get out.

It's unfair to blame WMAQ for a lot of this when they had very little to do with organizing this event other than televising it. It was organized by a company called Arena Partners, LLC and WMAQ simply picked up the broadcast rights to it. The timing issue would have been there regardless of who was broadcasting it, be it WMAQ or WLS or Public Access. I'm sure next year, the organizers will provide more padding between the musical acts and the star raising thing.

Wonder if the Journal stations got a different version last year then. WTMJ was using "Copyright 2015, Scripps" since April 1st.

The Union is liekly why they're in there to begin with. I presume the group of insert studios can be overseen by one or two engineers/techs who would be there whether or not Nightly was using one. Instead of paying a group of camera operators and stagehands and a lighting person to do a show in 3A, they can just use the insert studio techs who would be there anyways. Brian Williams fought to keep robotic cameras out of the Nightly News studio, so this was probably the outcome of that fight: they'll keep humans behind the cameras but they won't pay for people to come in on the weekends. That has more to do with the control room than the studio. As far as I know, they use the same control room on the weekends as they do during the week.

The shades have been down all day, I saw they were closed yesterday too. The problem I could see is that any chanting that may start up may make it's way on-air. I know the studio is fairly soundproofed, but it's not 100%...

There are a large number of protesters outside of the studio right now. Was this the case in the earlier shows? I wonder if they may relocate to the auxiliary studio tonight if they're still there at 10.

The only people who know Nightly is done from the insert studio on the weekends are some of NBC's NY employees and users of this website. 99.99% of viewer's don't, so why not? It saves a bunch of money.

Lots of magazines are printed regionally (It's cheaper to distribute them that way). So it is possible to buy an ad in a "national" magazine that runs only in one part of the country.

Wonder if that has something to do with http://www.ftvlive.com/todays-news/2015/11/9/scripps-sells-ads-to-look-like-news

Yes it is, but they're not very transparent about that for some reason. And conveniently the infinite scrolling prevents you from clicking the footer links to the terms of service that state it's operated by Scripps. I guess at the very least this site separates the utter garbage that is the click-bait social media drivel-passed-off-as-journalism this site is chock full of from the actual news sites.

I have reason to believe WFTS has switched over to VizRT based on a tip I received and some video evidence I posted below. It looks like this happened a couple weeks ago. Look closely at the lower thirds in this video: And the "before": Nothing too exciting. It helps to see the videos on YouTube so they're bigger and you can make out more detail.

All the (dumb) Journal web initiatives (Now Trending, Nashville Edge, and WISports.com to name a few) have been ended. They stopped the segments too, afaik.

That's pretty normal in the industry... It probably came from CNN Newsource. Producers usually don't give a shit whether or not a "sister station" did a package on the same story... They just grab the first one they see or will readily admit the other station's is a better package.

That looks like it might be a "promo swap" spot. Promo Swaps are where affiliates get to opt-out of airing a network promo (usually during primetime) and use that time as they please (local commercials or station promotion) in exchange for airing a different network promo somewhere else (usually during things like syndicated programming or news). It might be from the station's "Co-Op" promo inventory as well, where the network provides content for the station to air on local radio and cable.

Also if you were curious what happened to the old desk... [MEDIA=flickr]21269483763[/MEDIA] It's now in the NBC Experience store for people to take photos at.

Towards the end of Maddow tonight, an alternative ticker design came up for hurricane coverage. It was divided into 4 sections with storm information. It looked like it would be a "flipper" but I did not see it do anything (wasn't really paying close attention). Maddow won't get axed, and Hayes just won an Emmy so I can't imagine they'd throw him out either. Wouldn't really miss Lawrence O'Donnell though. He's just... Dry? I don't know how else to put it.

The traffic ticker at both stations in question is generated by Newsroom Solutions hardware and fetches data from various sources on the web, either public data or from a subscription service. The station can't fix it themselves afaik, they have to get Newsroom Solutions to fix it.