Weeters

"Later this year" is what people on here were saying last year. I'll believe it when I see it.

I wouldn't be surprised if this acquisition pushes the debut of any new graphics back. Now they have MORE stations to upgrade to Viz, when it looks like they still haven't finished their legacy stations (at least KGTV is still on Chyron) Graphics should be the least of Scripps worries right now.

Prepare yourselves... Change is coming. https://www.robertfeder.com/2019/07/01/abc-7-test-visually-compelling-video-storytelling-techniques

It's going to be a fine. There is a 0% chance that any political party, despite how loud they pander to their base, is going to force one of the largest owners of a dying medium to break up.

The armchair Asbestos Inspections of the KDFW building will continue in the thread on the subject.

This. The only law is that the EAS message be aired aurally and visually.

$535 million for all of that isn't cheap, but it's definitely not what this collection of stations would have sold for 10 years ago. We're seeing a lot of these sales not because the companies necessarily have "deep pockets", but because the stations value has plummeted to the point where groups like Tegna don't have to reach nearly as deep into said pockets to buy them. Another factor is the market is beginning to level off, and investors for these mega groups are starting to feel comfortable with throwing large sums of money around again.

Almost all stations have a switcher that isn't sufficient to have every feed coming into the building available on it. A small market may only have a handful of sources, but probably has a small switcher. A large market station may have a hundred sources but a switcher that only supports 50. Most stations I've seen rely on having a block of switcher inputs (I'd say on average 10) designated for remote sources (which can be satellite feeds, microwave, bonded cellular, and in some cases infrequently used hookups within the building itself) that are fed from the facility's router, and usually these run through framesyncs to ensure they're synchronized with the switcher. Since KGO was in the middle of a show, they would already have had the remote shots they were using routed in. It's possible that they already had CNN Newsource routed to the switcher for something else that was being fed on it (Newsource fed a murder trial verdict from Southern California less than an hour prior to the crash, at the time of the crash, Newsource was offering two feeds from a House Judiciary Committee hearing regarding the Mueller report). It's possible NewsOne was feeding something else and couldn't feed WABC immediately, or in a rush to get on-air, WABC wasn't feeding NewsOne. My guess is a producer, either in the booth or in the newsroom, saw the alert come down from CNN first, and at that point their priority was to get Newsource on the air because they knew that this was being covered on it.

This. CNN Newsource was probably already routed into the switcher and the producers just went with whatever feed would put pictures of the news on-air the fastest. The last thing on their mind was "Gosh I wonder if WABC is feeding this somewhere. Let's waste time getting that feed routed into the switcher instead of taking the one already available."

Poked around and found KOVR said goodbye to one photog on-air, though mentioned "several" people were leaving, including one other photog.

It's the big open space just left of the ramp space and right of the elevator banks. That's the entirety of the block, which does actually expose another oddity about the WBBM space: the only way to get extremely large items (i.e. large set pieces that wouldn't fit in an elevator from the docks below) in and out of the studios is through one of the Block 37 mall entrances. You can see the oversized doors next to the revolving door on Google Streetview, and on that plan you can see the large double doors leading into the hallway between the studios. That mall entrance likely would have also been the audience staging area, had they ever landed the talk show or whatever they initially intended the current news studio to be used for.

KDKA's farewell specifically mentions some of the departures being in "engineering" and "master control", which probably means the Master Control Hub is finally fully online. I imagine a lot of the names are from that, and it just so happened their departure lined up with a few other people who decided to leave or retire at the same time.

The space behind the area where the jumbotron was to go is the HVAC and lighting grid space. The other studio on the same floor (the big room on the right side of the floorplan) has a catwalk along one side, though I'm not sure if the streetside studio does. A bathroom would be fairly easy to plumb, since there's a set just right of the streetside studio The shaded ares marked NIC/Not In Contract seem to refer to this plan's original use as an office space furnishing plan (They seriously couldn't dig up a better floorplan??) Obviously you don't need office furniture in the bathroom so it's marked NIC.

Surprised nobody has mentioned how Jeff Glor's last broadcast ended with a 1:45 long credit roll with an extended cut of the theme.

This is turning into a list thread. We don't need to identify every station in the graphic. Figuring out who's logo it is isn't that hard to find out.

NewscastStudio posted the plans (and I'm sure they're designing the new set) for the new building: Curious as to what they plan to do with two fairly decently sized studios and three individual control rooms. Where are all the people going to work to produce content for all the broadcasts they're apparently planning on doing? Where's the Sales office?

It looks like they're finally moving into/building a more suitable broadcast facility.

My mistake on the timing, but they delay the Central feed. Station employees have told me of the complexity they have in covering over the East/Central-specific spots and promos that air. In essence, they are producing their own west-coast feed an hour early. My guess is this is a holdover from when the "tape delay" was actually tape. It gives them more room to recover from errors, and they could always tape the Mountain feed if something happened to the Central recording. Start recording primetime at 5PM, an hour out you need to switch tapes, rewind first tape, put it on standby, at 7PM start airing the first tape, standby second tape, roll on third tape... and so on! The fact this survived the recent Master Control hubbing is further evidence that CBS doesn't care that much. I'm sure it made the hub setup more difficult than it needed to be.

CBS owns a station (KOVR) that airs primetime an hour early (technically they air the Central feed on an hour delay.) I'm sure that helps the argument of stations that want to use different time zone feeds.

I saw the still before reading anything else about what was going on, and I thought for a second maybe someone was making their own "weather forecasts" with graphics from WMAQ's website. Boy, was I wrong!

It looks like Scripps' weird obsession with white/subtly colored panels on sets has made its way to WTMJ. Not sure when it changed, but the set used to always be deep blue to match the monitors. The light blue section behind the monitor (which looks less blue on-air) used to have blue duratrans in them after they were swapped from their original collages of newsroom and control room pics... Now you can see the LED strips behind the plexi panels. Must have been a quick change.

If they own the whole building, the whole building is up for sale. My guess would be the new owners would be responsible for either giving WBNX a lease to stay or starting the process of evicting them once the sale is finalized.

It's not exactly a law, but if you have a contract with labor unions and you try to go outside of the proper union to get work done, you're might end up with most (if not all) of your union employees not at their desks, picketing outside. NABET has a national contract with NBCU that covers a lot of engineering/production/technical jobs. However you also have IATSE's various chapters doing various things across the country. You might have a NABET camera operator and a IATSE lighting technician and a carpenter from a completely different IATSE chapter that's focused on scenic. Chicago has at least 8 separate IATSE chapters (Locals 2, 110, 476, 750, 762, 769, 780, and B46.)

A smaller wall with carpentry around it to make it blend into the set the way the old "window wall" did probably would have cost just as much as this massive wall. LED tiles are only getting cheaper, and labor to design and build set pieces (especially in Chicago) is not.

Interesting technical glitch at the beginning there, looks like someone switched on the luma key a little too early!